America Is Not Too Big for Rail. Actually.
It is often said that the USA is too big for passenger rail. Europeans just wouldn’t understand. America is big. Like, really big. You just can’t comprehend how big. Aviation is the only option.
Having just got back from a wonderful road trip (half-work, half-leisure, in which I made it from San Francisco to Denver, via Las Vegas and Flagstaff), I now have an appreciation for how big the US is. Long highways and big-sky country. But also how big it isn’t - or at least, how people tend to be mostly in a few places.
If you were to drive across the US (e.g. Los Angeles to New York), you would travel ~2700 miles and incur about 41hours of driving. If you were to drive across Europe (let’s say, Lisbon to Istanbul), you would travel ~2600 miles and incur about 40hours of driving.
Totally incomparable. That 100miles makes all the difference! Don’t you know there are US states bigger than some European countries?!
Now, to be sure, a 200mph train from New York to LA would take maybe 14hours, which is a very long train ride (though a very lovely sleeper service…).
But just as most people in Europe are not routinely travelling from the Atlantic to the Bosphorous, most US travellers are not travelling coast-to-coast.
Inter-city travel from Paris is mostly to Toulouse, Marseille, Strasbourg, or Hamburg, and so US inter-city travel is dominated by trips like Chicago to Indianapolis, New York or Detroit. It is true that Europe has a more even population distribution, where the US has densely populated coasts and only clusters inland, separated by large tracts of wilderness and farmland. But the Midwest and Texas nonetheless contain major population clusters. Meanwhile in Canada, five of Canada’s largest cities lie in a straight line from Quebec City to Mississauga.
Los Angeles to Las Vegas is 270miles. Somewhat less than the 430mile Paris-to-Marseille LGV route. A high speed train could get revellers to a weekend in Sin City in just over an hour, with no faffing around in airports, getting touched up by TSA or limits on hand baggage (such a route has been proposed, paralleling the I-15).(1)
Likewise, the benefit of rail links between the “Texas Triangle” of San Antonio (& Austin); Houston and Dallas is a recurrent crayonista project. Those cities are 200-230miles apart. Driving between any two of those cities will take 4-5 hours. Multiple short-haul flights hop between them daily. But a train could do the trip in 90 minutes (the region is significantly more compact than the French LGV network).
The same is true in the Midwest, where high speed rail would put Chicago within an hour of Milwaukee; two hours of Columbus, Indianapolis, Detroit, Cincinnati or St Louis and three hours of Kansas City and Omaha. All of which compares very favourably with the modern airport misery of flying (get to the airport, endure security, hang about in a crowded lounge, get your flight, then get from the airport to your actual destination. All those ancillary bits usually stack up to 2-3hours on their own, without counting the actual flight time).
Any argument against high speed rail across the US is also an argument against the InterState Highway System. After all, what sort of maniac would want to drive 40hours coast-to-coast when they could fly? What’s the point of it?!
Very few make such an epic road trip, but quite a lot of people want to hop into the next state or over to the next city.
The exact same logic applies to rail, except rail is faster, safer and you can relax, have lunch, read a book or do some work. It is bizarre that the IHS didn’t include designs for a parallel passenger rail network.
Moreover, rail lends itself to sleeper services.(2) If you once built a network of regional high speed rail servicing the coasts, Texas and the Midwest, it would not be difficult to string them together and offer long-distance sleepers.
Alas, this won’t happen. It should. But it won’t.
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In true form, it’s an unambitious plan which includes 60-90mph sections to cover mountain climbs instead of just carving a base-tunnel through the Mescal and Soda Mountains like the Swiss or Italians would. It also ties onto existing 70mph lines north of San Bernardino instead of delivering 200mph service all the way to LA, although the corridor is wide and in time you could likely dedicate (and electrify) a couple of tracks for 100+mph operation.
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Trainsets are less volume-constrained than aircraft - a larger wide-body aircraft are 65-70metres in length, but 200metre trains are common, and long-distance sleeper services could easily stretch to 400metre trainsets.