pstarr wrote:Newfie, its not the logistics and demographics that are totally different. It's our love affair with cars, fear of race mixing, and the lack of right-of-ways. We were still a relatively young country when we embraced the auto revolution. We have peppered our geography with suburbs whereas Europe and the rest of the world had already committed to a railroad infrastructure.
It is too late to drill rail lines through suburbia. Yes there are still cable right of ways etc, but those are not wide enough for multiple rail track beds, associated power system, maintenance roads and crossings. We made our auto nest and must sleep and die in it. Even though train travel is far superior in many ways.
.I asked for an itinerary with number of stops, number of train changes, total moles, total time and total cost.
Cost, is gonna be a big deal for me to find out .... but between 700 and 1500 euro depending, I know the Moscow nice one is about 1.5 days or thereabout.
As we were talking about, our network is expanding and we have a disparate set of services, so there is not yet a single train to take you from one end of the EU to another
KaiserJeep wrote:Again, different solutions for different countries. The USA is one large country with a Federal Aviation Administration, and the travel niche that HSR occupies in Europe or Asia is occupied by Business Class air travel here. We can do so because there are no border crossings, customs, medical exams, etc.
I do not dispute that HSR, commuter trains, etc. play a role in European and Asian countries. The requirements are different here, and the solution will be different. BEVs, self-driving vehicles, etc. are developing rapidly and as needed.
lpetrich wrote:-snip-
I fully concede that much of the US is not very well-suited for HSR development, like most of the area west of I-35. But much of it is, especially the Acela Corridor (Northeast Megalopolis, Bos-Wash Corridor), after the US's closest approximation to the high-speed trains of elsewhere in the world. Of the area west of I-35, California and the Pacific Northwest are also good for HSR development.
vtsnowedin wrote:Why would any rail road right of way need to be a half mile (2640 feet) wide??
Newfie wrote:Yes, except HSR needs stronger and thicker beds. So everything just gets bigger than a standard freight line. If we are dealing with Federal safety mandates then the cars must be about 50% heavier than in Europe (crash worthiness) so our ROW needs to be thicker, more substantial than a European HSR line of the same speed.
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