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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by Simon Reed To put things in perspective it takes 30 minutes to get from the centre of London to Heathrow or Gatwick airport, and even longer to Stanstead. It's probably a similar distance from Charles De Gaulle Airport to the centre of Paris. Why fly? If you take the Eurostar to Brussels, which is the same distance and time roughly, you can make a cross-platform change onto a Thalys High Speed Express towards Amsterdam or Cologne - another hour each. Many of the Amtrak threads on this forum have contained teeth gnashing and chest beating over the future of passenger rail in America. If you'd suggested in Europe 20 years ago that you could get from London to, say, Zurich in five hours by rail you'd not have been taken seriously. The passenger train has, sadly, fallen out of idealogical currency in the US and the High Speed, dedicated track networks we see in mainland Europe are unlikely to usurp the Airlines as your favourite waste of taxpayers money. Still, the European model shows what can be achieved with a willingness to transform the moribund into the dynamic. [/quote] I have made the point many times that if NA railroads had continued their evolution toward higher speeds out of the 1930's (when 100 mph operation was percieved as becoming "commonplace"), rather than settling for the long slow "load factor maximization" concept, it is likely the railroads could have outpaced the highway/trucking system's speed advantage and thus retained the time sensitive traffic dominance as well as the low value bulk commodity dominance, e.g. the erstwhile 70% railroad market share. This would have by default made rail passenger operations more viable in many of the medium length corridors, rather than the oxymoronic concept of trying to run time valued passenger trains at nominal NA freight train speeds. The theoretical "natural" speed limit of railroad technology has always been around 125 mph (increased over the years with new technological advances), while the natural highway speed limit seems to have settled at around 60 to 70 mph. One can question what would happen to time sensitive freighting if railroads could double or triple their average velocity from the 25 mph range to 50 or 75 mph range. In this aspect, the Europeans are light years ahead of NA. Now, if you continental types would just put more freight and less people on the rails, you will have achieved surface transporation Nirvana (the Edenistic ideal, not the grunge rock group!)
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