High Speed Rail

It's easy to get distracted with Wikipedia.  Today's article on Battersea Bridge in London ended up with me watching videos of high speed trains like this video of the record run between Paris and London (in 2 hr, 3 mins) at the impressive speed of around 200 mph.  Much more impressive is the following where the TGV set a new world speed record for a "conventional" train at 574.8kph (357.16mph): TGV record breaking run.

The world's fastest train of any type is an experimental "maglev" train (magnetic levitation) in Japan of just over 360 mph.  I have to say that, impressive as all of this undoubtedly is, they were talking about maglev trains and how they would revolutionize travel around 40 years ago.  There is still no maglev train in regular service anywhere.

But the big disappointment of course is here in the United States.  Just take a look at this table of high speed rail networks (by this definition, a high speed rail line operates at greater than 250 kph (just under 160 mph).  China is by far the leader, with Spain a somewhat distant second.  The United Kingdom is a distant 13th and the United States holds on to its 7th place only by relaxing the speed criterion to include the Acela which has a top speed of 240 kph (150 mph).  But the Acela doesn't really live up to its billed speed.

The Eurostar has a scheduled non-stop journey time of 2h 15m between London and Paris for a distance of 492 km (an average speed of 219 kph).  The Acela achieves a scheduled time of 2h 48m for the 362 km between Washington and New York (average speed: 129 kph).  Indeed the only sections of the track which are cleared for top speed work (240 kph) are in Massachusetts and Rhode Island.  However, between New Haven and New York, the speeds are so low that the Boston/New York trip is even slower on average than the Washington/New York.  So, as you can see the Acela is a high-speed train in name only.

Unfortunately, the governments of the United States have been very short-sighted in transportation policy.  They have consistently squandered the opportunity to increase the gasoline tax which would have had two very positive outcomes: greater fuel efficiency (the market would have demanded more efficient designs many years ago); and money for building alternative infrastructure to help us out when the oil runs out.  When gas gets to $10 a gallon, we are going to find it very expensive to get, say, from New York to Chicago.  The corresponding European, Japanese or Chinese business person will have a much easier time getting from Berlin to Madrid, Tokyo to Osaka, or Beijing to Shanghai!

It was hard to decide which blog to put this in: Railroads or Letter from Europa.  But, I hope you found it interesting.