High Speed Rail and Amtrak News
 

Interesting. Are the speeds on the map top or average? 110 mph seems a bit slow. 150 should be feasible.

It says top speed is 110mph for the NW Corridor. Not exactly Bullet Train or TGV speeds, but still less than 2 hours from Portland to Seattle.

http://www.wsdot.wa.gov/NR/rdonlyres/E76...4E7/0/LongRangePlanforAmtrakCascades.pdf

everything you want to know about plans for high-speed rail between Portland and Seattle

They just finished the bypass in that one WA town-- the one with the funny name.

That leaves... quite a lot more. But it's progress!

^ which one and???

When is the new Lakewood Sounder line in Tacoma going to allow Cascades service to bypass point defiance? That will really speed things up.

Titlow bypass, that's the one!

The federally recognized HSR routes (these corridors can apply for federal matching funds for state sponsored projects now):
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v284/austindaniel/USRegionalhighspeedrailsections.jpg

maybe someday we can connect to California's planned HSR via the current Coastal Starlate route...

I find it weird that Houston↹Dallas are not proposed for a route...

This is quite important in my book. Glad to see someone trying to get something done. Maybe by the time I'm about to kick the bucket, trains will be running!

110mph is beyond lame if that's really the plan...... is this europe in the 1980s?:yuck:

^ got to start somewhere...

I don't disagree with your sentiment, especially here in the states.

But the plan is for 110mph 15 years from now, in 2023!


The report talks about how 125mph doesn't seem to save much time, but why are we thinking so slow at all? You do 200mph, as is already done in many places, or shoot for 300+ and end up at 220 or something, you've done something major that can change the perception and use of rail.

This is connecting 3 major cities that we all traffic between regularly.
I swear I drive to Seattle twice a month.

Flying is insanely inconvieniet.
And unless the train is going to take under 2 hours, I must drive to be productive at all.

I am the biggest proponent of high speed rail you will ever find, it could save me tons of gas money, wear and tear on my car, time, energy and inconvenience if could get from downtown Portland, to downtown Seattle quickly.

If we are planning 15+ years out, lets not aim for current mediocrity, lets have some ambition, some vision and some drive to do better than move the yard sticks 28%.

If we could match Europe in the 1960s, that would be a start. :sly:

I was just doing a bit of googling... the new Cologne-Frankfurt high speed rail line (gen 3 - ICE 3) can go 250-300 km/h, is 177 km (110 miles) in length, and cost 6 billion Euros; although was constructed from 1995-2002, so would cost much more today due to inflation. In miles that comes out to 54 million Euros/mile.

However... that comes out to about 34 million Euros/kilometer (54 million Euros/mile), which isn't too bad. This includes the total cost of land, track, stations, and trains. Our MAX system has been right around $55 million/mile (MAX Yellow line).

A system from Portland to Seattle, a distance of 180 miles, they're estimating $6.5 billion (2006 $$) for the Portland - to Vancouver BC section - which comes out to $36 million/mile.


The WSDOT report linked above states that:

For a service level of 110 mph for the entire state. Hmm... and the document also states that 125 mph service would cost an additional $500 million, which is less than 10% of the total cost... seems like they should just go for it!

Note that the entire Cascades rail corridor from Eugene to Vancouver BC is 466 miles in length - more than 4x the length of the Frankfurt high-speed line.


Although true high-speed rail would be awesome.. I think I could live with this:

but I can't believe I will have to wait 15 years for it to happen. :(



unrelated note - interestingly, Amtrak seems to have enacted variable pricing for the Cascades service, depending on what time you travel. Nearly $20 one-way difference between AM/PM travel time.

What I saw and for the life of me I cannot remember where (it was a TxDOT plan, tho)was a high speed line going from San Marcos to Houston. San Marcos is in the Austin Metro Area kinda-sorta between Austin and San Antonio (but a little closer to Austin). This would help out with those going from DFW to Houston - not really but that's what state planners are thinking.

I don't know many people who travel from Dallas to Houston, tbh. It's not an animosity sorta thing, but it seems like it sometimes.

When I lived in both cities (2 years apart) I found there were quite a few cars on the highway....at least comparable to the Seattle↹Portland I-5 traffic. (Not to mention the air traffic between the cities (which was extensive)...as mentioned by rsbear)⇓

That statement makes no sense at all. Southwest, American and Continental (combined) have over 60 flights a day between Dallas and Houston. That's about twice the number of flights as between Portland and Seattle. And most of the flights in Texas use "mainline" equipment, not the regional turboprops Horizon uses in the Northwest.

OK.

I was just saying because all the people I know from Dallas, and all but one of the people I know from Houston don't make trips between the two.

