In 1982, the PBS show NOVA did an episode titled “Tracking the Supertrains.” It’s very dated, but also quite interesting – includes an interview with the Las Vegas mayor about maglev from SoCal to Vegas. The segment below is focused on the LA-SD HSR project that would replace the San Diegans (rebranded in 2000 as the Pacific Surfliner), the plan that Governor Brown embraced:

Segment 6 was quite critical of the “California shinkansen” plan, and may have played a role in the later demise of the plan (more about that below) but it’s still worth watching for the history lesson.

One might be tempted to snicker at how little of this ever came to pass. But my reaction is one of sadness. Even as late as 1982 there was a lot of interest and research in maglev and high speed trains in the US, as memories of the 1970s energy crisis remained strong. But Reagan got elected, oil prices crashed, and transportation budgets were slashed. The US shackled itself to the automobile, and by the 2000s, when the energy crisis returned for good, we had thirty years of catching up to do.

On the LA-SD route, the expected congestion has materialized and a trip between the two city centers by car typically takes much longer than the 2 hours it would take on an open freeway. We spent billions of dollars to widen I-5 in Orange County (subsidized by sales tax dollars) in the 1990s and might spend at least $4 billion to widen I-5 in San Diego County. But had Brown’s plan been sustained – the legislature began criticizing it in 1983 after anti-HSR cities like Tustin (where I was born and raised) pledged to bitterly fight it and the American High Speed Rail Corporation folded soon thereafter – then we would have been much further along in our efforts to develop sustainable intercity passenger rail transportation.

It is fitting that California, which approved the high speed rail plan in November 2008, is about to bring back to the governor’s office the one political leader we’ve ever had who was willing to be honest about – and do something about – our state’s energy and transportation crisis. We already wasted 30 years dithering on the high speed rail project, although since the 1990s that time has been used to craft a solid and sensible plan to finally build it. Now that we’re close to breaking ground on the first segment, we need to resist and reject the voices that would have us waste another 30 years, and instead move ahead with the California high speed rail project with all deliberate speed.

Leading multiple delegations of business leaders, the groups are to visit China, Japan and South Korea, which are, respectively, California’s fourth, third and fifth largest trading partners.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is hoping to find willing Asian investors, ready to sink money into the state’s long-proposed high-speed passenger train system, his office says….

High-speed rail will be a priority for Mr. Schwarzenegger in Asia, his office says. China, Japan and South Korea all have advanced high-speed rail systems. The governor will ride each of them and meet with top officials from each country’s transportation ministry.

Joining the governor on the trip are officials from the California High Speed Rail Authority, the Bay Area Council, and the California Chamber of Commerce. There are other items on the trip’s agenda, but HSR is clearly a centerpiece.

The group is riding an HSR train from Nanjing to Shanghai and will ride the KTX bullet train in South Korea with that country’s president. They’ll be meeting with JR East officials in Japan, and presumably will ride the Shinkansen there.

The trip deepens the important Asian connection for California high speed rail. The state has plenty of money to build its HSR system itself, but a political decision has been made to leave that money in the hands of the rich, so instead the state is going to look to the federal government and “private investors” – which as I’ve argued before will likely take the form of sovereign countries – to help fund the entire project.

China is the key player here. With an economy heavily dependent on exports to the United States, they are in the position to the US that the US was to Europe at the end of World War II – needing to rebuild their overseas markets. The US did this with a Marshall Plan, funding the reconstruction of Western Europe and thus creating the consumer demand for American-made products that contributed to the postwar economic boom. China may have realized it will need to do the same thing.

As this blog explained back in April, there’s quite a debate between Chinese and Japanese HSR operators about which system is better for California. This trip isn’t likely to settle that debate, but clearly China has been busily lobbying the governor’s office and the CHSRA. For the sake of the HSR project, let’s hope they haven’t just been lobbying the outgoing governor, but also key members of the state legislature and the two gubernatorial candidates as well.

If any actual news is made on the Asian HSR trip, this blog will certainly let you know.

The Shinkansen, as the speedy train network is known in Japan, is not considered futuristic, fancy or for the elite, as some critics of California’s high-speed rail plans have scoffed. Rather, it’s part of the fabric of daily life, something not so much taken for granted as relied upon. The sleek trains – better known outside Japan as bullet trains – shoot through much of the nation almost unnoticed every few minutes, efficiently hauling more than 300 million riders per year.

