zugmann ATLANTIC CENTRAL Same here, I have been reading this thread thinking the same thing, I need to just keep quiet, because why would anyone want to be either place let alone both? I think the same way when I hear someone voluntarily wants to live in Maryland. (a little bit of mason-dixon line humor)
ATLANTIC CENTRAL Same here, I have been reading this thread thinking the same thing, I need to just keep quiet, because why would anyone want to be either place let alone both?
I think the same way when I hear someone voluntarily wants to live in Maryland.
(a little bit of mason-dixon line humor)
I tried to leave, but I could not talk the wife into the Shenandoah Valley.
So we found a nice spot near the Susquehanna....
Sheldon
zugmannIf it doesn't turn the cardboard box clear in a matter of minutes - it isn't real pizza.
There it is baby! Excuse me while I go into hysterics, this is beyond "LOL!"
ATLANTIC CENTRALSo we found a nice spot near the Susquehanna....
Some very pretty country around there! There's a house on a spectacular bluff near the I-95 bridge over the Susquehanna I've dreamed of owning for years. Not gonna happen though. Just as well, after I bought the house I'd probably buy a cannon to shell the boats on the river with on those days I'm in a bad mood.
Yes, I think I know the house you mean. I live just minutes from there. We have been here in Harford County for 26 years, up here in the Harve de Grace area for two years now after moving from the 1901 Queen Anne in Forest Hill.
If I'm stuck in Maryland, this is the spot to be stuck in. Nearby the little city top rated by Smithsonian Magazine as one of the best small towns to visit, and lots of historic houses for me to work on.
Sometimes I go months without having to go to Baltimore, or Wilmington, or Philly........
We have a nice brick rancher on 2 acres in a quiet rural village and big basement for my next train layout. Construction starts soon.
charlie hebdoIt was possible to build Interstates, as I recall, even with a lot of local opposition.
I've wondered about that, too. We took huge amounts of land and billions of dollars to build the Interstates. Surely we could build HSR.
I think one of the issues would be that the Interstates actually allowed towns along the route to access the highway. HSR would bypass most towns, causing them to oppose it. Out in our area, towns were actively working to have the Interstate pass through -- I guess much like frontier towns worked to get the railroads to pass through.
I really don't know the answer. I would love to see HSR, but I also would not like the noise, construction, and cost if it were to bypass me with the nearest access dozens or even hundreds of miles away.
York1 John
would the route be popular ? so many of us only look at the end points instead of various city pairs. IMO starting with lines from Pittsburg west to Toledo, columus, cleveland, Dayton, Indianapolis. That is a first start with connections coming from PHL and NYCity on present tracks.. Then a dedicated ROW on the part PHL - Pitt.
What is needed for building interediate stations is to provide separate station tracks so express trains can pass locals. So for eventual building plan for these connectionsbuy all real estate needed and build platforms for essential expansion.
John: I don't know what OM had in mind for connecting to intermediate points, but they should be a combination of what Balt mentions and fast branches.
And of course, the politics involved with it would be something to screw it all up. Do you know why the New York State Thruway doesn't go to Rochester? Rochester went Democratic in 1948, costing Thomas A. Dewey the presidential election. Dewey became governor of New York and that was that. "The little man on the wedding cake" as Alice Longworth Roosevelt (Teddys' daugher) called him.
charlie hebdoSo in your speculation, how are intermediate populated areas to be served? Or not?
At present the 'necessary' spacing of stations can be a bit closer than it was in the early 1970s, but it is still further than, say, Philadelphia to Wilmington, or Baltimore to Washington. City pairs like these are far better served by reasonably fast regional rail, even in the 110mph rather than 125mph class (there is an enormous cost and maintenance difference even between these two) -- this is especially true when non-German dwell times are involved for two-track HSR; remember that even with mandatory station stops, the level of switch provision for 'passing tracks' at stations is high-grade, and much higher still should high-speed through stations become desirable.