So i took the train from portland to salem tonight. I usually take the amtrak bus but it was running a half hour late so i opted for the train. Bad idea. Anyone care to guess how long it took to get from PDX to salem? 3 HOURS! Haha i am never taking the train again. i gave it a chance and now i know better. Take the bus...as bad as i5 gets its never taken me 3 hours to go 50 miles. Whats funny was that no one really seemed frustrated on the train! Its like they expected it. We sat for an hour in the middle of nowhere. I'm convinced high speed rail will never happen in this country, at least not as long as it shares tracks with freight. Anyways, thats my rant. You just had to be there-it was laughable

Your experience wasn't a high-speed rail issue. The problem with current passenger train service in this country is that Amtrak doesn't own any of the rail lines it operates on. The rails are owned by rail freight companies and thus, freight traffic is given priority. Freight trains can be slow and loooooooong. With the increasing cost of fuel, freight trains, which are more efficient than freight trucks, are getting more use for long haul trips. I have no doubt the extra two hours you endured were responsible by a freight train using the tracks. However, Amtrak (and Greyhound) have horrible customer service and I'm not surprised the conductor or anyone else bothered to explain this issue.

High speed rail would require using new tracks, as most existing tracks have too many sharp turns, which doesn't mesh well with high speeds (100mph+). That, in addition to differences in speed, mean that freight and high-speed passenger traffic wouldn't be mixing like they do now. The only delays you'd ever experience on a high-speed train might be mechanical issues as true high-speed technology is foreign to this country. That could change over time.

We will not have HSR until ...
 

... Oregon decides that we need dedicated rail capacity. We are not practicing what we preach. Washington is years ahead of us. We spend all of our State transportation costs on roads that very few people use. We are a big state with many miles of paved roads over many rivers; hills, and over many ranges.

I think the ODOT needs to spend some of their research cash on the cheapest, smoothest , greenish, road design so all county roads can start implementing less costly road maintenance budgets. (Think gravel, sand, and strong, porous brick to move the water off the surface fast. Maintenance on bricks is much cheaper than repaving. Larger trucks are then banned on these county roads and smaller delivery trucks are used on the county roads. More jobs for trucking industry!!! Less money spend on supporting the big rigs.)

I think each region (e.g., Willamette Valley, Southeast Oregon) will need to decide what is more important (having pavement everywhere or moving the most people and goods). The State needs to understand that one size doesn't fit all. The planners and management at ODOT might talk about high capacity BUT THEY DO NOT PRACTICE IT. Example of this was when I went to some of the early Columbia River Crossing meeting and spoke about High Speed Rail (HSR) and moving the corridor to the Eastbank (no turns or Willamette River Crossings) and incorporating HSR into the design so we wouldn't have to spend billions later to get the dedicated corridor. I was listened to and then they moved on without much discussion at all. HSR at CRC was dropped early.

What bad planning and vision from my point of view. ODOT is very, very, locked into their view of the World and they know what is best for their citizens. It is a good old boys network base only on road construction with asphalt and concrete.

eP

I e-mailed ODOT, and boy was their response typical.

We have no plans to anything innovative or exciting. No vision and no leadership.

I thanked them for their efforts at all, but asked if there anyone in the pipe who might be a champion for HSR. I didn't hear back from them.

Maybe I should do it, if no one else is going to step up and make this an issue that gets solved quickly and gets infrastructure built before we're all dead.

rode the Cascade train up to B-ham a few weeks ago.

the cars were decent enough, but the train was SLOW, and always trailing a freight train.

It took close to 6.5 hours to do what a car does in 4.5.

Beyond awful

I know EXACTLY how you feel westcoast. The train is incredibly unreliable. I will take the amtrak bus anyday over the train. The 3+ hour ride from portland to salem was the last time I will use the train. The train is extremely frustrating if you actually have to be somewhere by a certain time.

Since it's such a long stretch without a stop between Vancouver BC and Bellingham, they should have a station at Blaine, WA, to serve the residents of the southeastern suburbs of the GVRD, so they don't have to go all the way to Pacific Central Station and back again, and the residents of northern Whatcom county, and in so doing, perhaps revitalize Blaine as a train connection town.

Ideally, White Rock would be the more suitable stop, with its larger population, but due to security and immigration issues, we can't have more than one stop on the Canadian side. With a stop at Blaine, passengers from Canada can cross the land border on their own, and board the train once they've already entered the US.

I ride the Cascades from Portland to Seattle every 3 months for my doctor's appointments. I upgrade to Business so that I normally don't have to deal with small kids/noise. I receive a $3.00 coupon to the diner. I would say that 90% of my trips have been super. I just started making the round trip from Eugene to Seattle with the same positive experience BUT if I plan my trip during flooding, etc. the trip can be a nightmare. The LA to Seattle train I would never even consider boarding..