And the Shinkansens have been doing that in Japan for 45 years, using cutting-edge technology in the process.

(A word about that: some HSR deniers criticize bullet trains as being “19th century technology.” Guess what else is 19th century technology? The automobile. Flight dates to 1903, so it’s essentially 19th century tech as well. What matters isn’t when a concept was invented, but whether it works well and meets our needs.)

Cabanatuan explains how the Shinkansens have become a basic part of daily life in Japan:

Japan’s high-speed trains run with an efficiency, frequency and reliability unimaginable to those familiar with Amtrak or U.S. commuter railroads. The sleek trains with the distinctive long noses depart as often as 14 times an hour – and they’re almost always on time. Over the past 45 years, the average delay is less than one minute – and that includes stoppages because of floods, earthquakes, accidents and natural disasters. Rail officials also note their safety record: There’s never been a passenger fatality on the Shinkansen….

Commuters account for about 5 percent of riders, railway officials say, but the reclining airline-style seats (but with more legroom) are also filled with business travelers, families, students, shoppers, weekend adventurers and a few wide-eyed foreign tourists.

In short, the trains are popular with every segment of the Japanese population, in a country that has been experiencing 20 years of slow economic growth. There is every reason to believe we’ll see the same thing here in California, which is why we’re so determined to bring the bullet trains to the Golden State.

Cabanatuan does discuss some perceived obstacles to bringing that success to California:

“Japan, especially Tokyo, is the epitome of rail culture,” said Tomohiko Tanaguchi, a senior adviser for the Central Japan Railway, “and California, especially Los Angeles, is the epitome of car culture.”

Tanaguchi is simply wrong here, dramatically understating the levels to which urban Californians already rely on trains and buses to get around. The SF Bay Area has the second highest proportion of people in the nation – 14% – using public transit to get to work, according to the Brookings Institution. The Los Angeles bus system is the 2nd busiest in the nation behind NYC, and the Metro Rail system gets very heavy use.

More significantly, by 2020 – the date the SF-LA HSR route is slated to open – LA will have one of the most extensive mass transit networks outside the New York area, assuming the 30/10 plan is adopted. As is already the case in SF, LA proper will be able to offer a car-free method of getting around the key parts of the city (though by no means around the entire city).

What that suggests is the notion of California’s “car culture” is widely misunderstood. It’s not that Californians won’t take mass transit instead of a single-occupancy vehicle – it’s that most Californians simply don’t have any other option to them. When those options are provided – and when those options enable timely, reliable service – Californians have shown they’ll use them.

If there is any flaw with Cabanatuan’s otherwise excellent article, it’s that he agrees with Tanaguchi even though as a longtime transportation reporter, Cabanatuan probably knows that California has more extensive transportation options than Tanaguchi’s “car culture” argument assumes:

California lacks such an extensive transit network, even in the Bay Area, and the tradition of traveling by train disappeared more than half a century ago, replaced by a culture of driving and flying. California doesn’t have the same population density as Japan either, and it’s only been a recent convert to building around transit stations. But that will probably change with high-speed rail, as it has in Japan.

Cabanatuan isn’t quite right here. California does have an extensive transit network, both in terms of buses and trains, in the Bay Area and in Southern California. It’s not as extensive as in NYC, but it’s getting there, especially with the LA 30/10 plan.

More importantly, Cabanatuan’s “cultural shift” argument – that Californians decided one day they didn’t like trains and shifted to cars and planes – gets the history wrong. Starting in the 1950s, massive government subsidies were spent on prioritizing planes and cars, making such travel much faster and more affordable than trains. Soon thereafter, passenger trains fell on hard times, and many closed down.

But by the late 1970s, the rail renaissance was underway. Local and intercity trains in California have had a lot of success, with dramatic ridership gains over the last 10 years in particular. As Cabanatuan knows well, the SF Bay Area has a “Muni culture” or a “BART culture” – the Muni trains and buses and BART trains are widely popular and used heavily by residents there.

Still, Cabanatuan is right to point out that HSR will provide a massive boost to greater urban density and TOD, as it has in Japan.

One of the most interesting parts of the article – and of extreme importance to the Peninsula, as well as suburbs in Southern California and the towns of the Central Valley – is what Cabanatuan heard from officials in smaller Japanese towns:

Deputy Mayor Kimiharu Yamamoto believes the station saved Kakegawa City, and advises smaller cities to embrace high-speed rail.

