NYC - LA HSR Line?

That's a HSR possibility that's sometimes used to "prove" how infeasible HSR is in the US.

But I've yet to see any reputable US HSR proposal that includes a NYC-LA line, except possibly as a side effect of building lots of shorter lines.

I'll now work out some of the details.

The great-circle distance is 2400 mi / 3900 km, and at the Paris-Lyon TGV average speed of 150 mph, that trip would take 16 hours. Using the Paris-Lyon line's approximate expense of $10 million/mile as a best-case estimate, that results in a cost of $24 billion. The California HSR project is closer to $50 million/mile, which yields a cost of $120 billion.

New York City - 19.0 m - (start)
Philadelphia - 5.8 m - 80 mi - 97 mi (change ends)
Pittsburgh - 2.5 m - 258 mi - 305 mi
Cleveland - 2.3 m - 115 mi - 135 mi
Chicago - 9.8 m - 309 mi - 343 mi (change ends)
St. Louis - 2.8 m - 260 mi - 298 mi
Kansas City - 2.0 m - 236 mi - 247 mi
Denver - 2.6 m - 557 mi - 599 mi
Salt Lake City - 1.1 m - 372 mi - 535 mi
Las Vegas - 1.9 m - 367 mi - 425 mi
Los Angeles - 15.3 m - 225 mi - 265 mi

Populations are Wikipedia's metropolitan-area ones. Distances are great-circle distances and Google Maps highway distances.

Total distance: 2800 - 3200 mi -- 19 to 21 hours by TGV. Stops at the intermediate cities will likely add an additional hour.

Comparing to more reputable proposals, the eastern ones are continuous from NYC to Kansas City, while the western one goes from LA to Las Vegas. The Kansas City - Las Vegas gap is over the thinly-populated western half of the contiguous US, with widely-separated cities.

The eastern ones are not explicitly long lines like NYC - Kansas City; they are proposals for much shorter lines, which combine to make that long line. The western cities are too far apart for that approach, except for LA - LV.

lpetrich wrote:That's a HSR possibility that's sometimes used to "prove" how infeasible HSR is in the US.

But I've yet to see any reputable US HSR proposal that includes a NYC-LA line, except possibly as a side effect of building lots of shorter lines.

I'll now work out some of the details.

The great-circle distance is 2400 mi / 3900 km, and at the Paris-Lyon TGV average speed of 150 mph, that trip would take 16 hours. Using the Paris-Lyon line's approximate expense of $10 million/mile as a best-case estimate, that results in a cost of $24 billion. The California HSR project is closer to $50 million/mile, which yields a cost of $120 billion.

New York City - 19.0 m - (start)
Philadelphia - 5.8 m - 80 mi - 97 mi (change ends)
Pittsburgh - 2.5 m - 258 mi - 305 mi
Cleveland - 2.3 m - 115 mi - 135 mi
Chicago - 9.8 m - 309 mi - 343 mi (change ends)
St. Louis - 2.8 m - 260 mi - 298 mi
Kansas City - 2.0 m - 236 mi - 247 mi
Denver - 2.6 m - 557 mi - 599 mi
Salt Lake City - 1.1 m - 372 mi - 535 mi
Las Vegas - 1.9 m - 367 mi - 425 mi
Los Angeles - 15.3 m - 225 mi - 265 mi

Populations are Wikipedia's metropolitan-area ones. Distances are great-circle distances and Google Maps highway distances.

Total distance: 2800 - 3200 mi -- 19 to 21 hours by TGV. Stops at the intermediate cities will likely add an additional hour.

Comparing to more reputable proposals, the eastern ones are continuous from NYC to Kansas City, while the western one goes from LA to Las Vegas. The Kansas City - Las Vegas gap is over the thinly-populated western half of the contiguous US, with widely-separated cities.

The eastern ones are not explicitly long lines like NYC - Kansas City; they are proposals for much shorter lines, which combine to make that long line. The western cities are too far apart for that approach, except for LA - LV.

The reason that this is not discussed is A;The cost would be staggering and B;The distance is well beyond that which is considered economical for HSR as we know it now...600 MPH(jetliner) beats 325 MPH across that vast a distance..

v8interceptor wrote:The reason that this is not discussed is A;The cost would be staggering and B;The distance is well beyond that which is considered economical for HSR as we know it now...600 MPH(jetliner) beats 325 MPH across that vast a distance..

More like 180 mph for the train, though your number for an airliner is not far off.

