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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

NYC to SFO in 12 hours would be amazing. What train technology gets you that?

It's called an airplane and it gets you there in six.

If you take into account ticketing and check in and security and boarding, the actual number is more like 9 or 10 hours.

Add to this the commute to and from the airports and you are looking at 12 hours.

But then you have to get on an airplane and all the horror that brings with it.

NYC to SFO in 12 hours is an average speed of 215mph, assuming the most direct route possible.

Practically you would require a top speed of ~250mph, and current current generation of conventional rail trains max out at about 190-210mph. But they could easily do NYC to SFO in 13-14 hours.

The Shanghai Maglev Train reaches a top speed of 268mph (during it's short 7min trip to the airport), so it could do the trip in less than 12 hours. But I'm not sure it's theoretically practical over distances that long.

That's a hell of a lot of infrastructure just to link two end-points at opposite ends of the continent. Any train going that route is not going to be an express, and more stops significantly affect average speed.

Getting downvoted for bringing up completely reasonable points?

And who is gonna pay for this magical high speed railroad that never breaks down and is never delayed?

High speed rail in California is costing around $90 million per mile. A perfectly straight line from NYC-SF is 2,572 miles. That's nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars. All to allow costal elites to increase their travel time? Sure.

  NYC to SFO in 12 hours is an average speed of 215mph

With zero stops and no delays.

It doesn't exist now. That doesn't mean it couldn't be built; the article was lamenting America's loss of vision and technological leadership, and I was replying to your comment that implied that 12 hours between major cities would be too slow, which in the case of coast-to-coast I disagree with.

doing some napkin math (and assuming you can lay track with a run length about equal to doing this by car) you'd need a train averaging 250mph. Current top average speeds for wheeled trains (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV) are in the 170mph range.

It's ~ 350km/h, can be done with TGV-like speeds.

That's a max speed, not an average.

And again, for this fantastical train, we're earning the privilege of doing in 12 hours what a plane will do in 6.

Does that six hours include travel to the airport, check-in, security clearance, boarding, deplaning, baggage collection, and travel from the destination airport back into the city?

If you factor in all this extra stuff, it looks more like 9-10 hours.

You have most of that with a train too, other than the security clearance (for now). But assuming high-speed train travel became something more than the sideshow operation that is Amtrak today, security screening of passengers would very likely be implemented.

No you don't. As someone who lives in a country with functioning high speed rail and who uses it regularly, let me tell you how it works here:

You go to the train station, which is in the city centre. You use a subway, tram or bicycle to get there. You walk in, go to your platform and enter the train. You place your luggage in the luggage rack and take your seat. When the train arrives at your destination or interchange point, you grab your stuff and leave. Sometime in between, staff will walk the train and check your ticket.

No long transit to/from the station. No check-in, no security screening, no baggage drop-off/pickup. It's a train, not rocket science.

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