“If we didn’t have any station, there would be no industrial park, no businesses,” he said. “We would just be left alone as a farming town.”

This matches what was found by smaller cities in Spain, such as Ciudad Real and Zaragoza, which have witnessed significant economic boosts by having HSR stations that connect them to the country’s larger cities.

Cabanatuan also found some interesting things about noise, one of the top concerns on the Peninsula:

High-speed trains don’t just deliver prosperity, though. They also come with problems, and noise has been a primary concern, much as it is on the Peninsula where some residents and cities are fighting with the High-Speed Rail Authority.

Japan has a national noise standard for the Shinkansen, limiting the noise it generates to 70 decibels in residential areas and 75 decibels in commercial districts. For comparison, a vacuum cleaner at 10 feet produces 70 dB, and a car passing 10 feet away measures 80 dB.

To meet Japan’s stringent standards, rail officials say, they use lightweight trains with sleek and sometimes odd-looking noses, design windows, doors and the spaces where cars connect to be as smooth and aerodynamic as possible, cover the wheels, and work to quiet the overhead electrical supply system, a major noise source. The railways also install sound-walls in some locations along the tracks, ranging from roughly 2 to 12 feet high, and they travel at reduced speeds in the densest areas.

From beside the elevated tracks in the countryside, the Shinkansen is definitely noticeable as it whips past at top speed. But the low rumble and swishing sound it produces seems quieter than a passing BART train or Caltrain. There’s no high-pitched screech or metallic roar, and no blaring horns. In urban areas, where the trains travel at lower speeds, the sound is mostly a muffled rumble.

I wish I could print that selection out and mail it to every single resident living within a mile of the Peninsula rail corridor. It proves what we’ve been saying for years now: high speed rail will produce a quieter Peninsula rail corridor, which in turn will fuel increases in home values. NIMBYs who have worked themselves up into a lather over HSR are shooting themselves in the foot and costing themselves a lot of money in the process in lost real estate values.

Cabanatuan’s article goes on to explain how Japan has successfully operated HSR in a country prone to earthquakes, with obvious implications for California, and concludes by quoting Japanese officials who say that California makes a perfect place for HSR success. It’s worth a complete read.

Overall, despite the flubs on “car culture,” Cabanatuan’s article is a fantastic and valuable look at a similar HSR system. Instead of assuming California’s project exists in a vacuum, he went over to Japan to actually see how HSR works, and brought back valuable knowledge about HSR, specifically about noise.

It is essential that other reporters on the HSR beat in California adopt a similar approach to covering the subject. As many as possible should travel to Japan, Spain, or France (for example) to see first-hand how HSR works, who rides it, what the trains look like, where the routes go, how the tracks and other infrastructure are built, how its finances work, and so on. Instead, too many reporters refuse to make these comparisons, instead comparing HSR to a massive freeway tunnel (the Big Dig) or to slow diesel long-distance trains (Amtrak).

If more reporters acted like Michael Cabanatuan, Californians would be better informed about the HSR project and better able to make decisions about this extremely important project.

For some, however, HSR offends their preexisting ideological views. And no matter how practical or sensible it is, they won’t abandon their ideology to allow it to be built, instead demanding the rest of us be held hostage to their ideology of hostility to government spending (except for spending they like) and of dependence on the automobile.

Such is the case with our old friend Randall O’Toole of the Cato Institute, who has been fighting high speed rail for the last few years. Because HSR offends his ideological sensibilities, he can’t support it. Instead of simply bringing a proven and effective transportation solution to America, he prefers we waste our time and money developing a gadgetbahn that has so many problems and flaws it’s unlikely to ever work, and certainly won’t address our needs.

Unfortunately for us, he found a credulous listener in the form of Adrienne Packer, the “Road Warrior” columnist for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, who praised O’Toole’s silly gadgetbahn in her column today:

Forget DesertXpress. Forget a magnetic levitation train. Forget high-speed rail altogether.

It’s too expensive and by the time a line is built between Las Vegas and Southern California, if that even happens, the technology will be outdated and unpopular.

Oh, this oughta be good.

At least, that’s the position taken by Randal O’Toole, an urban land use expert with the Cato Institute, a public policy research foundation.

“America is on the verge of a new transportation revolution,” O’Toole said last week . “That revolution is not going to be high-speed rail. It’s not going to be light rail or street cars.”