I prefer riding the train from Portland to Seattle, especially since I always get stuck in 2-hour traffic on I-5 through Olympia and Tacoma. Train does pretty well in that corridor... they are also building a new bypass track from Tacoma to Lakewood, I heard it may shave ~15 or 20 minutes from the trip length, and eliminate delays from the Point Defiance tunnel.

Federal panel releases rail plan
 

A Federal panel (Passenger Rail Working Group or PRWG) have made a new recommendation for rail infrastructure improvements in the US, and call for an increase in auto fuel taxes to pay for it. Currently, the tax is at 18.4 cents per gallon, and the panel recommends an increase of 5-8 cents to help pay for these and other unfunded infrastructure discrepancies within the US highway system.

http://www.lightrailnow.org/images02/amtrak-map-proposed-2050_PRWG.jpg

Note the already mentioned Cascade Corridor upgrade to 79-110 mph, but also the new Amtrak service from Portland to Boise, Salt Lake, Las Vegas and Los Angeles.

info found from: Susan Pantell With Light Rail Now Project Team · April 2008 www.lightrailnow.org

79-110mph still seems like it's setting the bar awfully low. While any improvement over passgner rail (especially in the Northwest) would be welcome, it would be nice to see a proposal with some more ambition.

Even at a constant 110mph with no stops it would still be 1:45 from Portland to Seattle, and that is a wildly unrealistic best-case scenario. 200mph, on the other hand, would give you a 1hr trip from PDX to Seattle, or an hour and a half from Los Angeles to Las Vegas; in my opinion, those are the sorts of trip times that would get the general population excited about using trains for those trips.

I hate to say it, but for a lot of these lines it sounds like we're finally catching up to 1960s Europe.

^ agreed, but Talgo trains (110 mph) do not require electrification, new ROW and complete grade separation. California's 700 mile HSR project (shown in red on map) will cost an average of $70 mil a mile or roughly $50 Billion because of these factors (original estimates were $39/mile, $30 bil total, California is still trying to figure out how to pay for it after the last $10 bil ballot failure and only able to get $15 bil from federal grants). So, the 466 mile Cascades corridor would cost $18 to 32 billion with construction costs rising every day. The 187 mile Portland to Seattle segment would cost $7 to 14 billion alone. Talgo tilting trains, upgraded track and crossings to allow up to 110 pmh speeds costs roughly $1-5 million per mile depending on urbanization and geographic features, which makes the entire Cascades route cost $0.5 to 2.5 billion. In a different political and social climate I would be with you all the way, but we have got to start somewhere and upgrading the system later WILL become a priority from those who control funding sources...

costs stated for the Cascades Corridor come from WSDOTs website

But even most high speed rail systems in Europe and Japan aren't even 186mph. I Germany, the fastest the train got that I was on was 150 mph. That is still pretty fast, tho!

Very true, but they had damn good rail service in the 60s.

Yeah, it's expensive, but how much would building a freeway or an airport cost? We really need to start reinvesting in rail infrastructure the way we invested in streets and freeways in the 50's.

^ I completely take back my above opinion. I just realized that the federal plan is for year 2050. That is purely asinine. By 2015 we should have 110mph service from Eugene to Vancouver, BC. By 2050 we should have 110-300mph service from BC to San Diego, PDX to Chicago, and so forth...

I posted a while back that I had contacted ODOT and the rail representatives.

It was clear that there was no vision, and no leadership to do anything great.


This isn't even a 'pie in the sky' type of thing, this is basic infrastructure.

110mph is insanely slow for decades from now. It's just insane.
If I had more free time, I would start a Friends of Trains to promote some of these issues.

I'm not sure why it is so far off the radar. It's infrastructure, investing in our own country and its people.

Why don't our tax dollars do that?

It's especially frustrating when you consider that with the money spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan the US could have built true high-speed rail on every corridor on that report and had plenty of money left over. Instead of doing things to decrease our demand for hydrocarbons our policy has been to secure supply. Obviously the policy has gone very wrong.

GM, Ford, Chrysler, Exxon, Shell, Texaco, Chevron and Halliburton do not have interests in mass transit.

Well, the American people should hopefully know how to change that now. If not, we're screwed for another 4 years.

Check out California's HSR web site.
It only approaches 200 mph in rural areas, in urban and suburban cities the fastest it goes is 120 mph or less.

The Talgo train sets can acheive a top speed of 150 mph on non electrified rural tracks design for high speeds. With grade crossings, and sharper curvatures of existing freight tracks, the best one can hope for is 110 mph on average.

The proposed Federal program upgrades mostly existing freight tracks, allowing financing for adding more double tracks, adding grade separations, installing modern CTC systems, and building bypass freight tracks around urban areas to move most freight trains away from out inner cities. It's goal to speed up both passenger and freight trains.