Just for the heck of it, I added up the lengths of several proposed HSR lines, again using highway distances. Here is a set that adds up to 3200 mi:

California: San Francisco - Anaheim, Los Angeles - San Diego, Chowchilla - Sacramento
Pacific Northwest: Seattle - Portland
Chicago Hub: Chicago - Minneapolis, Chicago - St. Louis, Chicago - Detroit
East Coast: New York City - Buffalo, Washington DC - Charlotte, Tampa - Orlando - Miami

Much more worthwhile.

Yahoo Maps distance between NYC and LA >
Distance: 2783 miles
Time: 41 hours and 15 minutes.
That's at freeway speeds with the Yahoo driver averaging ~67.5 mph, an average speed I don't think the best truck driver in the country could average.
Basic route:
(1) I-78 from NYC
(2) I-81 from Jonestown
(3) I- 76 from Carlisle
(3) I-70 from New Stanton
(4) I-44 from St. Louis
(5) I-40 from OKC
This shorter, faster route skips Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago, Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City, and Las Vegas, but goes to the MidWest cities poorly served by Amtrak, ie., Columbus and Indianapolis.

A high speed train averaging 150 mph would take 18 hours and 30 minutes to travel between America's two largest metros. And averaging 150 mph over that far a distance would be difficult.

Taking a different route, hitting the major metros along the way I listed earlier, adds hundreds of miles and hours to the train. And we all know politics will make that happen.

How much farther and how much longer?
NYC to Cleveland > 482 miles
Cleveland to Chicago > 347 miles
Chicago to St. Louis > 298 miles
St. Louis to Salt Lake City > 1327 miles
Salt Lake City to Los Angeles > 691 miles
Total Distance: 3145 miles.
Difference = 3145 - 2783 = 362 miles.
That's another 2 hours and 25 minutes on the train for total of 21 hours and 55 minutes, let's round that up to a clean 22 hours....

Who's going to pay higher fares for HSR for a ride 22 hours in duration?

I actually see some validity in considering the idea. Even a 22 hour ride isn't prohibitively longer than the trip by air. NYC-LA great circle distance is 2400 miles. Average speed by air is likely to be closer to 500 mph than 600 mph. After all, the planes take time to climb to cruising altitude and must descent and slow down to land. So figure about 5 hours in the air. Add about an hour at least on each end to get to the airport, 2 hours for security, maybe another hour boarding, checking baggage, claiming baggage, etc. Total trip time city center to city center is 8 hours. HSR then adds 14 hours to the trip. If you schedule the trip so you're sleeping on the train ( instead of at home or in a hotel ), you're essentially only wasting another 6 or 7 hours.

The reason I think the whole idea might seem far-fetched now but not in a decade has to do with rising prices of petroleum-based fuels. The plane requires them in huge amounts, the train doesn't. In short, you'll be paying dearly for those 14 hours you save taking the plane in another ten years. In fact, it's entirely likely plane travel will once again become the province of the upper classes. Basically then the masses will have two options-drive or take the train. Actually, unless we go to EVs, that'll only be one option because the fuel for a cross-country car trip might well end up costing as much as a plane ticket. So in my opinion, some sort of electrified HSR passenger network more or less spanning the country might well be the only viable, cost effective means the masses can use for long-distance travel. The recession put a temporary damper on fuel prices but it won't last forever. This time around it's supply-driven. Most of the cheap oil has already been taken. It's not that there's a shortage of oil reserves, but rather that they're in increasingly hard to get ( i.e. expensive ) locations. Not to mention the events in the Gulf of Mexico seem likely to put a huge damper on oil drilling.

So, not a crazy idea in the least. If we were to start building pieces of it now, I'd recommend going for alignments allowing at least 250 mph travel to take advantage of future improvements in HSR technology. It might be possible to eventually average 200 mph on a ~3000 mile NYC-LA run. That's 15 hours, not really all that bad relative to the plane. Additionally, HSR serves intermediate points a non-stop cross-country flight can't. It'll also attract the significant minority who might want to travel but will never set foot on a plane for various reasons.

i'm sure it is high speed freight that will make hese sort of lines voable in the future . consider that airlines often make more out of the freight carried on a plane than the passengers .

NYC to Chicago seems much more reasonable. The times with flying have to be comparable for it to work. Chicago to LA seems to far, let along NYC to LA. But what would be good is that if all the shorter range TGV routes were build then flying between nyc and LA would be much easier because the airports would be empty.

FRN9 wrote:NYC to Chicago seems much more reasonable. The times with flying have to be comparable for it to work. Chicago to LA seems to far, let along NYC to LA. But what would be good is that if all the shorter range TGV routes were build then flying between nyc and LA would be much easier because the airports would be empty.

Maybe the flying part would only be between Chicago and somewhere on the west coast with rail access. If it's too expensive to build a high speed rail line across the empty quarter then flying might bridge the gap, for a while.

it would be a linking of corridors . New yourk - Chicago would be the east coast one . The west coast one probably LA - Las Vegas . the middle ones are abit harder to work out .

