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Comment by CPLX | Hacker News Reader

Every year I wonder if Americans will finally learn how to build some proper trains.

Not like hyperloop or self-driving fantasies, not fake trains like dedicated bus lanes or incompatible Airtrain type projects.

Just some normal fucking trains. Trains with steel wheels that go pretty fast, that run on a consistent schedule between center city downtown areas and airports and so on. Like the kind every European country figured out how to do properly like decades ago, and that northern Asia has completely leapfrogged us in by now as well.

Like I want to go somewhere, so I figure out where the nearest train is, get a ticket, get on the train, and go to the place. Why is this so fucking difficult?

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Two rail specific issues I know of that drive up project costs (without getting into the blown up infrastructure costs we seem to face):

* Extremely heavy rail cars, some almost twice the weight as their European counterparts. This is determined by Federal Rail Administration requirements about crash safety with freight trains on shared lines. Crash safety here being just throwing more steel in the cars. This drives up design, capital, fuel costs, and rail maintenance, not to mention severely limits train performance.

Compare two trainsets from around when Amtrak's Acela was built:

German Siemens Velaro E;

Top design speed: 350 km/h Weight: 439 tons Capacity: 405 passengers

Acela Express:

Top design speed: 266 km/h Weight: 565 tons Capacity: 304 passengers

* FRA mandated "Buy American" requirement, which forces federally funded rail projects to buy equipment manufactured in America. Of course we long ago killed off our domestic passenger rail industry, so now projects must pay European manufacturers to tool essentially temporary factories to build already overpriced rail cars on a project by project basis.

Projects can apply to the FRA for waivers for both, such as the case with the California HSR project, but it adds friction.

http://observer.com/2013/07/amtraks-fat-expensive-and-slow-n...