Now when I first started looking at this, in the relative infancy of LGV planning, the conventional wisdom -- in no small part 'burned' by the experience of lightweight equipment on jointed rail in the '50s -- was completely against using the European-style entry into and through cities using existing trackage. This was combined with the idea of grade-separated construction (a la Interstates) and the desire for gravity braking and acceleration assist, so the idea was that the lines would transit cities at relatively high elevation, rather than at grade or in tunneling, and the station would reside at the highest elevation 'both ways' so that it would always be upgrade into, and downgrade leaving, the stop. Now remember in those days even the 150mph APT, which was then the real 'high-speed' model for us, involved complicated hydrokinetic braking from high speed down to the range friction braking would be safe and cost effective -- this in part via logical extrapolation from composite-shoe practice even with three brake discs per axle.
That was also a heyday of the idea that Interstates and HSR could be co-located, which is a substantial difference from co-locating transit or regional rail in highway medians. As previously noted, the problem with grades was not so much in the provision of peak grades on Interstates as in the vertical-curve issues associated with transition to and from those grades; this would often involve possibly heroic grade differences (and retaining-wall and drainage concerns, etc.) between the road lanes and the railroad at various points in the necessary vertical-curve profile; this also had serious consequences for roads crossing the Interstate at various points. Where the real problem came in (and still does) is in the curves. You will NOT get HSR speed in the medium of a 70mph-design-speed Interstate no matter what superelevation you use. As you may know, one design principle (to preclude highway hypnosis) is to put "unnecessary" curvature into an Interstate route; when this is done to necessary HSR standards (about a 12-mile radius!) the effect is not achieved. And there is the constant issue with prospective emergent collisions, either of road vehicles veering into or dropping onto HSR tracks or of Eischeide-style derailments that subsequently contact road structure.
So I continue to assume that a 'proper' HSR route will not be intimately co-located with Interstates or other roads, or with existing railroad ROWs except in certain unusually suitable situations (even the PRR speedway between New Brunswick and Trenton has too many dogleg curves or alignment issues to serve this purpose over a sufficiently long 'fetch'), and that much of it will continue to be best provided on elevated viaduct structure rather than the kind of cut-and-fill-punctuated-with-many-tunnels that we see in contemporary German construction through rolling terrain.
Now, between the noise issue, the Chinese-wall issue, the property costs, and the other general NIMBY concerns, it's pretty clear these lines aren't following railroads through the great many communities that originally sprang up around railroads a hundred years ago. Even if we made them four-track and put slower regional rail on the outer pair -- itself idiotic considering the 100mph closing rate even with regional at top speed -- you have these inconveniences, and while towns tolerate this from legacy railroads they certainly won't vote for them now.
So the logical idea is to put the 'stops' out in the country, BUT assure a decent mix of travel at lowest cost/reasonable speed and convenience to get to them. That would likely involve at least one rail feeder (with 110 or 125-mph speed where desired) combined with regional bus and with a network of roads and parking access. It makes little sense not to develop this as its own source of traffic generation as well as 'population center' for development -- which is why I'm big on PUDs for such satellite locations.
Note that this is still well inside what the OP in this thread specifies for his HST service. Remember the considerations for holdover/passing sidings at stations? If you are planning on running 'all-stops' 186+-mph trains together with a decent frequency of limited-stop superexpresses, you'll be using those switches an awful lot with some really close timings if you don't build to four full tracks. Of course if you build just to the limited stops, you'll get the through traffic ... but that isn't the question charlie hebdo was asking.
