USDOT Vision for HIGH SPEED RAIL in America

decisivemoment wrote:I think the politicians need to do a better job of communicating this fact.

Unfortunately the mantra of High Speed Rail has become so engrained into the national dialogue for the last two decades that anything else is unacceptable. Some years ago (1996?) there was an international attempt at officially defining HSR and creating a new classification for everything between conventional speed trains and HSR. (If my beleaguered memory is correct the lowest threshold for HSR would have been 150 MPH.) Obviously it didn't catch on. Pretty soon HSR will be any train faster than a bicycle.

off topic too , but it reminds me of what i can only guess was a marketing ploy . along railway lines that were close to main roads , the railways put up huge speed boards , with express freight , slow , 70 km/hr in huge letters . usually beside this , there would be the normal size speed board , usually also stating the speed as 70 / km/hr . ( passenger trains were allowed 100 ).
the kicker was , the max speed of express freight trains in those days was , .... 70 km/hr .

Matt Johnson wrote:

george matthews wrote:Speed attracts customers.

Absolutely. That's why we need to get speeds up above 79 mph and into triple digits. But I don't think speed alone accounts for the Acela's success. Would people be willing to pay a significantly higher fare for a mere 15 minute advantage between New York and Washington DC were it not for the Acela's more modern appearance and amenities?

Real actual speed attracts customers. This was proved in Britain when the HST 125 were introduced. InterCity rail travel soared. The InterCity unit of BR was profitable.

Electrification produces another increase. In Britain it's known as the "sparks effect".

The main thing people want from rail travel is speed. My journeys on Amtrak were pleasant but I wasn't in a hurry. They reminded me of Britain in the 1950s. When there were no motorways rail travel at the modest speeds of those days (60 mph was thought very good and the occasional 100 mph really exciting) was better than driving. I remember travelling in a car before motorways. It was tedious travelling.

Once the motorways were built BR realised they needed a drastic increase of speed. With the HST and the mainline electrification of the west coast route they got it.

With the rise of cheap air travel they needed another increase. A lot has been spent increasing the speed on the main lines.

All that progress has not occurred in the US, so your routes are stuck in the 1950s. If speeds increased there would be a huge surge in usage. Clearly there is suppressed demand for travel which at present is forced on to the airlines.

Pretty soon HSR will be any train faster than a bicycle.

Not in Europe.

george matthews wrote: Once the motorways were built BR realised they needed a drastic increase of speed. With the HST and the mainline electrification of the west coast route they got it.

With the rise of cheap air travel they needed another increase. A lot has been spent increasing the speed on the main lines.

The Pennsy (and probably others) realized that at least as far back as the 30's). Sadly, I sit here in 2009 wishing the train to Pittsburgh ran as fast as it did in 1938 let alone modern high speed rail.

I agree with both Mr Mathews and Mr SS. Time/distance/cost are a matrix for the traveller. The overall velocity matters.

On another board, I'm debating the efficacy of a renewed Ranger (KC-Ft Worth) by Amtrak. The average velocity across the run has to be at least 60MPH before the train is even time competitive with auto (and that includes the various breaks for fuel, meals and personal needs). Velocity matters.

Agreed. Velocity is key. I've decided against taking Amtrak when I'd otherwise like to, simply due to speed. Routes that are slower than car travel I'm afraid only appeal to the afraid-to-fly, don't-like-the-bus, and can't/won't-drive crowd. This is indeed a small universe.

When you make the train faster (or at least as fast) as driving, then it suddenly opens up a whole new universe of travelers willing to at least consider the train.

As far as I'm concerned, there are four ways to attract travelers to use your business.

Speed
Price
Comfort
Convenience

Airline travel holds the monopoly on speed, except for Acela along a very limited area. BoltBus, Megabus and the Chinatown buses win out on cheapness, followed by Greyhound, Southwest Airlines, Amtrak and driving one's own car. Amtrak wins hands-down on comfort (unless you're talking cruise ships), with personal cars and business-class flight following. The personal car is the champ for convenience - on the east coast, rail is almost as convenient, but everywhere else, frequent buses and flights are far, far ahead of one-a-day trains.

Amtrak can increase comfort by adding a larger proportion of business class, sleepers and amenities (baggage, full diner, etc) to each train, decrease their fares further and compete with the cheapo bus crowd, increase the number of trains running daily (and move stations to more convenient places where applicable), or increase speed to 110 mph and beyond while using more direct routes. Considering Amtrak's been trying to reduce the number of amenities on board, comfort's out. Amtrak's fleet is such that they can't afford the extra cars to make a meaningful cut in fares, not yet anyway. Likewise with increased service - there's only enough extra equipment for a few new trainsets. So, until they get new orders of S-IIIs, V-IIs and A-IIIs, Amtrak has to decrease time from point to point to increase their ridership.

mtuandrew wrote:Amtrak can ... increase the number of trains running daily (and move stations to more convenient places where applicable),

Bingo. There's the rub. 1 a day service does not take stress off either a air route or auto. Tomorrow, April 22, 2009, Southwest Airlines will run 8 different flights Kansas City to Love Field. That's about 1000 seats.

Amtrak has to offer frequency to compete, only slightly less than velocity.