http://www.fra.dot.gov/Page/P0185

We need to let technical people make technical decisions. The things I'm reading are ridiculous.

``` “All my engineers thought the rules were nuts,” he said, calling the Acela a “high-velocity bank vault.”

The Federal Railroad Administration likes to think that America is special, and so our trains have to be special too. ```

> The Federal Railroad Administration likes to think that America is special

The concept of "American exceptionalism" is a strange thing that still has lots of real-world consequences, apparently.

I think there is an affect where nobody resisted regulation creep because nobody was building a lot of passenger train lines anyway.

There is something analogous with city center housing in Sweden. For decades not much was built. The population is fairly stable and many were moving to suburbs anyway. Today, not everyone wants a suburban house, and nobody wants to live in '60s concrete "housing project" exclaves, so central apartment prices and rents skyrocket. But now you cannot build the kind of central flats people want any more, because of decades of accumulated regulations about noise, sun angles, parking quotas, etc. The market is dominated by 50-100 year old buildings that predate the regulations and are very popular.

Same thing here in Boston--three story detached houses, with one apartment per story, are the most popular form of housing here, and yet have been illegal to build for the past 100 years (with a few exceptions) due to being too dense for single-family zoned areas and being a fire hazard. It's odd that there is no "build out of non-flammable materials" exception for the latter.

Sounds like a subsidy/payout to the steel making industry to me.

So like almost all problems in America it goes back to a broken federal government and regulatory regime which is partially to do with a corrupt, pork barrel Congressional culture and partially do with aggressive "starve the beast" underfunding approaches to government due to disdain for it.

As someone who has recently spent a few months in various Western European countries for work: You would be surprised

In many urban areas, it is basically NYC. Which is great, and makes getting around easy. But once you get farther out, things dry up fast. And a good comparison would actually be Amtrak and the like on the East Coast of the US. Considerably cheaper (I would guess, off the top of my head, 60% of the cost for a comparable trip). But much like with US trains, your savings are at a cost of time. And a lot of the time, those savings aren't particularly significant once you factor that in.

As someone who travels a lot for work, I didn't see a huge difference in how I approached things while working on budgets. Fly to major city nearby and then get a train/rent a car to go to a smaller town (if needed). The former was more of an option, which was nice, but the latter was a lot faster if there were a few connections. And even when there was the option to just do pure train, the amount of time versus savings wasn't worth it.

And for personal travel? Even then, a flight was a lot more logical and not a lot more expensive once I factored in vacation hours and the like to handle transit times.

In terms of cities? Yeah, we are horrible (although, the UK and Ireland is almost as crap as we are once you get out of London). In terms of general (inter)national travel? A car is a lot less required, but not to the extent that a lot of us would think.

Pretty much. There's this notion that you can practically teleport around Europe for next to nothing using trains that just isn't true. On a couple of trips over the past few years, I've looked into taking trains between destinations in Western Europe (e.g. Dusseldorf to Paris) and it's turned out that taking the train was going to take me far longer and cost far more than flying.

The US doesn't have great train systems for the most part but, as you say, in the region that's most comparable to much of Western Europe, the Northeast, it really isn't all that different.

ADDED: What you tend not to have in the US is compact walkable towns and small cities once you get out of the large cities. Though I'd also say, that at least in the UK, small towns away from the main railroad lines will have bus service that's probably better than the US equivalent but it may still just be a few times a day.

>> On a couple of trips over the past few years, I've looked into taking trains between destinations in Western Europe (e.g. Dusseldorf to Paris) and it's turned out that taking the train was going to take me far longer and cost far more than flying.

That comparison is a little disingenuous, of course flying between two cities with an airport, that are not major hubs connected directly by hi-speed rail, will be faster and cheaper. Now consider how you'd get to Dusseldorf or Paris from whatever random smaller city with a train station (in western Europe basically any city with a population over ~100K). I'm not sure if there even are international airports around western Europe that arent directly accessible by train...

Besides traveling for business or pleasure, trains here are heavily used for commuter traffic as well. If you live and work close to a train station, which is quite common in the more densely populated countries, traveling by train will 100% be faster that sitting in a traffic jam every day. And in many cases your employer will even cover most or all of the cost (at least here in the Netherlands).

Obviously trains are still only point-to-point transportation, so if you need to be somewhere without a train station, or without many connections to larger hubs, you will lose time. But compared to the pitiful state of passenger rail in the US (or at least that's how I experienced it), it's pretty great here. I took the train from San Jose to SFO once: there was only one train every hour or so, which took something like 2:30 hours at a snails pace to get to San Francisco, then I had to get on the BART (which is actually pretty good), then I needed to get on the AirTrain, all just to get to the departures. By car it usually takes less than an hour... There really is no excuse for that...

it is an option. usually not the cheapest one, but in quite a few cases makes more sense/convenience compared to flying - ie if you have less than 5-6 hour distance to cover it's faster, plus the hassle of airports, security, baggage limits, ending in the middle of nowhere compared to city centre etc are not that great.

another good thing is, you can buy in most cases tickets just days ahead, most trains have constant prices so your price isn't within 50-1000 eur boundary for same flight, same seat, depending on timing.