Now, if the HSR is limited only to a few major stops, we have to look at which of them is necessarily on the line, the way Hartford is in that 'second spine' alternative. The OP predicates Pittsburgh as a midpoint ... which even the PRR's long-distance speed line in the early '20s did not. On the other hand, the Ramsay survey (an even higher-peak-speed line in its final iteration in the late '20s) did go to Pittsburgh (although most certainly no city of appreciable size in eastern Pennsylvania, and presumably none in southeastern New York State or northern New Jersey) so we need not reject it out of hand -- except for the truly heroic civil engineering involved in getting a true HSR line into and out of that city, even if your schedule tolerates 10 miles or so of approach routing. We have recently been reminded of the relative stupidity of tolerating curves with tight permanent restrictions in any part of a nominal HSR route, so I won't go into that any further.
Clearly entry into a city like Chicago would need to be speeded up. The current run of HrSR from Joliet to CUS is pathetic.[/quote]Now, getting an arrow-straight through service into Chicago will involve dedicated tracks, no grade crossings, and while steep approach grades might be considered, the vertical-curve requirement makes rather for long approach structures for flyovers rather than expedient peak steepness. We can probably ignore tunneling in the Chicago developed area, but we also have to look at issues with above-grade clearance and the kind of extended NIMBYism that likely goes with outer neighborhoods in that very developed area. I can't think offhand of any potential approach from existing lines that could be exclusively optimized for the necessary speed and absence of crossings at grade; in fact I'd assume that a new line completely on viaduct, built with the current range of Chinese self-launching construction for that structure, is the only practical alternative. And you'd run this to "somewhere" that has an appropriate mix of local access ... real local access, not historical.
What I suspect is that you'll have a last-mile strategy very like the old idea of a stop in Englewood or Paoli. There'll be a downtown-Chicago stop, and at least some of the high-speed express service would go there, but somewhere reasonably near would be a satellite facility with better quick transfer to and from the high-speed line, which might itself only have a shuttle to 'other' transfer or intermodal facilities that tie into different modes effectively.
In the mid-Seventies this was handled with a handwave, the general solution being PRT. You'd be rocketed to your high-elevation station, ride the motorstairs or elevator down to the PRT lane, get in your vehicle just like hailing a cab at the rank, and the computer would then route you wherever you were going, on local roads or dedicated guideways. Now even then, when you actually started overlaying the 'necessary' guideways for this over a street grid, you started to get snarled in three-level linguini, all of which would presumably have to be paid for, maintained, and powered, and it was when this was exhaustively costed-out that the PRT dream started to die. (There were a great many other reasons why it wouldn't work well, some of which are now being somewhat expensively rediscovered by the Uber and Lyft people... )
MOST of the current 'regional' services connecting with HSR are going to be two-level at best. The immediate thing that changes is the provision of local FAA-certified regional air service, in aircraft no larger than about 10-12pax, dispatched via scheduling computer, which is the only real way to provide distributed 'interurban' high speed service between reasonably small municipalities on the proper as-needed-when-scheduled-ahead-of-time basis -- there is no better way to do this on the ground at all; think of it as the '50s GM bus model scaled up to shorter net trip times for longer distances. The issue of reliable transfer from the aircraft to the HST stop is important, but relatively easy to scale and provide.
The fallback is going to be some type of bus, but probably resembling a more moder Pickwick bus than a converted transit or tour bus. It would involve a combination of reasonable luxury, high speed capability, and relatively compact outside proportions (for example, it should be capable of entering and negotiating built-to-a-price multilevel parking structures) These things are easily designed, their chassis and shells have an interesting range of alternative uses, and they should have very long effective service lives if built correctly. The perceived problem, of course, is that they are not rail, and while convertible to run at high speed on rail if done right (e.g. a modern version of the Evans approach, rather than crudely-sprung secondary wheels, with active-suspension debounce of tire contact) there is likely little 'big savings' in that capability.
There were discussions of passenger 'modules' over the years: your seat would be on an intermodal underframe, and equipment would move you, sitting in air-conditioned comfort, between a private 'automobile' or bus chassis, a train, or an airplane without requiring that you leave your seat. An only slightly modified version of this underlies the premise of Hyperloop, and it may be interesting to see how that pans out in practice.
