adirondacker12800 Reply:
June 21st, 2010 at 5:14 pm

I would. Two hour drive is doable. Three hour drive, even if I’m a passenger, is tiring. Four hours, no thanks. I occasionally do it but won’t if I have reasonable alternatives – faster and cheaper. But then I’m one of those silly people who calculate my driving costs at half the IRS rate, not by how many miles I get to the gallon.

Matthew Reply:
June 23rd, 2010 at 5:30 am

There are many millions of people living on the east side. The Victorville plan isn’t acceptable for a long term solution, but it’s a good first start. The goal is not to capture the entire potential market all at once, but to come up with a feasible business plan to capitalize on the comparatively low hanging fruit of the “flat and fast” desert section of the trip. Once the extension to Palmdale is complete, and direct trains from Los Angeles and San Francisco run to Las Vegas, this will be an extremely popular service for a potential market of tens of millions of people. The hope is that those mere single digit millions on the east side are enough to get things started until the rest of the network is in place.

James Fujita Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 3:05 am

the population of Southern California is huge compared to the population of Vegas, so the number of passengers going roundtrip from SoCal to Las Vegas is likely to be much higher than the number of passengers going in the opposite direction.

In any case, Vegas is not designed at all as a residential city or a city with a traditional city center. It is a city of hotels and not much else. The population of Vegas lives to serve the hotels and casinos.

I hate to say it, but this is one case where “one directional” travel should be okay.

James Leno Reply:
June 21st, 2010 at 8:39 pm

Good point. I always saw the Palmdale connection as an extension of DX into the CAHSR system. If the trains are compatible, DesertXpress could roll right into LA, San Diego, and SF, and the “only goes to Victorville” issue would become moot.

rafael Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 8:52 am

Are they really doing the planning work (EIS/EIR etc) for a High Desert connector or have they merely hinted that is something they might consider as a future phase 2? Very big difference!

Afaik, their approach is to get LV to Victorville built asap to provide near-term relief for I-15, i.e. to get more SoCal tourists to come to Lost Wages. According to a video by the maglev folks that I saw a while ago, the auto/air modal share split for that particular market is surprising – something like 80/20.

Perhaps there are lots of relatively less well off folks and/or gambling addicts in Bakersfield/the High Desert/the Inland Empire/inland SD county etc. who can’t – or don’t want to – shell out for a plane ticket. Perhaps DX isn’t even counting on a whole lot of passengers from downtown or west LA or for that matter, from Orange County.

Also, time to market trumps technical details. Steels wheels vs. maglev to Las Vegas is a little like the VHS vs. Betamax wars of the 1980s (yes, whippersnappers, video was once recorded on magnetic tape – gawd I’m a frickin’ fossil)

Peter Reply:
June 21st, 2010 at 8:16 pm

It’s not that DX has not been making that point. It’s more a matter of no one in the news wanting to listen. It’s more fun and sells more newspapers if they have a “controversy” reporting on “Rail Fail” than actually doing some bloody research and discussing “facts”.

Donk Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:54 am

Less energy? You have to levitate a frickkin train over tracks by rotating high power magnets! Sure there is less friction, but you have to carefully levitate a frickking metal train in the air! My understanding is that it takes far more energy to run a Maglev train than a conventional train. The advantage to Maglev is that the reduced friction increases the top speed, but not the energy consumption. If so, the only advantages are that (1) it is faster over long distances and (2) it is cooler because you are levitating a frickkin train in the air. All other points to to conventional rail.

Donk Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:57 am

There is a pretty obvious market for HSR from LA to Vegas, so it will happen. I don’t think Robert was saying anything about it succeeding, just that it will happen.

My predication is that they build Desert Xpress to Victorville, it goes bankrupt b/c they can’t find the funds to get it to Palmdale and LA, then somebody else comes in an cleans up the scraps once Southwest Airlines fuel costs triple.

Eric L Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:11 pm

But would connecting at Palmdale avoid this expense for DX or are there major obstacles between Victorville and Palmdale? Is there any possibility of convincing CAHSRA to make at least one tunnel with at least two tracks between LA and Palmdale a higher priority than some other early projects like the central valley track? I’d think they would have an easier time getting all the investment money if they had an achievable plan to get all the way to LA, maybe they’d even raise enough money to build to Palmdale and pay for some small fraction of the cost of the LA-Palmdale segment.

Alon Levy Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:47 pm

Scientific American isn’t exactly the best publication. My girlfriend, who’s in biotech, finds its biomed coverage so incorrect that she tells people to bite the bullet and read peer-reviewed articles on PubMed instead.

The specific article you link to is pretty bad, and not just because it’s overexcited about maglev and underexcited about anything else. It gets some elementary things wrong. It states the Tokaido Shinkansen gets people from Tokyo to Osaka in half as much time as flying, where in fact even after including access and egress times it’s hardly any faster. It misstates the Acela’s speed as well as its problems; the average NY-DC speed is 81 mph, not 70, and it’s so low because of the catenary, not the tracks. And it understates the maximum gradient of conventional HSR, pegging it at 2-3% whereas in fact it’s 3.5-4% (it may also overstate maglev’s gradients; I’ve seen 8% claimed before, but not 10%).

Other mistakes in the article are tone and omissions. The article neglects to mention that the Shanghai maglev train is severely underperforming and Shanghai is in fact constructing a subway on the same route. It brushes off the large cost of the Chuo Shinkansen, or the even larger cost of the halfwitted Colorado project that wants to use maglev technology. And it says nothing about service issues like frequency, local transit connections, and capacity.

In other words, SciAm just plugged a technology that, from its coverage, is indistinguishable from vaporware. It’s up to its standards; the question you should ask yourself is whether it’s up to yours.

rafael Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:49 pm

Freight trains crawl up and down gradients at bicycle speeds. HSR trains with distributed traction can climb 3.5% inclines at 90mph+ all day long.

