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“The trip must be between 200 and 300 miles. Their research indicates this is the sweet spot between being more than a convenient car ride, but less then a convenient plane ride. I'll note that LA -> LV is ~180 miles, whereas LA -> SF is ~340 miles.”

That’s a function of the train speed. If the train traveled at 300 mph, then LA<->SF becomes faster than Brightline’s 180 mile LA to Vegas route, which looks like it will average 100 mph.

300mph is not trivial for trains, that's more in maglev range. In fact, the fastest maglev in operation (Shanghai's) tops at 286mph.

Yep, that would explain the half a dozen comments about maglevs made by me.

I’ve definitely been trying to steer the conversation towards maglevs.

> That’s a function of the train speed. If the train traveled at 300 mph, then LA<->SF becomes faster than Brightline’s 180 mile LA to Vegas route, which looks like it will average 100 mph.

Even with the speed, you would have to do LA <-> SF as the crow flies. California HSR Phase 1 is 520 mi.

On the other hand, LA <-> LV is effectively flat, at least from where the Brightline leaves in Palmdale. The difference between the two projects is pretty stark.

Brightline built Miami to West Palm Beach on rails it already owned, I think much of the new extension from West Palm Beach to Orlando has been on existing rails too.

Do trains require more staff per seat? Amtrak trains seem to have 2 staff in the car and I assume 2 engineers, and roughly (5 car consist of 72 seats) 360 passengers, vs 4-6 people for 180 people on an A320.

IIRC the bigger component was the time issue. When the flight is an hour and the train ride is 3 hours it makes a big difference.

But I would imagine it's seat density (more seats in a plane fuselage vs a train car) and sold seats vs empty seats (airlines have a pretty efficient system for filling seats based on dynamic pricing, due to the fact that the flight departures are timed and gated).

I'll try to find the article, it had numbers.

It’s a miracle of marketing that so many people think what brightline has built is high speed rail.

At least for its Las Vegas segment, it may qualify.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail :

  While there is no single standard that applies worldwide, lines built to handle 
  speeds above 250 km/h (155 mph) or upgraded lines in excess of 200 km/h (124 
  mph) are widely considered to be high-speed.

From https://www.hsrail.org/brightline-west/ :

  Brightline West is ready to connect Las Vegas and the Los Angeles area at speeds of up to 180 mph.

It operates at 200kph/125mph for part of the route, which is the traditional definition (e.g. it's what you see on those maps of European high speed rail). It's barely over the line, but it qualifies.