Nope. If O’Toole’s prediction is correct, those of us who shudder and wince at the thought of leaving behind our convenient and comfortable vehicles can rest easy.

He firmly believes driverless vehicles will lead the way in transportation revolution.

Yep. Driverless vehicles. THAT is Randall O’Toole’s answer to high speed rail advocates.

It gets better:

These vehicles are equipped with “lane keep assist systems,” which are controlled by cameras that detect the lane stripes and keep the vehicle within those lines.

Obviously, the lane markers must be in better condition than those we see on Interstate 15, otherwise the detectors would go bonkers and we’d be pulled over for drunken driving.

They also have “adaptive cruise control,” which uses lasers to detect fellow motorists on all sides of the car. If the vehicle traveling ahead of the driverless car is too slow, the high-tech car will move over, pass and then return to its original lane.

O’Toole envisions driverless vehicles mingling with traditional cars at first. The driverless vehicle would simply see other cars being objects they detect, but designated lanes similar to high-occupancy lanes could be created for the new cars.

Maybe this is workable, maybe not. Perhaps it’s worth exploring. But O’Toole makes it clear this isn’t an idea that should be pursued for its own sake, but because it can undermine a perfectly workable transportation system he opposes on ideological grounds:

The greatest obstacle at this point is, you guessed it, the government, which O’Toole said would rather push high-speed, taxpayer-subsidized trains on us.

It’s political, he said.

But guess what, Randall? Your gadgetbahn is political. Your opposition to it is political. Instead of high speed trains, you want to push taxpayer-subsidized freeways and gadgetbahns on us. Tell me how you build this without more taxpayer subsidy:

Driverless vehicles could be the norm by 2018 barring any major hurdles, he said. “They would be institutional and bureaucratic, not technological. Turning vehicles into driverless cars is basically a software update,” O’Toole said.

So how exactly would this new technology improve congestion on the stretch between Southern Nevada and Los Angeles or address pollution problems?

O’Toole believes if everyone rode in a driverless vehicle, our highways could accommodate 6,000 vehicles per lane per hour, three times the amount today. Great, so how does that help with pollution and congestion? They would all be moving at consistent speeds and traffic jams would be headaches of the past. Fewer cars idling equals less pollution.

Ultimately, speed limits might be raised because driverless vehicles are viewed by some as safer.

“Collisions are caused by slow reflexes; computers won’t have that,” O’Toole said.

Here are some of the internal contradictions and obstacles to O’Toole’s gadgetbahn that make this a very costly and undesirable substitute to the proven success of high speed rail:

1. How much will taxpayers have to spend retrofitting freeways to handle these cars? Driverless vehicles require major changes to existing freeways, including putting in the infrastructure to help keep cars in their lanes. Who pays for it?

2. How can we afford the cost of oil? Given the reality of peak oil – declining supply at the same time as oil demand soars in China and India – these driverless vehicles are going to cost Americans an enormous amount of money to operate. If Deutsche Bank is right and we see oil permanently above $175/bbl in 2015, this gadgetbahn will be totally unaffordable.

3. Alternatively, if there were somehow a method to meet the current driving demand with another fuel source aside from oil – and there is widespread skepticism that we can generate that much electricity – growth projections mean we’ll have to spend billions of dollars to expand freeways to handle the new cars. That’s taxpayer subsidy for new freeway lanes even though HSR is a much cheaper option. It would cost $25 billion to upgrade Highway 99 to interstate standards in the Central Valley, but a fraction of the cost to link Sacramento to Bakersfield via high speed rail. O’Toole basically wants us to waste a bunch of money to suit his anti-rail bias.

4. This gadgetbahn doesn’t eliminate traffic or provide the same speeds and amenities as high speed rail. Unless we spend those billions of dollars to widen freeways, this will do nothing to solve the existing and severe traffic problems California and Nevada face. Unless people are going to put a toilet and a cafe in their driverless cars and/or crank them up to 220 mph, a driverless vehicle isn’t going to provide the same quality of experience that riding a high speed train does. (And how much will it cost to completely rebuild interstate freeways to allow driverless cars to handle 220 mph?)

Packer doesn’t ask any of those questions. Instead she equates HSR with this gadgetbahn:

This all might sound far-fetched, but it appears the chances of us riding in but not driving our own cars are about as good as any of us riding in a Las Vegas-to-Anaheim high-speed train anytime soon.