110 mph is still far faster than what Amtrak averages today on its long distance routes, a porkly 45 mph.

To go any faster, States will have to finance high speed rail projects between city pairs.

Becuase it's rail. Any politician is going to be heistant to pay hundreds of billions for infrastructure that most people don't even know exists, let alone register as a travel option when planning trips.

Yeah, ridership on Amtrak Cascades is near zero.

Coast Starlight
 

The same can't be said about the Coast Starlight. I'm having to book about a month in advance in order to get a seat to Seattle and back. This country desparately needs high speed rail. Especially between SF and LA and SF and the PNW.

uh... i think alexjon was being sarcastic.

given the state of our economy, i can't see any HSR happening here for 20 years. have you seen the news? we're fucked. the dollar is doomed and unless we can manufacture the necessary construction materials here in the US, we won't be able to afford to import the materials. i'm not saying it's not needed, but we are just not going to have the resources to do this stuff (here in "the world's last superpower" - how ironic).

True, a nationwide plan will cost hundreds of Billions.
But, for particular city pairs where higher speeds are desired, it'll cost around $10-15 million per mile to upgrade the track, and around $5-10 million per grade separation.

Take for example, Chicago to Milwaukee. That's a distance of approximately 85 miles. So, the brand new tracks will cost around $850 million. There's approximately 90 at grade highway intersections, to upgrade all would cost an addition $900 million. Most of the at grade intersections are in rural areas, so the expense building the grade separation will be much less than in more urban areas. Total including train sets would be around $1.8 billion.
That initially sounds like a lot of cash, but it's not considering how much is spent building commuter rail lines. The stations already exist on this line, the problem will be choosing which ones to pass by.
Amtrak presently runs 14 Hiawatha trains along this route every day, plus two Empire Builder trains a day. Presently it take an hour and a half, averaging around 60 mph, it could be completed in just more than one hour.
The tracks along this route are already in pretty good shape because the Hiawatha makes 5 stops and still averages 60 mph. So, it's probably not necessary to spend much money on new tracks. Half the route is already double tracked. But imagine how eliminating the at grade intersections, and using faster train sets would help speed this route up. Probably for less than one billion dollars.
Other city pairs could be upgraded cheaply too. You also will get more for your tax money investing on tracks with many passenger trains a day already running on them, like the Chicago to Milwaukee corridor. As you complete upgrading city pairs, one by one, you also speed up the longer distance cross country hotel trains piecemeal too. But one has to start somewhere.

The Coast Starlight route is a problem. I can see spending the money to upgrade the tracks between Portland and Vancouver, and between Sacramento and San Jose, and between Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, because more than two passenger trains a day presently run on them.

But that leaves hundreds of miles that have just the two Coast Starlight trains a day. I don't think it's a good investment to spend billions of dollars upgrading relatively unused tracks when there's so many other tracks Amtrak runs far more service on.

Let's upgrade the most use tracks first. Even with upgrades to parts of a long distance Amtrak route, like the Coast Starlight route, significant savings in time can be acheived.

How many miles of HSR does $700B buy?

Maybe we can get some high speed rail as a New Deal type project to help the stimulate the economy.

Per http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/faqs/cost-and-payment.htm
The cost to build the 800-mile system is estimated to be about $40 billion.
800 M/$40 Billion x $700 Billion= 14,000 miles. :cheers:

Amtrak operates passenger service on 21,000 miles (34,000 km) of track primarily owned by freight railroads connecting 500 destinations in 46 states.

Therefore, 66% of all Amtrak routes could be converted to 220 mph HSR corridors with the $700 Billion bailout. :tup:

Of course, California probably has underpriced the costs significantly. So let's just say 50% of all Amtrak routes could be upgraded to 220 mph HSR corridors with the $700 Billion bailout. :notacrook:

Now my question, which half would you upgrade, and which half you would not upgrade?

^the east coast...no doubt the strongest corridor. There should be enough left over to get an LA to Seattle link in there, and one west coast to east coast line....for starters anyway.

Just throwing this out there...

It'll be REALLY hard, realistically, to get any sort of HSR system in place via government funding... partly because the airline industry will see it as a $700 subsidy for direct competition. I expect that the lobbying would be tremendous.

:previous: Lobbying wise, getting funding for high speed rail will be difficult but may very well get a MASSIVE bump in just a few months. Let us all remember that Biden is perhaps the biggest advocate for rail in Congress today, and I think that we have all learned that the role of mere beauty modeling for the VP has come to an end. I agree with pdxf that perhaps the best way to get a comprehensive HSR package is to market it as a New Deal type initiative. It has been shown over and over again that putting money into infrastructure is probably the absolute best way to stimulate the economy.