6 thoughts on “The Latest On The High-Speed-Rail Boondoggle”
And we have a new country to faddishly copy, Uzbekistan. I too pine for this noble role as a dictator of a small, screwed up country who can build a near useless high speed train! at my whim.
Mr. President, we must not allow a high speed train gap!
Very impressive. Twice a week they can haul 257 passengers 214 miles in 2-1/2 hours. It would take almost a hundred Camrys or Malibus to do the same, but of course the cars could make the trip a couple times a day.
The only viable and profitable high-speed ground transport system I can envision is a small version of the vac-trains from science fiction. Instead of transporting people, move small packages in evacuated mag-lev pipelines. If the packages can travel faster than low mach numbers the pipe would be faster than air transport, dominating long distance package transport and cutting a day or two off delivery times.
Laying very straight pipelines is relatively simple, and since all such pipelines already transport oil or high-pressure natural gas, making them vacuum tight doesn’t even present new requirements. Likewise, a wide variety of mag-lev systems are already well understood.
The only new engineering would be coming up with a system of standard pressure-sealed but easily opened containers that travel through the pipeline, and a method of very rapidly introducing them at one end and removing them from the other while maintaining the vacuum seals on the ends of the pipeline. A variety of machine mechanisms could accomplish this, and it’s a crucial piece of the system because it determines how many packages a minute the system could handle.
Kewl!
Why are you saying that Uzbekistan is screwed up? They just built/upgraded a 214 mile passenger rail line for 70 million dollars, with another 53 mil for a pair of Talgo trains. That they can make that distance in 2 and 1/2 hours is better than the Amtrak Acela between New York and D.C.
I think we should hire “Peggy” the credit-card-guy in the TV commercial from over there to do our high-speed trains for much less money.
Instead of comparing it to the Acela, just look at the numbers. $123 million for the upgrades and trains, which haul 257 passengers at a time, which is very close to $500,000 a seat. The train runs twice a week, or 100 times a year, so a one-year only cost is $5,000 per seat-trip. If the service runs 10 years it drops the upfront cost to $500 a seat trip (assuming 100% ridership), and since the trip is 214 miles that comes to $2.33 a seat mile (or perhaps $1.17 round trip). That’s twice the IRS 2012 driving mileage reimbursement rate, and are like driving a sedan while paying $35 a gallon for gas. And those numbers are just based on the train’s upfront purchase costs and track upgrades, completely neglecting the train’s operating expenses, fuel, maintenance, track maintenance, and employee costs. Since Uzbeks probably can’t afford to blow hundreds of dollars to travel two-hundred miles, I’d venture to say that even the cheap Uzbek line will have to be massively subsidized.
Perhaps my suggestion about maglev pipeline package transport would fail a similar analysis, but I’ve never dug deep enough into the idea to generate any cost estimates. However, one time I did compare how much oil you could ship through a pipeline using conventional methods versus putting the oil in maglev barrels and blasting it at mach 5 or so, an the pipe’s capacity goes up by several orders of magnitude.
One of the tricks to increase utilization is to have a large number of input and output tubes, since the fill capacity of the high-speed section is limited by how close the vehicles are packed during the acceleration and deceleration sections (they spread out a high speed, of course). So get 10 vehicles accelerating in parallel and then start merging them into one pipe as they gain speed.
It would make an interesting business and technology study.
Yes, this is “Peggy”, you have railroad travel question?
Purchasing not one but two Talgo trainsets to run a twice-weekly service is rather silly. And if the service only runs twice a week, running it in anything under 6 hours is silly too. Why does it need to run in 2 1/2 hours? So you can travel one day and be back by the end of the week on a business trip?
But how do you know that they don’t have non-Talgo service on that line? The line has an overhead electric wire for electric trains. Maybe the Talgo only runs twice a week for now until they get more experience operating it? Do you know any Uzbek’s to fact-check any of this at all, including the low price of 70 million to do the high-speed upgrade — California is talking about 70 billion with a “b” — about a thousand times greater price to do much the same thing?
No, I don’t have an “in” at the Uzbekistan government. So there’s absolutely no way for me to fact check how much they actually spent for the project, what it actually does or what else goes on that line. My admittedly limited experience with public projects in incompetent authoritarian regimes is that it’s probably a boondoggle of the finest quality.