What’s truly sad about this column is that it shows how deep the ignorance of HSR runs in the American media. Journalists simply don’t know anything about it. That’s why Adrienne Packer can equate HSR – which has been in successful operation for nearly 50 years in Japan and decades in Europe – with this totally unproven and as yet nonexistent technology that O’Toole dreamed up. Whatever you think of O’Toole’s gadgetbahn, it is factually incorrect to equate it to high speed rail. We may never see that gadgetbahn implemented. But in just two or three years, Adrienne Packer and other Nevadans can take a high speed train to Southern California for a fraction of the cost.

It’s just another example of how Randall O’Toole and other HSR deniers and skeptics are enabled by the widespread ignorance of passenger rail and HSR in particular on the part of American journalists. Maybe we need to stage an intervention and take them all to Japan or Spain for a week and make them ride the Shinkansens and AVEs between the cities so they can see how it works.

In fact, that appears to be what the San Francisco Chronicle did in today’s paper. Unfortunately, the Chronicle has chosen to deny it’s the 21st century and is keeping their very good articles on the Shinkansen in today’s print edition and off the website until Tuesday. Which is unfortunate – but hopefully other reporters and journalists will read those articles closely and understand that HSR already works, instead of being seduced by someone’s ideologically-fueled gadgetbahn.

In the period between 1935 and 1950, the 10 fastest scheduled passenger trains in the world were all U.S. streamliners….

What differentiated our streamliners from contemporary trains in Europe and Asia was advanced technology. American railroads and equipment suppliers had not only pioneered the diesel-electric locomotive in the 1930s – a quantum leap over from the old steam locomotive – but introduced lightweight cars with better wheel sets, couplers, braking systems and lower centers of gravity to negotiate curves at higher speeds….

To operate the Shinkansen, or “New Trunk Line,” between Tokyo and Osaka, Sogo actively imported technology from America, including the two-axle trucks of the Budd Manufacturing Co. and dynamic braking pioneered by General Motors’ Electro-Motive Division. To top it off, the Japan ordered the most advanced computer used outside of military applications (built by yet another American company, Bendix) to operate the line’s signal and dispatching systems.

Remarkably, the U.S. government gave Japan foreign aid – money purportedly going to an underdeveloped country – to build a rail infrastructure far superior to our own.

In short, America slept while the world innovated. Perhaps in 1956, the year the Interstate Highway Act was passed and the year M. King Hubbert predicted “peak oil”, when America was the undisputed global economic colossus providing unprecedented economic prosperity to its population, it made sense to assume that innovation could come to an end and that cheap oil meant we could rely on freeways and flights forever.

Of course, in retrospect that doesn’t seem to have been such a good idea, as the US has now become dependent on oil and increasingly crippled by its rising costs. Even though most California businesses, especially those in the Bay Area, are strong supporters of high speed rail, a few folks are unwilling to admit that the 1950s are over, and that cheap oil and freeways and airplanes won’t be able to handle our transportation or economic needs.

As I’ve said before, the fight to build high speed rail isn’t just about economics, finances, engineering, and urban planning. It’s also about whether we assume the status quo is just fine and can last forever, or whether we understand and accept the need to change and embrace the future. The status quo includes the decision to abandon HSR development in the 1950s and 1960s, and the future includes the decision by Californians in 2008 to embrace HSR as part of their state’s future.

California can now lead the HSR race for the country, and bring the best that the world has to offer in steel-wheel high speed trains to the state. Now is the time to take that lead, as looming increases in oil prices will provide another stark reminder of the failure of the status quo and the pressing need to embrace change.

• With a British general election looming and the Conservative Party riding high in the polls, it’s good to hear that the Tories will support the London-Scotland HSR project if and when they get elected.
• Amtrak will launch wifi on the Acela trains in March. I keep hearing that wifi on the Capitol Corridor between San José and Sacramento should be happening soon, but no date on that has yet been made public.
• Vietnam plans to adopt Shinkansen technology for a link from central Hanoi to the airport. Last summer Vietnam announced plans to use Shinkansen tech for the cross-country link from Hanoi south to Ho Chi Minh City.
• Hong Kong NIMBYs are protesting plans to build an HSR link to the mainland, while the Economist wonders how China will pay for the massive cost of its HSR construction binge. The answer appears to be that the government will subsidize the construction to a large extent, which is the smart strategy, though the details matter. The Economist compares China’s HSR plans to America’s big 19th century railroad construction efforts, and it’s worth noting that those efforts were constantly plagued by debt problems. In fact, on at least three different occasions, railroad-related debt problems produced financial panics and threw the nation into Depression (1857, 1873 and 1893). Yet nobody would say that the railroad construction was a bad idea – the US would never have become a global industrial power without them. Of course, a better way to build it could have been done, and when it came time to build the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s, memories of the 19th century railroads were strong, which is why government directly subsidized the construction cost of the interstates.