I don't really disagree with that. Especially if you're travelling between downtown locations that aren't too far apart on main railroad lines, e.g. York to London or London to Brussels, the train makes a lot of sense. (As indeed is the case in the Northeast US.)

It just isn't the panacea that it often seems to be painted as.

I literally have no idea what you're talking about. I recently returned from Switzerland, and there is a good fast train going basically everywhere, whenever you want to go, and it's amazing and stone cold simple to figure out. You can do seemingly impossible things like wake up in an entirely different city to a place like Zurich, get on a train, and get off in the Zurich airport terminal and check right in. It's not cheap, but nothing in Switzerland is and it's relatively inexpensive by those standards.

It's amazing. And Switzerland has an unusually strong reputation for rail but honestly my experience in places like France and even the UK has been similar. If you want to go somewhere else, you go to the nearest train station and buy a ticket to that place, and then you go to that place.

I live in NYC and it's not even close, and this is the best rail served area in the country by far. I can't get on a train anywhere in this city and get off in an airport terminal. Let's pause and think about that for a second. I live in New York Fucking City and I can't get on a train and get off at an airport. Newark is as close as it gets if you're near Penn Station, but you're still dropped off a long and tedious "Airtrain" ride away. And the PATH that runs from lower Manhattan just inexplicably stops short of that Newark Airport Airtrain, despite the fact that the same mainline track system continues right along. Same story at JFK. And Laguardia they don't even bother to pretend.

It's completely fucking dysfunctional, obviously so. The idea that U.S. rail transport, or transport in general, is even semi-remotely comparable to northern and western Europe is frankly ludicrous.

Switzerland can't support TVG-style speeds because of its topology (too many mountains, curves), but then again, the country is small enough that you can get to Zurich from Geneva in ~2 hours 46 minutes.

According to this, they have more hsr than the US:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_high-speed_railway_l...

For Geneva to Zurich, only one segment of it (beyond Bern, stopping before Zurich) is > 200 km.

Now try the same in Italy or Spain...

But seriously, Swiss and German trains are well known for their punctuality and reliability. Italian and Spanish trains, not so much. (I've seen all of them first hand, and found the stereotypes pretty accurate.)

Italy seems to be better now than 20 years ago...

I visited this past May. Flew into Rome and immediately hoped onto the fast train to Florence. Spent a few days there, then took the fast train to Bologna, transferred to an inter-city (not as fast) down to Riccione for a few days cycling around San Marino. Then took another train from Rimini back to Rome (not high speed, but cut across the central mountains).

Anyways, it worked well. The cost was far less than flying Rome/Florence/Bologna. Might not have worked as well if we wanted to venture out of the cities, but for a typical city-based vacation, it was great.

Also a New Yorker, but my reference point is Hong Kong instead of Europe.

Hong Kong has a high speed rail link from the middle of the airport that gets to city centre in 30 mins flat, making two stops along the way at major mass transit junctions.

How does the 7 not go to LGA? Why doesn't the E go to JFK What stopped the PATH from extending to EWR?*

* I actually know the answer to this one and it's actually a technical constraint. The PATH system uses MTA like third rails for power. The mainline track system uses overhead lines for power. Having the PATH continue to EWR would require investment in parallel infrastructure between Newark Penn Station and EWR. Of course PATH is maintained by the Port Authority and the mainline track by NJ Transit, each of which has its own agenda and budget so it'll never happen.

> * I actually know the answer to this one and it's actually a technical constraint.

Not really. I mean sure in the sense that they'd have to run the third rail as you mention, but that's not a technical constraint given how simple it is. And theoretically it's in progress.[0]

The problem here is plainly political. If the politics of building trains in this country weren't completely broken it would have been done long, long ago.

[0] http://www.nj.com/essex/index.ssf/2016/04/newark_elizabeth_l...

Oh while we're talking about dysfunctional PATH decisions based on mindless political/organizational divisions here's another one that'll make your blood boil: http://newyorkyimby.com/2014/09/the-port-authoritys-missed-c...

> * I actually know the answer to this one and it's actually a technical constraint. The PATH system uses MTA like third rails for power. The mainline track system uses overhead lines for power. Having the PATH continue to EWR would require investment in parallel infrastructure between Newark Penn Station and EWR. Of course PATH is maintained by the Port Authority and the mainline track by NJ Transit, each of which has its own agenda and budget so it'll never happen.

Why is that a technical constraint? The mainline system uses third rail from Grand Central Terminal to Pelham, where it switches to overhead line equipment, so even in a US setting it's clear that switching between power supplies on the move and dual-compatible stock is no problem.

My dad and I went on a driving trip around England and the Isle of Skye. The only destinations we couldn't have reached with train were Mediobogdium and Uig when we got to the Isle of Skye.

> But much like with US trains, your savings are at a cost of time.

That's the difference though. In the US, trains are so expensive that they're almost always more expensive than flights.

Also, comparing to NYC is disingenuous. NYC has by far the best public transport in the US. There's a very significant drop-off in quality (other major cities have poor public transport, and for smaller cities it's nonexistent).

Pretty simple actually--our rail system is optimized for freight, not passenger transport while our road and airway systems are the opposite. While this does mean rail transport is dreadfully slow and full of delays (since a car of wheat isn't particularly time-sensitive and doesn't need to go 300 kph), it also means that cargo transportation is incredibly efficient (both financially and energetically) and cheap.

I was going to make exactly this point. If you look at Europe and say "their trains are so much better!" then you're missing half the picture. They're not better, they're just different. Better in some ways, worse in other ways.