A lot of the viability of the whole idea of cross-country HSR depends upon how much more flying will cost in the future relative to HSR. Another lesser factor is what percentage of the population is unwilling to fly, regardless of cost. Right now apparently this group is small enough that it isn't considered in HSR studies. However, greater security delays and/or more plane crashes could dramatically increase the percentage of "no-flys".

I don't think that airliner safety will become much worse anytime soon. If anything, it's likely to improve, from improvements in artificial intelligence and robotics: Biologically Inspired Robots as Artificial Inspectors

As to security delays, I don't know what's going to come of that. I suspect that lack of major terrorist attacks will cause airports to slack off. However, another terrorism scare could cause airports to implement even worse measures.

Fuel cost is a much more serious problem. It's hard to have a substitute for combustible fuels for airplanes, since anything else has serious problems. I've seen biofuels mentioned as a substitute for fossil fuels, but biofuels, and synfuels in general, would likely be rather expensive until they are used enough to produce economies of scale.

lpetrich wrote: Fuel cost is a much more serious problem. It's hard to have a substitute for combustible fuels for airplanes, since anything else has serious problems. I've seen biofuels mentioned as a substitute for fossil fuels, but biofuels, and synfuels in general, would likely be rather expensive until they are used enough to produce economies of scale.

Fuel is the biggest problem facing airlines. I'm already predicting much higher fuel prices, both market driven and via carbon taxes, will increase the cost of air travel within the decade to the point where it's out of reach of the middle class. Ditto for long-distance auto travel unless we move wholesale to electric cars. That pretty much leaves electrified rail in one form or another as the only viable means of long-distance travel.

I was browsing the railroad section of Powell's Books in Portland this week and found A Railroad for Tomorrow by Edward Hungerford. Written in 1945 and set in 1960, this work of fiction tells a futuristic tale of one man, William Wiggins, who manages to build the finest railroad in the world--The United States Rail Road (USRR). Starting with a neglected and bankrupt New England short line, Wiggins uses his smarts, perserverance and a small inheritance to rise to power in the railroad industry and American politics. The writer foresees a quasi-Amtrak type of arrangement where all the major railroads in America cooperate on passenger service for the improvement of service and the good of the individual companies. By 1960, the USRR has high speed trains running coast to coast in record time with ample profit for all participants. The trains from Boston to NY take 3:30, NY to DC is 3:20 and NY to Chicago is about a 15 hour trip. And needless to say, almost everyone lives happily ever after (I don't want to spoil the ending).

Here are some of the schedules for the long distance USRR trains:

New York to downtown San Francisco: depart 1600 Sunday, arrive 0800 Tuesday
New York to Fairbanks AK (via Everett WA, not Seattle): depart 1510 Sunday, arrive 0630 Thursday
New York to Mexico City: depart 1345 Sunday, arrive 0800 Wednesday.

What the writer didn't foresee was the rate of technological change that would improve air travel versus rail travel. In 1945, when coast to coast travel required 16-18 hours of flying time, 50 hours on a luxury train might have been acceptable to the masses. But when flight times dropped to 5-6 hours, a 50 hour rail trip lost almost all of its fans.

Just one comment about air speed versus rail speed: while the gap is certainly larger than it was in 1945, it's actually smaller than it would have been in 1965. The oil crisis slowed down air travel a fair amount and apart from a few trans-oceanic routes, it's never gotten back up to the "golden age of jetting" speeds. By the time you add in the vastly more unpleasant and time-consuming security theater practiced in todays airports versus those of the sixties, you end up with a situation where a legit 200 mph train could compete with flying (in terms of total downtown-to-downtown time) on routes as long as NYC to Chicago. NYC-LA, however, is just too long.

madcrow wrote:Just one comment about air speed versus rail speed: while the gap is certainly larger than it was in 1945, it's actually smaller than it would have been in 1965. The oil crisis slowed down air travel a fair amount and apart from a few trans-oceanic routes, it's never gotten back up to the "golden age of jetting" speeds. By the time you add in the vastly more unpleasant and time-consuming security theater practiced in todays airports versus those of the sixties, you end up with a situation where a legit 200 mph train could compete with flying (in terms of total downtown-to-downtown time) on routes as long as NYC to Chicago. NYC-LA, however, is just too long.

Makes me wonder if we'd see higher airspeeds between KJFK and KORD (for the benefit of Mr. Norman, should he come by), if a true NYP-CHI high speed rail line came into being. The rail line would probably push some airlines from that route, but others may well start charging a premium for a true 1 1/2 or 2 hour flight.