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Comment by robbywashere_ | Hacker News Reader

How about a boring ass electric train

We looked into this! If you want to go regional range, you really need high speed rail (who's trying to sit on a train that goes slower than cars on the highway...)

High speed rail is prohibitively expensive. Besides the rail itself, you need to do grade separation from the ground so the rail can be flat, environmental impact studies, and in the US where private property rights are very strong, you might need to pay the land owners.

Look at the proposed price tags of the past 4 high speed rail projects in the US (none came to fruition): - California High Speed Rail: $77B - Acela High Speed Rail (NE Corridor): $150B - Texas Central: $20B - Virgin Trains Florida High Speed Rail: $4B (just Orlando to West Palm!)

I wish it was as simple as electric trains! Would save us a lot of engineering...

Acela in the NE Corridor exists as does Virgin Trains (post COVID it's operated under the name Brightline) from Miami to Orlando.

Only 2 of the 4 you listed haven't come to fruition.

Acela and Virgin Trains are not high speed rail…

To complement this, the Acela has a top speed of 150 mph; it can only travel that fast for ~10% of the distance between Boston and DC though [1]. It fastest leg from NYC to DC averages 82mph (about as fast as driving on 95 at night ;) )

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela#:~:text=Acela%20trains%2...

The US isn't very good at building large infrastructure projects. Boats and planes have the unique advantage that you don't need a lot of infrastructure along their path of travel, unlike a high speed train.

Also this can be used as a replacement for a ferry. Note how two of their launch customers operate in the Caribbean, where travel between islands is a big deal.

> The US isn't very good at building large infrastructure projects

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/interstate/finalmap.cfm

But, yes, that was a long time ago. Still, we could find the will again.

The US can't find the will to build housing, how is it going to find the will to build another continent-spanning railway?

We were the best once. The railroad was impressive as were many of the dams, power plants, etc. at some point things went horribly wrong though

> The railroad was impressive

The utter boondoggle of corruption that went into that is pretty amazing, though.

That was almost three-quarters of a century ago, the US is a very different, chaotic, and dysfunctional country (see: California High-Speed Train Fiasco).

We can't build anything anymore.

Because there's not enough of a crisis to justify it, yet.

We can do both lol. Aerospace engineers building a ground effect vehicle are not the same people as the people doing regulatory work to run train lines

Nobody wants to talk about the real solutions that are boring apparently

Is it a real solution when for some strange reason it's impossible to build them?

Also I love trains. I moved back to Miami and there is a train called Brightline that goes from Miami to Orlando. It's extremely nice and my preferred mode of travel. Imagine if we had a bullet train that just spanned the entire east coast...

Eminent domain isn't that popular anymore unfortunately. Florida being one large empty red state, it's a lot easier to muscle 500 miles of new track into what's already there. To go up the whole east coast you'd have to wrestle with a half dozen different political machines. Even just limited to Florida, the line hasn't gotten past West Palm (yet), and was stalled for years due to lawsuits from just 2 counties.

Not the most popular opinion, but I believe it could be a net win for all: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/railroad-national...

The analogy that comes to mind is airports.

Acela tried... $150B pricetag :(

https://www.railway-technology.com/features/featuregrand-pla...

That $150B estimate seems wildly optimistic to me as well.

It took 22 years and almost $7B to build 22 miles of MRT (not high-speed rail) just outside of the DC beltway, and much of the route had an existing right-of-way. It's a populous area, but the DC to Boston route is quite heavily developed.

Trains really tend to struggle over open water. Very difficult for them to stay afloat.

Take the train to a port then take a seaglider to an island!

The use case for this vs a train could not be more different.

Servicing routes of low passenger demand, across water, with low environmental impact. Impossible for a train.

Sounds too boring. Could we complicate things heaps by putting it into a vacuum tube at least?

A lot of their customers operate ferries and flights to islands.

what are you, European?

Going to Catalina on a train sounds like a lot of fun.

NIMBY

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