Donk Reply:
June 20th, 2010 at 12:14 pm

Thats unfortunate. Vietnam is a perfect candidate for HSR and can be compared to CA in many ways. They are about the size of CA, with a higher popultion than CA, a way higher population density than CA, an almost perfectly linear arrangement of major cities along the coast, and the two largest cities (Hanoi & HCM/Saigon) at the endpoints of the line. There is a major mountain pass in the middle between Hue and DaNang that would need to be tunneled under.

Airplanes have now taken over as the only viable way to travel up and down the country, with tons of flights going up and down the coast and stopping at intermdiate smaller cities. HSR would be a major knock out punch of Vietnam Airlines, since it could take handle most of the major cities much more efficiently, just like how CAHSR could knock out Soutwest Airlines.

I was in Vietnam a few years ago and loved it. I found the dated and cheesy anti-American and anti-French propaganda in all of the museums very entertaining. Being there made me wonder if Vietnam would look like S. Korea today if they had ended up siding with the Americans instead of going the communist route.

YesonHSR Reply:
June 19th, 2010 at 2:53 pm

I dont think even they would spend 20-30 Billion on something outside of China unless they own it outright. There will more money for HSR coming even this year with the DOT budget. Yes a real source is needed soon.. will that be in the next Transportation bill or something like the bill Senator Kerry had proposed in late 2008?

wu ming Reply:
June 20th, 2010 at 9:12 am

if it helps, about the only communist thing left in china is the flag. it has been pretty relentlessly capitalist for the past two decades, if not three.

Useless Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 6:27 am

@ John Burrows

“China might offer to pick up the tab?”

Chinese trains cannot pass US FRA safety regulations and intellectual property laws, so they will not be able to win any US project. The US market will be free of Chinese train models. Ditto for Japanese Shinkansen models in California because of shared track issues. Korean KTX-II can be sold in California since their model is fully UIC compliant; but Korea lacks the construction financing muscle of Japanese and Chinese bids.

It’s a different story in Florida where Japanese do stand on a fighting chance.

Alon Levy Reply:
June 19th, 2010 at 4:49 pm

JR Central has offered itself as an operator for Florida. I think JR East is also planning to bid on California. To my knowledge neither has offered money.

rafael Reply:
June 19th, 2010 at 8:54 pm

In the particular case of FRA’s attempt to increase freight railroads’ liabilities in return for public investment, I don’t think it’s an issue of left vs. right. It’s an issue of old tyme railroad practices vs. the exigencies of modern passenger transportation, i.e. active safety + speed + on-time performance.

The Class I railroads are in the freight business, a low-margin commodity activity based on hauling vast tonnage at the lowest cost per ton. Standard speed passenger service became unprofitable after the federal government built the interstate highway system and consumers switches to cars and planes. Congress gave these private companies limited powers of eminent domain in the 19th century because they were – and still are – considered to provide a service to the general public. Nevertheless, it also allowed the industry to terminate its unprofitable passenger operations in 1970s, when the mighty Pennsylvania Railroad went belly-up. Amtrak was created to preserve passenger rail with public subsidies, which have been a bone of contention ever since.

The private railroads don’t really need grade separations to run freight. They don’t need positive train control signaling. They don’t need electrification. They don’t need aggressive maintenance of track geometry. They don’t need alignments and tracks suitable for 110mph+ operation. They don’t need to operate on a timetable. All of these things are essentially expensive nice-to-haves if all you’re doing is hauling heavy goods. They don’t need the corridor upgrades FRA is willing to spend billions of dollars on, though they’ll be happy to take the money if there are no strings attached.

The strings FRA is trying to attach relate to the on-time performance of emerging HSR. In return for public funding for capital investments, the freight railroads are supposed to take on all future liabilities for guaranteeing that. In essence, they are supposed to change their business model to once again support passenger rail, except at higher speeds in return for as-yet unspecified recurring trackage fees. They’re not jumping for joy at the prospect, but they’re willing to take on the additional operational complexity IFF there’s enough money on the table.

And that’s basically the rub: the administration has ambitious plans but only a rather modest amount of moolah to implement them. The speed differences between freights and emerging HSR are already large enough to require substantial new bypass sections if freight capacity is to be maintained. Private for-profit freight operators aren’t going to volunteer to make up the funding difference just so the President can have a political legacy.

The point about targeting slow sections to improve line haul times, rather than focus on top speed, is well taken. The railroads do have a lot of technical planning and operations expertise that the administration and Congress are not leveraging to maximize value for taxpayer money. Supposedly, shaving off a few seconds here and a few seconds there in e.g. the NEC isn’t going to get voters excited enough to open their wallets.