one way to discover how HSR operators in other countries have built their infrastructure and run their trains is to tag along in the driver cab, at least vicariously.

Series 500 Bullet Train

The following YouTube video is part 1 of an eight-part series tracking the progress of a sixteen-car series 500 bullet train from Hakata (Fukuoka) to Tokyo on the Sanyo and Tokaido shinkansen lines traveling in “nozomi”, i.e. express, mode at a top speed of 300km/h (186mph). The audio is in Japanese, but the author has kindly provided limited translation.

(Playlist for parts 2 to 8)

Total trip distance is 1069km (664mi), part 6 includes the “rollercoaster” section between Toyohashi and Laka Hamana. Operated jointly bby JR West and JR Central with a change of drivers at Shin-Osaka. Dwell times at run-through stations are around 50 seconds, this is normal in Japan. The journey as such is entirely uneventful. Infrastructure is supposed to be this dependable!

For our purposes, it’s perhaps the design of the line that is of greatest interest: at-grade vs. elevated vs. trench vs. tunnel structures, selective use of sound walls, speeds through populated areas, fences etc. Also, contrast the graceful design of the train – inspired by the streamlined shape of a kingfisher breaking the water’s surface without creating much of a ripple – with the ugly headspans.

Series 700 Bullet Train

Also informative is this in-cab video of a series 700 bullet train, the successor to the sleek but expensive series 500. This design features a duck-billed nose that minimizes tunnel boom and susceptibility to sway in heavy cross-winds and when passing high speed trains approaching from the other direction.

Note that the Japanese obsession with punctuality isn’t just a source of personal pride for the impeccably dressed bullet train drivers but rather, an operational necessity: in many sections, the existing lines are at capacity, so drivers are expected to stick as close as possible to timetables that are prescribed down to the second. The Tokaido shinkansen between Tokyo and Osaka supports a total of 285 trains on weekdays. It is headway constraints rather than a lack of engineering chops that force most Japanese bullet trains to travel (at slightly) lower speeds than their counterparts in Europe.

To activate close captioning in (somewhat broken) English, please click the up arrow on the lower right. Keeping the mouse button pressed, slide up and toggle the CC icon.

Eurostar

If you prefer a running narration in the Queen’s English, below is the first video of a similar series documenting a Eurostar trip from Paris to London (h/t to Trains4America). The video was produced in 2004, three years before the second portion (CTRL2) of the High Speed 1 line in the UK was completed. Parts 11 and 12 of the series are now only of historical interest.

(Parts 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)

The UK is not a signatory to the EU’s Schengen Agreement. The British government therefore required border controls including dedicated boarding platforms at all Eurostar stations in France even before the Al Qaeda terrorist bombings on the London Underground. Security consists of running your ticket through a bar code reader at a turnstile, your bags through a scanner and walking through a metal detector. With no baggage handling to contend with, passengers can arrive at the station as little as 10 or 15 minutes before their train leaves.

The first thing you’ll notice is that the overhead catenaries feature poles not headspans. Also note the lateral distance to the nearest buildings and embankments/retaining walls on the way out of the French capital. The speed limits there may have more to do with signal block length and associated headways (i.e. emergency braking distance) on the regular network than with concern about noise: one section of the line supports a total of over 200 trains on a weekday. Out in the undulating countryside, extensive cut-and-fill earthworks were needed to keep the ruling gradient to 1:40 (i.e. 2.5%).

Lille, a city of a million inhabitants, got SNCF to run the line to the UK through its downtown area. French mayors and local business leaders understand that “beet field” stations like Haute Picardie make it much more difficult to attract the inward investment they need to compete with the Île-de-France region surrounding the capital. The section through Lille features tunnels, trenches and elevated structures with tall sound walls through residential neighborhoods. Some connecting regional trains depart from Lille Europe, many others from the legacy Lille Flandres station about 1/4 mile away, a single stop away on the local metro and tram lines. Passengers can also choose to walk through a shopping-mall-cum-conference-center.