Of course maglev can deal with steeper gradients, the heavy part of its propulsion system is buried in the track. Even so, trains do slow down when climbing. Note the need for very large vertical curve radii whenever there is a change in gradient.

Light rail and subways are also great hill climbers, because of shorter gear ratios – though those are mostly there to improve acceleration at low speeds.

rafael Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 9:58 am

Possession is nine tenths of law and, PCJPB owns the main line tracks between SF and the Monterey Hwy in south San Jose. UPRR inherited SP’s 1991 contract. Claus 8.3(c) gives PCJPB – i.e. Caltrain – the legal right to unilaterally cancel freight service between SF and Santa Clara IFF it is decides to make changes to the corridor to the commuter service that would be incompatible with freight. Exercising this option would trigger federal abandonment procedures, i.e. compensation claims from UPRR and its customers – who are also Bay Area employers.

The documents doesn’t specify which changes would qualify, presumably the document’s authors were thinking of scenarios in which Caltrain would go away for lack of business or operating subsidies. Another potential scenario would be a BART extension. A third, which could (should?) apply in the present context, is full grade separation such that vertical transition gradients <1% and access to freight spurs cannot be retained at reasonable cost.

Note that SP explicitly retained rights to intercity passenger service in the peninsula corridor. UPRR has zero intention of ever providing those, but the language does give it a legal instrument to challenge 8.3(c) IFF the reasons PCJPB cites are really related to HSR rather than Caltrain.

Clem’s compromise suggestion is to declare the peninsula a “short line”, an industry term that implies restricting freight to moderate axle loads (e.g. 22.5 metric tonnes, the European standard) and relaxing the gradient constraints (plus real superelevation tight curves, if applicable). More here:

http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/2009/08/effect-of-heavy-freight.html

Still, the whole thing is a paper tiger as long Caltrain cares about trackage rights down to Gilroy and in the East Bay (for SMCTA’s Dumbarton rail). Also, CHSRA is still holding out hope that UPRR will come around on ROW negotiations in the CV, the Antelope Valley and/or the Inland Empire.

The more interesting tidbit here is that it exposes a safety argument that UPRR has advanced to oppose cutting a deal with CHSRA. Derailments/cargo spills that foul adjacent track are possible, especially on track that UPRR owns outright and doesn’t bother to/can’t afford to maintain properly. UPRR claims this would especially super-duper-hyper dangerous in the context of an HSR system with PTC and intrusion detection via track surveillance at HQ.

Note that this is an issue of corridor traffic management, i.e. the physical distance between adjacent tracks and/or supports, unrelated to who owns which track or which trains run on the same tracks. The answer, of course, is to include UPRR in the PTC, track surveillance and emergency signaling aspects of HSR where appropriate. Beyond fencing and CCTV, his could include vibration transducers attached to UPRR’s rails plus software (cp. knock sensors for gasoline engines) that can identify potential derailment/cargo spill events and bring them to dispatchers’ urgent attention within seconds. You’d still want a live person in the loop to mitigate the risk of false alarms.

A freight train engineer may not notice a derailed bogie on a single car for quite some time because the train as a whole is has so much kinetic energy. An acoustic system might well be able to give UPRR much earlier warning. This would reduce not just the chances of a minor derailment becoming a major event but also, the damage the incident would do to UPRR’s own tracks. This damage consists of repair costs and the opportunity cost of temporarily taking the damaged section out of service (or, in very light cases, accepting the degradation by imposing a lower speed limit)

Tony D. Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 10:01 am

To quote the Great Austin Powers, “Yeah Baby!”
NIMBY’s who brought on this frivolous piece of crap are claiming “victory”? And if UP is willing to negotiate on the Peninsula, why not negotiate on other ROW’s, particularly south of SJ? Good stuff!

Robert Cruickshank Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 10:27 am

The bill is designed to leverage SNCF to pay some reparations for their role in the Holocaust. See more in this Sac Bee article.

rafael Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 10:32 am

It seems unlikely that a company would be penalized in this way 65 years after the fall of Hitler. The people working for and running it today had nothing do with the atrocities committed by executives back then. Respecting history by remembering the victims is not the same thing as never doing business with an old German corporation ever again.

Note that Siemens has a light rail factory in Sacramento. Various state transit agencies have purchased vehicles produced there. I don’t see why different rules should apply to HSR trainsets.

Alon Levy Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 12:34 pm

I wonder which Japanese flak wrote this bill.

Peter Reply:
June 22nd, 2010 at 2:23 pm

Interestingly, the country and companies that have most acknowledged wrongdoing and taken responsibility for their actions in WWII and the Holocaust are Germany and its major corporations.

Rafael Reply:
June 23rd, 2010 at 5:19 am

The Channel Tunnel auto trains are basically short-distance rail ferries, comparable to those through the Swiss and Austrian Alps. Such trains are expensive to operate, last not least because cars and trucks contain flammable fuel. There have already been two fires in the Channel Tunnel, each requiring months of expensive repairs to the tunnel walls.

In addition, those auto trains run at less than 100mph and yes, passengers do sit in their cars for the ride. In California, running auto trains during the day is a non-starter. The distances simply don’t permit efficient track sharing for such large speed differentials.

However, there might be a market for full-length auto/sleeper combo trains running on the HSR tracks at night, at much reduced speeds (more like 60mph) to keep the noise down. Axle loads would be limited to 17 metric tonnes. These would most likely be point-to-point, e.g. SF to LA. The auto loading/unloading facilities would probably be located at some distance from the centers of the respective cities. CHSRA has no plans for such services at the moment, nor for other ways to exploit the tracks at night.