Salon.com > High speed rail

Amtrak testing 165mph trains

Mon, 24 Sep 2012 20:28:00 +0000

TRENTON, N.J. (AP) — Amtrak is going to break the speed limit this week in the Northeast Corridor.

The rail service announced Monday it will operate test trains overnight at 165 mph in four stretches from Maryland to Massachusetts.

Acela Express equipment will be used for the tests, which were to start at about 10:30 p.m. Monday in New Jersey.

All the locations may one day have regular 160 mph service. Amtrak said tests need to be performed at 5 mph above what is expected to be a maximum operating speed of 160 mph.

Two test locations — from Perryville, Md., to Wilmington, Del., and from Trenton to New Brunswick, N.J. — currently have a speed limit of 135 mph. The two others — in Rhode Island from Westerly to Cranston and in Massachusetts from South Attleboro to Readville — currently have 150 mph limits.

The Republican threat to blow up high-speed rail

Wed, 29 Sep 2010 16:06:00 +0000

High-speed rail links, conclude researchers at the London School of Economics and the University of Hamburg, contribute to economic growth.

The researchers studied a high-speed railway linking the German cities of Cologne and Frankfurt and determined that towns connected to the new line "saw their GDP rise by at least 2.7 percent compared to neighbors not on the route." (Hat tip: International Political Zone.)

So Obama was right!

"A major new high-speed rail line will generate many thousands of construction jobs over several years, as well as permanent jobs for rail employees and increased economic activity in the destinations these trains serve." Barack Obama, Apr 16th, 2009

The silver lining in the great China traffic jam

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 19:06:00 +0000

As a metaphor for everything that is wrong with pell-mell hydrocarbon-fueled industrial development, the massive Chinese traffic jam between Beijing and eastern Tibet, stretching for at least 100 miles and possibly lasting into mid-September, is just about perfect. Trucks loaded with coal from mines in inner Mongolia are stuck, sometimes moving as slowly as a third of a mile an hour, while en route to Beijing, where residents are adding 2,000 new cars a day to the already overcrowded streets, and the air quality appears to get ever more horrible, by the day.

Coal. Gas. Gridlock. Smog. Ain't modernity great?

As part of the grand narrative that sees Chinese economic growth as an enormous environmental disaster, the China traffic jam packs a devastating punch. That endless line of trucks stuck in slow motion, laden with global-warming-igniting coal to fuel the factories pumping out China's endless quantities of manufactured goods. What could possibly be worse?

Except, you can also imagine the great Chinese traffic jam as a mere speed bump, when placed in the context of what China is actively attempting to do to address its massive transportation bottlenecks.

Who needs high speed rail?

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 00:02:00 +0000

Is the fact that China is stomping all over the United States in the domain of high-speed rail something for Americans to be proud of??

That's the provocative thesis put forth by Bruce Watson in DailyFinance.com.

China, writes Watson, can speedily upgrade its transportation infrastructure with trains that zip across the country at speeds of over 200 miles per hour because it isn't constrained by citizens whining about their property rights or the high wages of American workers. With an authoritarian government and unlimited access to cheap labor, China can lay down as much track as it wants and even write the whole thing off as a giant Keynesian stimulus project.

As America's high-speed rail projects get ponderously under way, critics will inevitably point to the various delays and perceived shortcomings as evidence that the U.S. is on the skids, that it is being overtaken by China, or that it lacks sufficient political will. Yet these failings reflect a political system that is more responsive to its people, more concerned with individual rights and more developed than China's. In other words, while America's political and economic system may be less efficient than China's, it is also more mature -- and more preferable.

Riding on that mag lev train to Vegas

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 20:40:00 +0000

Some of the very best blogs are those that focus obsessively on just one topic -- and so it is with one of the newest additions to my blogroll, Yonah Freemark's "The Transport Politic." As you might guess -- it's all about the politics of mass transit, and while the rest of us have been watching the progress of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act through various ideological or political or economic prisms, Freemark has cared only about what its passage might mean for mass transit funding.

And in something of a surprise, the very latest word is that the version of the bill currently agreed to by House and Senate negotiators includes $8 billion for high-speed railway construction, which is more than four times what was originally in the Senate version of the bill. There was no funding at all for high speed rail in the original House stimulus proposal.

Can Amtrak survive?

Thu, 11 Mar 1999 20:00:00 +0000

Amtrak finally unveiled its new bullet-train service this week, a $2 billion experiment dubbed "Acela," which, starting in December, will shuttle passengers from Boston to Washington at speeds of up to 150 mph. By electrifying the 470-mile route, straightening its curves and employing new trains, Amtrak will cut a half hour off its popular three-hour Metroliner service between Washington and New York, making it rival the time it takes to travel by plane, when travel to and from the airport is factored in.

But the victory for Amtrak is bittersweet. It unleashes its pride and joy under the watchful eyes of the Amtrak Reform Council, created by the 1997 Amtrak Reform and Accountability Act, which demands that Amtrak be able to pay its own way by 2002 or face privatization. The council can write up liquidation plans as soon as December if it determines Amtrak will not meet those goals.

What would Amtrak's privatization mean for train travel in America? "We shouldn't have any illusion that we'll have any rail service if we privatize," says Ross Capon, executive director of the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP), a rail advocacy organization. He bristles at the mention of an "Amtrak privatization debate."