Eurostar trainsets feature two tractor cars plus motors on the first bogie of the passenger cars immediately adjacent to the tractor cars, for a total of 12 powered axles. Total rated power is 12,200kW (16000bhp). In the event of an emergency, a single tractor car is sufficient to pull the trainset out of the Channel Tunnel, where the speed limit is 160km/h (100mph) for passenger and 100km/h (60mph) for freight and car/truck ferry trains. Along the route, the train has to adapt to four different signaling systems, multiple pantograph settings and two electrification systems. The 750VDC third rail pickups are no longer needed now that CTRL2 has been completed and trains terminate at St. Pancras International, shaving more than 20 minutes of the nominal line haul time and substantially improving punctuality.

Since the summer of 2009, Southeastern Highspeed regional trains also use the new High Speed 1 infrastructure. The series 395 “Javelin” trainsets have a top speed of 140mph and will provide frequent shuttle services between downtown and the sports venues in the East End during the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Takeaways

- operators all use automatic train control systems that engage the brakes if drivers ignore speed limits that are signaled in their cabs. In addition, the infrastructure operators have central facilities for managing traffic on the lines.

- high speed trains do run through suburbs and rural towns at 200-300km/h (125-186mph) in both Japan and Europe. Shinkansen lines typically run through Japanese towns on elevated structures, whereas European planners prefer to run trains at grade and construct numerous road overpasses.

- however, where the line runs (relatively) close to existing buildings, speed limits are either much lower or else noise is mitigated with sound walls and/or soundproof windows installed at the railway’s expense.

- expensive tunnels into downtown areas of large cities are worthwhile IFF there is excellent connecting transit and/or transit-oriented development in the immediate vicinity of the station. Both can significantly increase ridership.

I’m pressed for time today, so here are a few snippets of HSR-related news from around the world:

• A new High Speed Commuter Train enters service in the UK today. Traveling at a top speed of 140mph, the Japanese-built “Javelin” is extremely light (for a train) and equipped with powerful electric motors. These permit rapid acceleration and deceleration such that the service can share the expensive HS1 tracks with Eurostar, whose trackage fees on the UK side have long been 10 times higher than in France. This is oneI reason why tickets are so much more expensive than those for similar distances within France. The new regional HSR service should reduce Eurostar’s costs in the UK.

  For more on the concept of running both long-distance and purely regional HSR trains on the same tracks, see also our earlier post on “HiSpeed Services And Branding“.

• Meanwhile, Greengauge 21, a prominent HSR advocacy group in the UK, warns that the government’s proposed top speed of 250km/h (155mph) for HS2 (the extension to London Heathrow, Birmingham and Manchester) will be insufficient to attract enough ridership. For the extension to be a commercial success, it claims the line will need to support top speeds of at least 300km/h.
• VIA Rail, Canada’s counterpart to Amtrak, wants to upgrade service to 125mph in the core Windsor-Quebec City corridor. This could eventually connect to the Midwest HSR network that proponents think was given a boost by the FRA guidelines published yesterday since it will eventually link eight US states. However, much like the hoped-for Pacific Northwest link between Vancouver BC and Portland (perhaps Eugene), there are simply no public funds on the table. Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a conservative, remains opposed to improved passenger rail service in his country. In addition, the Canadian border agency is demanding C$500,000 per year to man the new border post at the train station in Vancouver. This was enough to derailed the effort to get at least the Amtrak Cascades route extended.
• JR East has officially unveiled its new E5 series trains, which will serve the Tokyo-Shin Aomori route at a top speed of 320km/h (199mph) starting in 2013. The advanced active-tilt design will run on the existing Tohoku shinkansen line, which was built for a much lower top speed decades ago. While the Fastech 360 development platform for the E5 did achieve the desired top speed of 360km/h (224mph) on the same tracks, it failed to meet very ambitious targets for noise emissions and emergency braking distance. The signature retractable air brakes are not needed at the lower top speed defined for the E5 and were therefore cut from the final design.
• A new report on the Jerusalem-Tel Aviv HSR line in Israel has uncovered cost overruns and inadequate planning in a key section. It seems likely that heads will roll in the agencies responsible.