Given the size of our country, I'm not at all sure we made the wrong tradeoff here. Being able to cheaply ship goods from coast to coast seems far more valuable than having high speed passenger trains that "only" take a day or two to make that same trip.

Certainly, there are some corridors where we ought to to better. DC-Boston and LA-SF, for example, would probably benefit greatly from high-speed rail. But I don't think the idea of ubiquitous passenger trains is really a good one for us, much as I might like to see it.

While an interesting observation, I'm not sure this really addresses the point. The conversation was implicitly about passenger rail, and the US is clearly bad at that.

Also I can think of a few practical reasons why Europe might have less developed long distance freight rail off the top of my head. Not least the fact that most of Europe is a lot better connected by sea than opposite coasts of the US (especially before the Panama canal was built).

Our freight system is a big part of why our passenger system sucks, though. Most of our cities see infrequent or nonexistent passenger service because the rails are all tied up with freight.

That doesn't really follow. If freight rail is getting in the way of passenger rail then the cause is insufficient capacity, not the existence of freight. And the solution is to build more track (or allocate more of the existing capacity to passenger services) but that costs money, and there's no political will behind it.

If anything it sounds like the freight rail is the only reason you have any passenger rail at all.

That doesn't really make sense. If we got rid of the freight trains the rails would just start to rust, it's not like there's a ton of money/interest/profit in passenger rail thats stymied by all the jam packed tracks.

Or I can just say "their passenger trains are so much better" and not miss any of the picture.

Which, plainly, was the original point.

A lot of the infrastructure is shared between the two types, so you can't just ignore one.

> Being able to cheaply ship goods from coast to coast seems far more valuable than having high speed passenger trains that "only" take a day or two to make that same trip.

Why can't we have both?

In order to have both we need segregated passenger and freight rail systems, which is extremely expensive. AFAIK, China is the only country to have both, and avoids the high costs through a mix of weak property rights, lax environmental regulation, and a strong domestic supply chain.

America has only about 5x the freight rail traffic of Europe, while Europe has over 100x the passenger ridership that America has. I don't think the freight advantage (if it can be called that) justifies the disadvantage of our relative passenger immobility.

By the way 40% of US rail freight traffic by weight is coal, which is nothing to be proud of. If you erase the fact that USA is still a massive coal consumer, it starts to look like Europe moves as much freight as America does.

> America has only about 5x the freight rail traffic of Europe, while Europe has over 100x the passenger ridership that America has. I don't think the freight advantage (if it can be called that) justifies the disadvantage of our relative passenger immobility.

It is "justified" if the American configuration (cars & trucks carry people, trains carry goods) uses less energy than the European one (cars & trucks carry goods, trains carry people), which I suspect it does when you do an apples-to-apples comparison and leave out metropolitan rail systems, where people-vs-freight tradeoffs don't apply.

> By the way 40% of US rail freight traffic by weight is coal, which is nothing to be proud of. If you erase the fact that USA is still a massive coal consumer, it starts to look like Europe moves as much freight as America does.

Again, to do a fair comparison you have to subtract coal from European transport systems.

I'm not sure how you arrived at your conclusion. US transportation energy consumption for all purposes (goods and passengers) is much higher per GDP per capita than for any European country. For example Germany has a per-capita GDP about 2/3rds at much as USA, but uses less than 1/3rd of the energy for transportation.

Not sure what you're getting at with ignoring metro rail systems.

The US has to transport goods and people longer distances, so all other things being equal US transportation will be more energy intensive. However, having the US switch over to the German mode of transportation, where goods move on trucks and people move on rails, will make the system more, not less energy intensive since goods contribute more ton-miles than people.

I still think you are presenting a false choice. It isn't necessary for the US to put goods on trucks in order for us to put people on trains. Nobody today drives their cars from the coal field in Gillette, Wyoming to the electric power plant in Montrose, Missouri. Adding trains for people will not somehow make the coal-hauling railroads of America more congested or less effective.

Freight lines and passenger lines are usually (though not always) different, especially on the country-side where you have no electrification for freight lines and HSR-dedicated lines.

In the USA, all passenger rail outside the northeast is not electrified and freight lines are a strict superset of passenger lines.

Once you get wherever you wanted via train, you are now pretty much stuck at a train station.

So much of America is not walkable, and we don't have great public transportation within cities and towns, so if you arrive somewhere without a car there's not much for you to do.

edit: of course, ride sharing helps.

But the same is true of flying. Once you get wherever you wanted via a plane, you are pretty much stuck at an airport.

The difference, of course, is that airports tend to have sufficient passenger numbers to justify car hire agencies locating there (or at least providing a shuttle), but that case is harder to make as long as there are comparably few trains per day.

I've never once been to an airport that didn't have either a bus or a train link to the nearest city.

> Once you get wherever you wanted via a plane, you are pretty much stuck at an airport.

Adding insult to injury, that airport generally isn't feasibly reachable by public transportation.

Not going to happen. Americans fight HSR like the plague:

http://singularityhub.com/2012/09/04/can-high-speed-rail-com...

The CA HSR should have been built decades ago. In the meantime, China has built 12,000 miles of hsr, and will double that within 10 years.

China is also building maglevs. The Beijing S1 has should be live within months:

http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/business/2016-11/28/content_275...