Just imagine how effective that coast to coast airline flight will be - departing New York with intermediate stops at Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Charleston, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas and terminating at either Los Angeles or San Francisco.
HSR stopping at every intermediate 'town' would be similarly ineffective.
Never too old to have a happy childhood!
I'm not sure what all OM said because I don't feel up to reading such a long post. Briefly, we only need go look around and in the past for models of how to handle intermediate stops. The concepts of limited stops, alternating skip stops and the like come to mind as well as connecting branch lines. I don't think the notion of flying in small aircraft to connect to an HSR is viable. If you need to fly, you would connect to another flight, as now.
Before pushing for a New York to Chicago High Speed Rail System, it might be a good idea to see how the Texas Central plays out. It is now three to five years behind the initial start up date. Moreover, how it will be financed appears to be a mystery, or at least the proponents have not put forth a detailed financing plan. Or if they have, I have missed it.
charlie hebdoThe concepts of limited stops, alternating skip stops and the like come to mind as well as connecting branch lines.
Skip-stops on HSR are really a relatively dumb idea, regardless of how well they work on transit. They are, in my opinion, of the same kind of operational 'economy' that alternately loading and unloading containers from an intermodal consist is. This might be different if there were 'natural' pairs or multiples of intermediate destinations along a particular HSR track -- I don't have any offhand examples but I suspect some could be found -- so that you had relatively "frequent" service between endpoints but certain trains make the limited stops differently. (I think the presence of good and well-scheduled regional rail between particular stops and the 'skipped' alternates would go a long way toward improving the idea, as it would for example in some of the Texas alternatives we've looked at -- but this is one of those things like Roadtowns where you have to build, operate, and maintain multiple infrastructures all at once).
The issue with any 'branch' HSR feeder is that it will inherently involve changing seats and waiting. It will be interesting to see how many destination-to-intermediate pairs there are that would support this.
Branch feeders to the 'parallel' trunk of regional fill-in rail makes much better sense in a great many potential American markets, specifically including the proposals for high speed in the NEC, the 'second spine', and the kind of Chicago-to-the-east line Lehman's article postulated. Naturally I think the HSR from Chicago should terminate at New York rather than Philadelphia, but that is based on long-ago experience where people from Philadelphia regularly commuted to New York for business, but lived in the Main Line neighborhoods; while HSR from New York to Philadelphia is something of a waste operationally, it's certainly going to be sufficiently patronized to support the cost of true HSR in the Boswash zone above any slight overall-speed compromise in the longer segments, and New York is a somewhat more sensible 'change' location either from Boston (and, let's say, a reasonable reach of surrounding regional access) or from Washington. At least theoretically one of the 'skipping' consists could arrange to merge onto the NEC in the speed-restricted area of Gateway to the west and south of Manhattan, perhaps even using the facilities at what I still call Secaucus, to furnish one-seat rides from the Chicago HSR to at least major destinations on the Corridor; I think it is likely that the few miles to Portal would be reasonably route-common between the existing NEC and the much faster second-spine, so there would be only a couple of minutes' opportunity time lost in what is already going to be slowing for the "turn".
The point of the small aircraft is that they are a faster regional service; I'm sure Backshop is well aware of the consequences of trying to accommodate a large number of what are operationally general-aviation flights into the TCA and gate architecture of any airport large enough to provide 'heavies' on a commercial scheduled basis competitive with HSR, so no, it wouldn't be practical to integrate that way. That's not to say that a service won't be developed making regional hub-and-spoke feeders to airports -- or that the same type of aircraft couldn't be used to serve that service model -- just that it isn't the same operating model I'm using.
The amount of plant involved in providing FAA 'regional' network airfields with sensible ground transfer is relatively little compared to anything else of comparable speed, including quite a bit of what would otherwise have to be heavy regional rail. I suspect at not too critical take rate it may be possible to develop a proper AI/ES replacement for the 'attended tower' that zunum uses as a criterion in its original network development, and reduce costs further without compromising effective safety or operations flexibility. Of course other opinions can and will differ, and the idea may well be the same kind of serial failure that I expect long-distance electric autonomous trucking to experience.