Yes On Prop 1A

There are a whole lot of reasons why Prop 1a is a great idea – reduced carbon emissions, reduced stress on crowded highways and airports, insulation from high oil prices, increased urban densities near stations, and the prospect of a massive construction project in the perennially-underemployed and housing-bubble-busted Central Valley – but beyond that, it’s also very smart local politics.

But how? you might ask. After all, the line doesn’t even run through Yolo County, and the Sacramento leg won’t be completed until a later stage in the system.

Here’s why:

1. The Capitol Corridor. In addition to the money to build the main High Speed Rail line, Prop 1a contains a huge amount of funding for feeder lines into that HSR trunk line, among them the highly successful Capitol Corridor, which runs through Yolo County at Davis. The Capitol Corridor is already running near capacity, and while Caltrans has done a lot of work improving the tracks and crossings, leading to faster trains and a very high on-time rate, the route will need a lot more funding to expand to meet local demand. Prop 1a’s funds would help run trains more often and later, which is of direct help to Yolo commuters, shoppers and tourists into both the Bay Area and Sacramento. I’d much rather take the train into Sac than drive on the Causeway, if they ran often enough.

2. SoCal gets a lot closer. Even before the bullet train line gets to Sacramento, it will be pretty easy to catch a San Joaquins train in Sacramento to the HSR line in Fresno, and then jet over to LA down the valley from there. Right now, the Coast Starlight is excruciatingly slow because it goes down the coast, but with that slow train + high speed rail combo down the Central Valley, it’ll get you to downtown LA in 4 hours or so, which is about as fast as if you drive from Yolo County to Sac Metro, park, wait around in the airport going through security and dealing with delays, and then pick up your baggage and rent a car on the other end. And unlike airplanes (or god forbid an I-5 or Hwy 99 road trip), high speed rail will have wifi and cell phone reception, so you can actually make some productive use of that time while you sip your coffee and admire the scenery.

Of course, when the Sacramento leg of the HSR is built, that’ll go down to 2 hours, which will revolutionize the way we think of SoCal, bringing it practically as close as the Bay Area. If you have friends or relatives in SoCal, if you want to take the kids to Disneyland, get out of winter’s tule fog and see the sun again, or just want to hit the beaches for the weekend, it’ll be a whole lot closer than it is today, and cheaper to get there due to the economics of long, fast trains making multiple runs a day.

3. Yolo County depends on a healthy state economy, and a state government in the black. While I tend to be wary of bond measures, building world class transportation infrastructure is exactly what bonds are supposed to be for. Especially in an economic climate such as this, big projects that employ a bunch of people, both to build and run it, is smart Keynesian economics. It’s what we did in the Great Depression, building Shasta Dam, the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge. When the economic cycle gets back on its feet, having infrastructure like this, which not only moves people more energy-efficiently and cost-effectively, but which also frees up highway, airport and rail space for freight, will contribute to the recovery.

And that infrastructure and job creation, in turn, will lead to a state government and state economy that has more money to invest in other things Yolo County needs. As a county highly dependent on University of California funding, as well as state assistance because of our rather smallish tax base relative to our county government expenses, a thriving state economy, goosed by High Speed Rail, will help to reverse the current death by a thousand cuts that the state legislature is doing to education and social welfare spending.

Replace a vicious cycle with a virtuous one.

4. Finally, because it’s incredibly cool. Seriously, as someone who has ridden shinkansen bullet trains in Japan, I am ecstatic at the thought of blazing down the Golden State in a bullet train of our own. One of the things about airplanes is that they are so high up that they remove you from the scenery. High Speed Rail trains, on the other hand, fly along the very surface of the landscape. With a state with scenery as beautiful as ours, be it urban or natural, riding the train will be an amazing experience in and of itself.

As a state as well as a county, passing this bond measure will determine in many ways we have not even considered what sort of future we live in. Right now the market is scrambling to find something to invest in that’s not a paper scam or an investor bubble. We should have no problem getting the investors for this train, if we have the will to set it in motion.

Vote Yes on 1a to finally bring California into the 21st century.

The above was written by wu ming and reposted from Surf Putah with his permission.

Comment Starter: How did you first become interested in high speed rail? Was it a trip on a European or Asian HSR system? Repeated trips on California passenger rail that led you think “a bullet train would make this SO much easier?”