And we have a new country to faddishly copy, Uzbekistan. I too pine for this noble role as a dictator of a small, screwed up country who can build a near useless high speed train! at my whim.
Mr. President, we must not allow a high speed train gap!
I had to look that one up. Uzbek high speed rail wiki.
Very impressive. Twice a week they can haul 257 passengers 214 miles in 2-1/2 hours. It would take almost a hundred Camrys or Malibus to do the same, but of course the cars could make the trip a couple times a day.
The only viable and profitable high-speed ground transport system I can envision is a small version of the vac-trains from science fiction. Instead of transporting people, move small packages in evacuated mag-lev pipelines. If the packages can travel faster than low mach numbers the pipe would be faster than air transport, dominating long distance package transport and cutting a day or two off delivery times.
Laying very straight pipelines is relatively simple, and since all such pipelines already transport oil or high-pressure natural gas, making them vacuum tight doesn’t even present new requirements. Likewise, a wide variety of mag-lev systems are already well understood.
The only new engineering would be coming up with a system of standard pressure-sealed but easily opened containers that travel through the pipeline, and a method of very rapidly introducing them at one end and removing them from the other while maintaining the vacuum seals on the ends of the pipeline. A variety of machine mechanisms could accomplish this, and it’s a crucial piece of the system because it determines how many packages a minute the system could handle.
Kewl!
Why are you saying that Uzbekistan is screwed up? They just built/upgraded a 214 mile passenger rail line for 70 million dollars, with another 53 mil for a pair of Talgo trains. That they can make that distance in 2 and 1/2 hours is better than the Amtrak Acela between New York and D.C.
I think we should hire “Peggy” the credit-card-guy in the TV commercial from over there to do our high-speed trains for much less money.
Instead of comparing it to the Acela, just look at the numbers. $123 million for the upgrades and trains, which haul 257 passengers at a time, which is very close to $500,000 a seat. The train runs twice a week, or 100 times a year, so a one-year only cost is $5,000 per seat-trip. If the service runs 10 years it drops the upfront cost to $500 a seat trip (assuming 100% ridership), and since the trip is 214 miles that comes to $2.33 a seat mile (or perhaps $1.17 round trip). That’s twice the IRS 2012 driving mileage reimbursement rate, and are like driving a sedan while paying $35 a gallon for gas. And those numbers are just based on the train’s upfront purchase costs and track upgrades, completely neglecting the train’s operating expenses, fuel, maintenance, track maintenance, and employee costs. Since Uzbeks probably can’t afford to blow hundreds of dollars to travel two-hundred miles, I’d venture to say that even the cheap Uzbek line will have to be massively subsidized.
Perhaps my suggestion about maglev pipeline package transport would fail a similar analysis, but I’ve never dug deep enough into the idea to generate any cost estimates. However, one time I did compare how much oil you could ship through a pipeline using conventional methods versus putting the oil in maglev barrels and blasting it at mach 5 or so, an the pipe’s capacity goes up by several orders of magnitude.
One of the tricks to increase utilization is to have a large number of input and output tubes, since the fill capacity of the high-speed section is limited by how close the vehicles are packed during the acceleration and deceleration sections (they spread out a high speed, of course). So get 10 vehicles accelerating in parallel and then start merging them into one pipe as they gain speed.
It would make an interesting business and technology study.
Yes, this is “Peggy”, you have railroad travel question?
Purchasing not one but two Talgo trainsets to run a twice-weekly service is rather silly. And if the service only runs twice a week, running it in anything under 6 hours is silly too. Why does it need to run in 2 1/2 hours? So you can travel one day and be back by the end of the week on a business trip?
But how do you know that they don’t have non-Talgo service on that line? The line has an overhead electric wire for electric trains. Maybe the Talgo only runs twice a week for now until they get more experience operating it? Do you know any Uzbek’s to fact-check any of this at all, including the low price of 70 million to do the high-speed upgrade — California is talking about 70 billion with a “b” — about a thousand times greater price to do much the same thing?
No, I don’t have an “in” at the Uzbekistan government. So there’s absolutely no way for me to fact check how much they actually spent for the project, what it actually does or what else goes on that line. My admittedly limited experience with public projects in incompetent authoritarian regimes is that it’s probably a boondoggle of the finest quality.