Quote:
Originally Posted by electricron
In the UK, the longest time included in the posted slides was London to Newcastle, at 2 hours and 11 minutes (approximately 2.2 hours)
To travel the 2774 miles between NYC and LA in 2.2 hours, the train would have to average 1260 mph, faster than the world famous Concorde jet could fly.
Distances and elapse travel times matter. Jets works far better at getting you there in a reasonable amount of time over these large distances than trains.
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I don't think anyone is suggesting building an HSR line from NYC to Los Angeles.
Birmingham has a population of 4 million or so, and London a population of about 14 million.
The first phase of the project is roughly equivalent of building an HSR line from New York City to Philadelphia. New York is 19 million, Philadelphia is 6 million. Birmingham is about 160km from London, Philadelphia is about 130km from New York.
Doesn't seem so crazy.
Ideally an equivilant project in the US would see an HSR corridor built from New York to Washington, with Phase 1 being NYC-Philly, 2A being Washington-Baltimore, and 2B being Baltimore-Philly.
No way that wouldn't be successful.
Amtrak is doing it's best with what it has right now on the corridor, but if it had $100 billion to sink into the corridor it could do wonders.