The alternative to high-speed small 'distributed' aircraft is some kind of fast bus running on what will as often as possible be dedicated ROWs. This idea has been tried many times in many countries over the past half-century or more, and I don't know offhand of any place it has really succeeded as it would have to as a HSR feeder. The control problems associated with autonomous high-speed ground vehicles are enormously greater than those for aircraft (ask your daughter if she concurs) in addition to all the "issues" that go with high momentum off a fixed guideway.
There isn't really a TL;DR unless you appreciate the point of some of the intended technologies already. In some ways it's like the opposite of that Procrustean-logic one-note-samba ttrraaffiicc keeps banging away on every chance he sees.
There was this old project long ago, parts of which are extant and some parts have active railroads on it. Plus, it was intended to be all electric!
Chicago – New York Electric Air Line Railroad
OM: Since skip stops are dismissed by you as "a relatively dumb idea," as well as branch feeders or anything you didn't draw up in your scheme years ago, it seems there is nothing more to discuss.
Was your scheme actually a formal presentation as a consultant to Amtrak or the FRA?
54light15Do you know why the New York State Thruway doesn't go to Rochester? Rochester went Democratic in 1948, costing Thomas A. Dewey the presidential election. Dewey became governor of New York and that was that.
I'm having a hard time believing this old legend. Rochester was so well-served by highways I-390 and I-490 that they elected to remove their inner loop in recent years.
Albany, Syracuse, and Buffalo are all also bypassed by the Thruway. Sorry, I'm not buying your old legend.
There was wisdom applied in the construction of the early limited-access thruways. For instance, lower construction costs, tolling, and (though maybe not done consciously), not tearing up the social fabric of neighborhoods.
Then, arrogance took over.
GrampThere was wisdom applied in the construction of the early limited-access thruways. For instance, lower construction costs, tolling, and (though maybe not done consciously), not tearing up the social fabric of neighborhoods. Then, arrogance took over.
So anything after 1956 is arrogance?
charlie hebdoOM: Since skip stops are dismissed by you as "a relatively dumb idea," as well as branch feeders or anything you didn't draw up in your scheme years ago, it seems there is nothing more to discuss.
For example, branch feeders are a fine idea, but there are hard limits on how many 'junction points' are possible on a given Chicago to Philadelphia/New York alignment. Then there are length constraints on the high-speed branch feeders themselves, and by extension limits on how many of the high-speed branches would be built to each permissible junction point (coming from both sides, of course). There will likely be quite a bit of "regional-speed" structure in place of high-speed branches for much of the immediate demand, in no small part for the same operational reasons that Joe brought up in conjunction with the choice of Avelia Liberty sets over 125mph PRIIA shells with the balance of investment in more luxuries: you want to keep the main HSR speed high, without compromising the "through" traffic, but there may be relatively little actual reduction in time from a regional feeder to a cost-effectively scheduled HSR branch to a limited stop on the mainstem as compared to one-seat and largely one-speed regional 'all the way' to the stop. I'd acknowledge that as demand were to increase, eventually economics to support higher-speed branch construction strictly for its own sake might develop. But the more feeders there are to each stop, the worse the 'miss' involved with skip-stop operation would become, on top of which is the widespread abandonment of a one-seat 'experience'.
Balt,
No, into the 60's. Then "Urban Renewal" and such.
Gramp There was wisdom applied in the construction of the early limited-access thruways. For instance, lower construction costs, tolling, and (though maybe not done consciously), not tearing up the social fabric of neighborhoods. Then, arrogance took over.
[/quote]
Gramp Balt, No, into the 60's. Then "Urban Renewal" and such. Gramp There was wisdom applied in the construction of the early limited-access thruways. For instance, lower construction costs, tolling, and (though maybe not done consciously), not tearing up the social fabric of neighborhoods. Then, arrogance took over. So anything after 1956 is arrogance?