At risk of restating the obvious, the markets in which Amtrak has captured a significant fraction of the travel market offer (a) multiple daily frequencies and (b) endpoint-to-endpoint travel times that are competitive with driving. Amenities beyond a reasonably comfortable seat and the ability to purchase a snack or beverage might be desirable but are not in my opinion mandatory, and as the Acela service has shown, ticket cost isn't always an issue. It's on creating new corridors that this money can be best spent.

TomNelligan wrote:At risk of restating the obvious, the markets in which Amtrak has captured a significant fraction of the travel market offer (a) multiple daily frequencies and (b) endpoint-to-endpoint travel times that are competitive with driving. Amenities beyond a reasonably comfortable seat and the ability to purchase a snack or beverage might be desirable but are not in my opinion mandatory, and as the Acela service has shown, ticket cost isn't always an issue. It's on creating new corridors that this money can be best spent.

Comfort is important, at least in comparison to the Hound. Last year I took to the hound in Florida. It was squalid. I wished there had been a train. And the bus was slow because of congestion.

IMHO, the best 'bang for the buck' right now, before anything else, would be to get level boarding at as many stations as possible. For off the NEC, this means 550mm platforms (superliner compatible, actually a touch too high, but that can be handled in a few easy ways).

Why?

It's easy - the biggest controllable hit to Amtrak's running speeds is dwell time. The average speed of a train that sits 5 minutes at a station is ZERO. And that adds up, fast.

Even on the NEC, dwells are far too long - major stops should be 5 or less, minor ones should be 2 or less.

Level boarding means faster - far faster - boarding, and easier boarding. So you're increasing passenger comfort (and safety), in addition to speeding things up.

It also means no 'Amtrak train in a station blocking things again' for the Class Is. Being a good guest is always to your advantage.

Get rid of the slowest part of the trip, then tackle the slow parts, then tackle the slow parts, then tackle the slow parts. It's going slow that hits Amtrak the hardest, not the 80mph limit. Heck, there's some systems out there with 80mph limits that average pretty high anyway, because they get there fast, stay there, and don't sit forever in stations...

Level boarding means faster - far faster - boarding, and easier boarding. So you're increasing passenger comfort (and safety), in addition to speeding things up.

How about boarding at more than one door?
I once, to my horror, saw a woman, unused to the train, miss a train from Winter Haven to Jacksonville because she didn't know where to board it.

Mr mtuandrew has summarized the picture very accurately; and most of that simply demonstrates the workings of a system which, under both public and private control, still offers a variery of choices to an increasingly diverse market ...... the "Friedmanism" that upsets some of us.

I expect Amtrak to continue to post slow-but-steady gains in this environment ...... not because of any marketing push or new infusion of state-supplied capital, but simply because the energy pressures will penalize the competition more.

What disturbs me the most is the possibility that if those trends put also more freight on the rails, the public isn't going to understand why the freight roads (understandably) won't pick up the tab for improvements over which they feel they don't have sufficient control. That sets the stage for polarization and another impasse.

There are probably any number of places out there, particularly in the flat areas between the two major mountain ranges, where new capacity for both passenger and freight service can be redeveloped without the work being too capital-intensive or the NIMBY pressure too great. That, in turn, could downplay the public- vs. private-sector conflict, and pave the way for some serious discourse on the fringes of the major cities where the two services will have to co-operate more.

george matthews wrote:

Level boarding means faster - far faster - boarding, and easier boarding. So you're increasing passenger comfort (and safety), in addition to speeding things up.

How about boarding at more than one door?
I once, to my horror, saw a woman, unused to the train, miss a train from Winter Haven to Jacksonville because she didn't know where to board it.

Looks to me a good argument to build Disney style ramps for ticketed passengers. The ramp makes it easier for those less abled or wheeled to board a train. The MCS uses a portable ramp with a crewperson to get wheeled chairs on board. Anything to cut dwell times to lead to better average speeds.

If you will forgive the intrusion of a first-time poster, I think there are a couple of related facts about passenger rail in Europe that are ofter overlooked, but which may be instructive for rail development in the U.S. First, unlike Athena emerging from the head of Zeus, European high speed trains did suddenly spring forth fully formed from out of nothing. Rather, they are the culmination of many years of work, and were "built" on a foundation of what we would call conventional rail.

Second, those "conventional" trains (actually faster than Amtrak in many cases) still exist. For instance, I believe such trains in France ply the rails under SNCF's "Corail" brand. They serve passengers who are less time-sensitive and/or more cost-sensitive. They also serve many locations not served by high speed trains, and feed passengers to those trains.

What lesson is there in this for the US? While I certainly agree that the development of frequent-service corridors is where the great bulk of passenger rail funding should go, I'm a bit dubious of efforts such as the HSR initiative in California to build a high speed system where, for the most part, no rail system now exists. Without the base and continuing support of more traditional rail service, I think it questionable whether a high speed system will succeed on either an economic/operation (and I do not mean profitability; as James J. Hill recognized long ago, if you want to make money, transport pigs, not people) or political basis. I believe, we should certainly move toward true high speed in the NEC, where a proper foundation has already been laid. In most other areas, I think it best to provide improved conventional service. This would provide transportation alternative to more people relatively quickly, and would start building a foundation for possible future HSR.