17 thoughts on “High-Speed Rail”

  1. The problem is, once I got to Houston, I’d have to rent a car. That negates any advantage for me (unless the train is very, very cheap).

    This would be advantageous primarily for people whose destination is within walking distance of the train station (or who really on public transportation). Neither Houston nor Dallas are good cities for that.

    1. Out here in DC, we have things called Taxis and Car-share services.

      CarShare is ideal for this kind of thing. Pay by the hour, and park somewhere the car can be picked up by another user.

      1. There appears to be a typo in that post, Deny Guy. What you obviously meant to say was:

        Out here in DC, we have no conception of how large cities like Dallas and Houston really are, and we assume that all American have government expense accounts to pay for unlimited taxi rides, like we do.

        Inane, as always. 🙂

  2. There was a proposal to put in a high-speed rail line along the Front Range in Colorado several years ago. One of the sticking points was obtaining the right-of-way along the proposed rail line. The company behind the proposal was trying to get a very wide corridor on either side of the line as their private property. IIRC, the corridor was at least a mile wide. It was a huge land grab. Needless to say, many of the people who land was going to be taken by eminent domain weren’t happy with the idea and raised all kind of objections. It’s possible the project is dead but I don’t know.

    As with anything, the devil is in the details. What is the Texas company’s plan to obtain the necessary right-of-way for their rail lines? If they aren’t going to use eminent domain to take people’s property, then I see no problem with them rising private capital to develop this project.

    1. They could build a monorail using the existing right of way along I-35.

      Monorails make quite a bit of sense for that reason. Unfortunately, city planners hate them because they’re associated in the popular mind with Walt Disney, who created mass-transit systems people actually want to ride, and urban planners can’t fathom the idea of mass-transit systems that people enjoy rather than endure.

      1. That’s not the only reason city planners hate them. Switching tracks on a monorail is hard (not impossible, but much more complicated than switching regular rails); if the monorail is just going in a loop that’s not a problem, but that limits the routes pretty severely.

        The DIsneyland monorail, and the Seattle World’s Fair monorail are both basically loops (at one time they both actually ran at a profit), but they serve pretty specialized niches.

      2. If you want an Elevated rail system over I-35, that is well proven technology, however,
        Elevated rail is expensive.

  4. It wasn’t Southwest that torpedoed the project 20 years ago. I heard from sources near the Railroad Commissioner at the time that the math simply did not add up–like in California today, the projected line would have had to have charged such a high price just to pay the interest on the loan that they never could have filled the train at that price–meaning the route never would have paid for itself.

    On top of that, there was a serious issue regarding land ownership–a bullet train has to follow a relatively straight route with only gentle curves, and there was no route that didn’t cut vast numbers of farms and businesses in half. The un-budgeted expense of building access tunnels (or raising the track) beyond those needed for road crossings, or the political expense of seizing the land (Kelo happened later, but Texas promptly passed a state law against it) were unknown but expected to be enormous.

    In short, the whole thing was a pipe dream, and it was fortunate that little money was wasted on it before it was shot down.

    1. The Texas Railroad Commission has nothing to do with railroads. It regulates oil and gas. The name is simply to confuse the Yankees.

      1. Nevertheless, Bob Kruger was looking quite closely at the project, and determined that it was pretty much impossible for it to ever turn a profit, much less pay back the loans.

        1. Same thing happened in the Channel Tunnel project. Two things usually happen. The predictions for ridership are totally wrong (up or down) and you cannot expect it to pay itself off in 10-20 years. You have to consider these structures last a LOT longer than that with proper maintenance.

          1. …and second, someone comes up with a fountain of unaccountable public funding so that it doesn’t have to ever turn a profit.

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