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The entire existing rail line between Penn station and South Station has been under reconstruction for the last two or 3 years ....replacing track, straightening curves, eliminating grade crossings, walling in tracks, etc to accommodate new and faster acela trains which are actually already ordered and expected to go into service next year. They will be capable of 200 mph but will travel at an average 160 mph and the time between NYC and Boston will be reduced from the current 3.5 hours to 2.5 hours . Right now the regular Amtrak trains take almost 4.5 hours.
This is a pending reality and is as good as it's going to get in any of our lifetimes. Some of the trains are here and being tested and most of the groundwork is already done.
The stuff in the article at the top of this thread is mostly a pipe dream, especially the tunnel going form Ronkonkoma to New Haven. That will never happen. Nor will most of those other dreams.
Acela typically takes about 4 hours to get between Boston and NYC, I do not recall it making it in 3.5 hours ever. I noticed the extensive work on the tracks, but did not realize the goal was to speed up the trip to 2.5 hours. I'll believe it when I see it, but if the 4 hour trip really can be shortened to 2.5 hours, I'd be totally happy with that, and in that case I'd agree a bullet train would have no function.
The late Congresswoman, Louise Slaughter had proposed an experimental, high speed train, be set up to travel between Rochester and Buffalo, a distance of roughly 60 miles. The article that was published in the area's newspapers outlined a number of details, but the GLARING one was that this type of train takes something like 8-10 miles to get up to speed, as well as 8-10 miles to get back to a "normal" speed, so they can approach the station.
Having said that, do the math....the overall trip between Buffalo and Rochester, as mentioned, is 60 miles. Subtract the speed up and slow down zones, that leaves 40 miles of "high speed travel". That equates to something like 12-14 minutes of "high speed". So, what do you save, 10 minutes? Again, at what cost?
In the NYC to Boston scenario, if some stops are included, which I would think would be necessary, for financial viability, then you go back to the fact that it takes 20 miles to get the train up to speed, and slowed back down. So for how long does the train get to 200 MPH, and cut the travel time almost in half?
Just asking.....
Maximum speeds listed are for just track segments and not the entire operating speed inclusive of stops--that's the case everywhere and is standard practice including for the current service. I would hope most people would understand that stations are at a stop and that there is not instantaneous 0 to 200 and back as that would be vomit-inducing. This also applies for the current service--that 150 mph maximum speed for Acela really only happens in very small segments.
A high speed rail that only goes from Buffalo to Rochester is only glaringly bad if that's all it serves. I think if there were to be rail upstate that's at high speed, you would want to at least connect to Albany and preferably to NYC, Boston, and Toronto. It's on those stretches where those ten minutes per segment start adding up. Your math might also be a bit off because you're thinking about only top operating speed, but if the top operating speed is much faster than the previous top operating speed, then even the periods where the trains haven't reached the new top operating speed but are still going at speeds higher than the former operating speeds for the segment, you're still accruing time savings (e.g if the max speed for a segment was 125 mph before, but the max speed for a new service is 200 mph, there's still that time when you're between 125 mph and 200 mph where you're still going faster than the previous max even if you're not at the current max). The time savings for the Boston to NYC route is going down from about four hours to one hour and forty minutes. That is about half the time. Obviously, the top operating speeds are going to be on the straight track portions some distance away from the stations.
I think the basic issue is that it's hard for a lot of Americans to imagine efficient high speed rail and how it functions, because the US simply does not have them. These high rail lines operate without incident and very efficiently with often very large ridership numbers for service patterns around the world that can be analogous to a lot of US service routes, but there's a kind of foolish exceptionalism we buy into where we believe it's not doable because we ourselves haven't done it.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 05-16-2021 at 03:07 PM..
Current old New York Central and Boston-New Haven ROW is where it is because landowners in CT and MA didn't want to surrender property for railroads. And they still aren't going to go down without a fight.
CT in particular is a state with comparatively little flat land, but has tons of waterways (hence all those bridges, tunnels, etc...).
When you start talking about crossing waterways a few federal agencies get involved. There are scores of environmental and other laws that just didn't exist more than 100 years ago when railroads pretty much could do what they wanted when building new ROW. Case in point is the efforts at Lackawanna cutoff restoration.
I assume you're saying "it will never happen" with "it" being in reference to a new, faster Boston-NYC service. That may be true, but I think in regards to the link the OP posted, what's posted is partially meant to avoid exactly the issue you're talking with wealthy, seaside NIMBYs. It's one of multiple Boston-NYC high speed rail proposals that avoids using the existing ROW or creating a new ROW along the CT coast.
Between Boston and Washington, through NYC is one of the few routes in the US where high speed rail makes sense. Of course, it's also the route that's most expensive to build.
It says that it would take 20 years to build it (and it says that below the title that the train could "soon" connect the two cities :-), after the project is approved?! That is an incredible length of time to build anything - why should it take so long? The TGV train between Paris and Lyon was built in about 7 years, and that was in the 1970s, in supposedly too-laid-back and inefficient Europe :-). There definitely should be intercity high speed trains in the US - the skies are overcrowded, plus in NYC it is such a pain to even get to/from the airport. For Boston-NYC, even the pretty slow Acela is substantially more pleasant than flying and taking forever to reach Manhattan with the shuttle bus.
There is nothing about France's approach to infrastructure that is "too laid back and inefficient." In fact, it's very simple to get infrastructure projects approved in France and their completion is generally timely and on budget.
For a good example, look at the recent Paris Metro and RER Expansion mega project, hundreds of new km of rail running deep under central Paris. By comparison, London's Elizabeth line was many years delated and much smaller than the scope of the Paris project. Likewise, Berlin hasn't built any new rail since reunification. And let's not get started on the measly 3 stations, $10 billion NYC subway expansion.
Between Boston and Washington, through NYC is one of the few routes in the US where high speed rail makes sense. Of course, it's also the route that's most expensive to build.
Yea, there's about a half dozen hsr routes covering dozens of cities that make sense right now and the northeast corridor is definitely one of them. Of those, we have just about zero constructed.
The late Congresswoman, Louise Slaughter had proposed an experimental, high speed train, be set up to travel between Rochester and Buffalo, a distance of roughly 60 miles. The article that was published in the area's newspapers outlined a number of details, but the GLARING one was that this type of train takes something like 8-10 miles to get up to speed, as well as 8-10 miles to get back to a "normal" speed, so they can approach the station.
Having said that, do the math....the overall trip between Buffalo and Rochester, as mentioned, is 60 miles. Subtract the speed up and slow down zones, that leaves 40 miles of "high speed travel". That equates to something like 12-14 minutes of "high speed". So, what do you save, 10 minutes? Again, at what cost?
In the NYC to Boston scenario, if some stops are included, which I would think would be necessary, for financial viability, then you go back to the fact that it takes 20 miles to get the train up to speed, and slowed back down. So for how long does the train get to 200 MPH, and cut the travel time almost in half?
Just asking.....
Frequency of trains, dedicated tracks, and on-time service will make a bigger difference than a 200 mph train serving NYS. But for longer distances like Buffalo to NYC the time savings could be hours - right now its 9 hours by Amtrak, 7 hours driving/bus.
Gee, I have been reading the same claim about high speed trains in the U.S. since I was a kid.
All talk.
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