The US is a case of "too much democracy." Sometimes you just need to give power to a commission / body and let them do what they need to do. If you need every village, suburb, unincorporated city and "advocacy group" to give votes on any plan, you're going to fail.

> Like the kind every European country figured out how to do properly

While I can't compare to US railways, EU railways have their fair share of issues. There might indeed be a fairly large offer, the structures running them seem to be an organisational mess in many countries.

Just some examples I know of:

* The Netherlands and Belgium ordered trains that were never able to drive [1].

* Rail is sometimes referred to as Germany's inefficiency secret [2].

* Rail privatisation in the UK isn't very popular [3].

Obviously it isn't all bad. But it also isn't organised properly in many EU countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyra

[2] http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/a-series-of-defe...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatisation_of_British_Rail#...

We had trains, and we still do. We just stopped moving people on them, and shifted it all to freight.

That is correct. America actually has a remarkable freight rail system. But the vast majority of Americans are not involved directly with freight rail so most people don't think about it.

I think in most of Europe there's a relatively painful 50/50 balance between passenger and freight traffic. The freight trains run mostly at night. The tracks are used really, really hard, which causes maintenance issues.

It's quite hard to do track maintenance well when there's a train passing by every 5-10 minutes, 24/7. Maintenance windows can become really expensive.

Because at American distances, airplanes are very time-efficient for moving people. And that's today -- they were even more so before TSA.

Trains would mostly be effective at covering those distances that are currently "puddle jumper" flights. Things which are an hour flight on a slow prop plane, but which take at least twice as long real-time due to airport and security hassles.

I don't think anyone is seriously proposing a US-wide HSR network; the US-wide population density obviously makes that non-viable.

There's definitely parts of the US where the population density could easily sustain HSR, though; California from San Diego–Los Angeles–San Francisco is one, and Boston–New York–Philadelphia–Baltimore–Washington is another (quite how far you could stretch that network west is an interesting question, and I don't know enough about current travel trends to comment, certainly Pittsburgh is close enough that travel time-wise it could beat out aviation), as is Miami–West Palm Beach–Orlando for example.

What is interesting is it is likely the case that the North East is the only place where there's a sufficient population density in a larger general area that crosses state lines.

The problems seem to be frequently the fact that nobody wants a train line near them that doesn't stop near them, whereas current aviation routes simply overfly them, and adding in extra stops completely destroys the business case by making them comparatively slow (v. aviation).

Agree completely with the stops issue. Personally, I think that focusing any amount on intercity trains is wasted effort without first having intracity transport worked out. What's the point of having a fast train between Orlando and Miami if I can't do anything without a car on the other end?

No Florida city has a good public transit story. Hell, in the Tampa Bay area, you can't even get from the Tampa International airport to Pinellas county without two hours of buses, because the cross-bay express buses only run for commuters. (Only on weekdays, only during rush-hour times.) So what's the point of a train that goes from Tampa to Miami if it takes me another two hours to get to Clearwater or St Petersburg? That's half of the four hours already to drive direct!

Without even trying to figure business cases out, I think it should be obvious that going after busy aviation routes should succeed without more intracity transport: there's obviously "enough" public transport for aviation to succeed there (where that "enough" might be the fact there are plenty of car hire agencies at the airport along with one or two bus services!).

Unless the alternate mechanism is going to have the same termini,like as the air routes (as in, at the airport itself), it still likely needs additional local transit, even if the existing network is adequate to support the airport.

Pittsburgh is on the other side of the (eastern) continental divide--the Appalachian Mountains--from NYC. They're not the highest but they'd still cause a lot of difficulties to HSR. I also doubt you'd have enough traffic just to Pittsburgh and NYC-Chicago is too far. Even if you wave your hands and reduce the current travel time by half to about 8-10 hours, very few people will take that rather than fly.

NE Corridor already works well for train obviously. Amtrak has various plans to upgrade service though I don't know the current status of those plans.

Half that to 8–10 hours? It's only ~350 miles or so, and if we're talking HSR, by the standards of the past thirty years is only a couple of hours or so. The other thing worth remembering is that some of the steepest grades on railways in the world are found on HSR, up to 4% compared with 1.5% that would be considered steep by the standards of most railways.

Fair point about the grade (given right-of-ways for dedicated track). However, it's over 700 miles as the crow flies. It's academic in any case. This would be a project in the $10s of billions and isn't going to happen in the foreseeable future.

Took me two hours to go from San Francisco to San Jose by public transit, and I had to use an Uber for the last leg because the train for the last segment stopped running (this was for a journey started around 8 PM).

Took me two hours to go from Tokyo to Kyoto.

I have you beat with 1.5h from midtown Atlanta to east Atlanta via MARTA (subway + 1 or 2 busses, this was about 5-6 years ago.

There was no breakdown but this obviously depends on where in midtown you come from and where in east atlanta you go to, also just waiting on a bus can be 20-30 minutes per transfer.

I think a part of the problem is that most(?) rail lines are owned by a patchwork of companies. So while you can take an Amtrak from San Jose to LA, it will travel over BNSF and Union-Pacific lines (I think). It may not get right-of-way everywhere, resulting in delays.

We need the Federal Government to own the rail lines, just like it owns the highways.

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