So racism
BaltACD Gramp Balt, No, into the 60's. Then "Urban Renewal" and such. Gramp There was wisdom applied in the construction of the early limited-access thruways. For instance, lower construction costs, tolling, and (though maybe not done consciously), not tearing up the social fabric of neighborhoods. Then, arrogance took over. So anything after 1956 is arrogance? So racism
Sounds like a variant on the rightist anti-urban meme, i.e., racism.
According to Gramps, limited access highways were good as long as they ran through rural areas and had tolls.
I'm a lifelong Chicagoan and there several locations that imply that limited access highways were not originally intended to bulldoze their way into the central business district. The Skyway was meant to feed into Michigan/Indiana Avenues (paired one-way thoroughfares, The Calumet (Bishop Ford) Expressway was meant to feed into Stony Island Ave, the East-West Tollway would feed into Roosevelt Rd., etc.
Given that much of the Eisenhower (Congress) Expressway preceded the East-West ( I 88), that notion was not universal in Chicago. The Post Office was designed to straddle an expressway! The Burnham Plan (1909) even envisioned what would be the Eisenhower.
"Albany, Syracuse, and Buffalo are all also bypassed by the Thruway. Sorry, I'm not buying your old legend."
Well, a guy who has lived in Rochester his entire life told me that story. I think it's true. My point of posting that was to show that politics affects everything. There has long been talk of a high-speed train from Toronto to Windsor. In every small town out past London, every politician wanted a station for it or they would not approve bulding it even if some of the "towns" are only crossroads in the middle of farm fields. So, I doubt it will ever happen.
The only reasons railroads got built as they did in the 19th Century was that they virtually linked every town that THOUGHT they were something with another town that THOUGHT they were something. There was never the overriding thought that they would be connecting end points a thousand miles distant. It was only after lines were built between podunks that the thoughts turned to linking more podunks together and thus get from major population center to major population center.
BaltACD Just imagine how effective that coast to coast airline flight will be - departing New York with intermediate stops at Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Charleston, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas and terminating at either Los Angeles or San Francisco. HSR stopping at every intermediate 'town' would be similarly ineffective.
blue streak 1 BaltACD Just imagine how effective that coast to coast airline flight will be - departing New York with intermediate stops at Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Charleston, Columbus, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Phoenix, Las Vegas and terminating at either Los Angeles or San Francisco. HSR stopping at every intermediate 'town' would be similarly ineffective. Well before the DC--6s -7s and Constellations that is what it was like.
And well before that both PRR & ATSF participated in cross country air travel.
https://airandspace.si.edu/exhibitions/america-by-air/online/innovation/innovation03.cfm
I've seen a photo of Amelia Earhart near one of the trains when the air-rail service was started. Can't recall where.
54light15 And of course, the politics involved with it would be something to screw it all up. Do you know why the New York State Thruway doesn't go to Rochester? Rochester went Democratic in 1948, costing Thomas A. Dewey the presidential election. Dewey became governor of New York and that was that. "The little man on the wedding cake" as Alice Longworth Roosevelt (Teddys' daugher) called him.
While I'm sure Rochester would liked to have had the Thruway, and I would guess no tears were shed by the other party when the city was bypassed, history shows more likely reasons why construction went as it did. In the early days of expressway building, the highays tended to go straighter to the ultamate destination, and not veer to every city. As others pointed out, they tended to be greenfield construction. The Thruway tended to follow the old Westshore route, and ran straight past Rome and Rochester, rather than the NYC route that served all those towns.
Other examples of early expressways show the Penn Turnpike avoided Pittsburgh, and the Ohio T'pike passed about midway between Cleveland and Akron. An earlier example is the Merritt Parkway which skirted the NY metro suburbs along the Connecticut "Shoreline". When the Connecticut Turnpike was built years later, they plowed thru the developed suburbs.
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