Prop 1A in California was advertised partly on top speed but mostly on the SF-LA non-stop line haul time of well below 3 hours. State voters did approve that, but they only pledged a fraction of the funding needed to implement hundreds of miles of fancy brand-new dedicated infrastructure. Moreover, they only committed to taking on fresh debt, not to new taxes to service it. They did endorse long-term sales tax hikes in several counties for local/regional transit project, by 2/3 majorities, after Lehman Bros had already gone belly-up. At the state level, they weren’t even given that choice.

Bottom line: you can’t implement and sustain even emerging HSR on the cheap – let alone express HSR. ARRA offered up $8 billion and states applied for $56 billion, for starters. Stop trying to be a superpower, stop waging futile land wars in Asia. Instead, properly fund domestic civilian programs such as HSR in a significant number of viable corridors.

gblatham Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 1:23 pm

Dennis,

Thank you so much for providing your blog with a link to (and text of) my latest column. The more people who understand both sides of the issue, the better off we’ll be.

You know, it’s funny. To you, I “tend to the right,” while “The Journal of Light Construction” (after another recent piece) said my opinions represented “a liberal take” on things!

We “foamers” must be far more complex than our interests seem to dictate!

Best,
Garl Boyd Latham
Dallas, Texas

Rafael Reply:
June 20th, 2010 at 1:16 am

You’d need to address that question to Richard Mlynarik, a frequent commenter and contributor to Clem’s blog. He’s the one who makes all those nice 3D Sketchup models for Clem.

I just use Google Maps for my purposes. If I need to know or draw a curve radius, I simply draw a couple of temporary perpendicular to the straight tangents. The center of the curve is then approximately where the two intersect. The length of a third temporary line gives me the approximate distance. It’s far from precise and not useful for gentle curves, but it gives a quick-and-dirty ballpark number.

Regarding the maximum speed at which standard gauge passenger trains can run through a curve before passenger discomfort sets in:

v = (R * (h1 + h2) / 11.8)^0.5

v = equilibrium train speed in km/h (1.609 * speed in mph)
R = radius in meters (0.304 * radius in feet)
h1 = real track superelevation in mm (25.4 * value in inches)
h2 = unbalanced superelevation in mm (idem)

Example: R = 1000ft, h1 = 3 inches, h2 = 6 inches => v = 47.7mph.

For this value of h2, passengers will experience 0.1g lateral acceleration in this curve at this speed. If you plan to run slower trains, e.g. freight, on the same track then there is a limit to how much real superelevation you can implement without having to resort to funky solutions like gauntlet tracks.

Alon Levy Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 10:12 am

If you have a circle-drawing applet, you can draw circles by using perpendiculars and looking at where they meet.

You can even estimate radius directly, by comparing the change in azimuth with the total length of the chord. For small changes in azimuth, the chord and arc lengths are similar, so the radius is roughly ( (chord length)/(change in azimuth in degrees) ) * 180/pi. I’ve tested this on a couple of curves in Connecticut with radii in the high hundreds of meters, and it gives you good approximation for the radius for much less work.

Just make sure that the chord connecting the two points where tangent turns into curve has the correct direction. Its azimuth should be the exact arithmetic average of the two tangets’ azimuth. If it’s not, you need to continue one of the tangents straight until the new chord has te correct direction, which will lower the radius.

Clem Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 10:44 am

I made those polygons using an Excel spreadsheet full of gnarly coordinate transformations. I pick off two points on each tangent, specify a ROW width and radius, and poof, out pops a list of polygon coordinates (latitude and longitude) that can be hand-edited into a KML. It’s kludgy and time consuming but it works.

There is an online KML circle generator out there, but the real trick is computing the latitude and longitude of the center of the circle based on the intersecting tangents.

Rafael Reply:
June 20th, 2010 at 10:03 pm

No-one’s talking about a trillion dollars for HSR, nor is anyone making plans to keep building corridor starter lines through 2050. What we are talking about is a number in high tens to low hundreds of dollars through 2030, depending on how extensive a system you want. In the civilian world, that kind of many buys you a boatload of long term value and a lo of planning, engineering, construction and operations/maintenance jobs.

Just for reference, bringing back all of the soldiers and contracts currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan just 30 days sooner would save enough to let the administration double the ARRA allocation for HSR. You tell me which would deliver more tangible, useful results.