I mentioned how impressed I was with the speed of the Eurostar train from London to Brussells. I was guessing that we were going a hundred fifty mph or so. Apparently, that wasn't too far off, but it's going to go even faster later this year:

Beforehand, it took nearly three hours to make the crossing, and now it will take two hours, 35 minutes. Further upgrades scheduled to be completed in 2007 will knock another 15 minutes off. The trains will finally travel at their top speed of 186 miles per hour, according to Eurostar.

Sure wouldn't want to hit a cow at those speeds. At the least, it would be instant hamburger. A system like that would be a huge hit for LA-Vegas, if they could resolve the political and financial issues.

I riden the shinkansen alot in Japan. Taiwan and Korea have built their shinkansen lines as well. High-speed train is nice.

However, there are sound economic reasons why a link between LA and Las vegas is unlikely. High speed trains are expensive. Building the line is expensive and the maintanence is expensive as well (the track has to be check for alignment and re-aligned every day). A large traffic load is necessary to cover these costs.

The Tokyo to Osaka line has a train departing every 3-5 minutes. Each train carries up to 1,000 passengers (about 2 747s worth). This is the kind of traffic density that is required for the lines to pay for themselves (the Kanetsu shinkansen runs at a loss and the Tohoku barely makes money - these are all run by J.R. East).

The only traffic corridor in the U.S. with the density to pay for this is Boston-NYC-Washington DC, where they already have a high-speed train.

For the rest of the U.S., cars and airplanes make more sense.

You've obviously never driven between Barstow and Las Vegas, especially on Friday or Sunday. Or the day before a holiday. Not only is the road bumper to bumper, it's 100 mph bumper to bumper, so that when a minor fender-bender happens, traffic is stopped for at least 20 miles or more. I speak from personal experiences. A high speed rail service would do VERY well. The problem is that the only railroad thru the area is heavily traveled freight -- and subject to earthquakes. High speed rail lines have different needs. Alas, the railroad's owners are not keen on leasing their right of way to passenger traffic.

I've been on I-15 and the weekend traffic snarls typically add an hour or two between L.A. and Vegas. Meanwhile the heavy freight trains do 70 mph across the desert. The problem is the triple-track in the Cajon pass is heavily travelled with slow freights churning their way up the mountain. These are not compatible with high speed passenger trains, and the railroads that own the tracks are not interested in passenger trains disrupting their business.

There's another slight problem - London to Brussels is flat. LA to Las Vegas is not even vaguely close to flat.

There are, after all, mountains in the way - maximum elevation of Cajon Pass is 4260', and Mountain Pass is higher ).

(I assume the I-15 route because it's the direct route between LA and LV, and the interstates try for minimum grade just like trains do...)

Steep grades make trains slow. They make high-speed bullet-trains pretty much impossible, as far as I understand it.

(I assume the I-15 route because it's the direct route between LA and LV, and the interstates try for minimum grade just like trains do...)

A lot of the talk about this has been combined with the notion of high-speed rail to Palmdale, to provide another LA-area airport with lots of room to expand. So it would probably come up the Antelope Valley rather than over Cajon Pass. From Palmdale, it would be a non-stop (or perhaps with a stop in Barstow to pick up people coming from the Inland Empire) trip to Vegas, with a reasonable grade other than the hill about thirty miles south of town. Admittedly, that would be a fun one to climb on the way back to LA. Of course, there are alway tunnels...

I think that this is something almost inevitable. It's just a question of when the technology, the politics, the market, and the construction costs cross on the graph.

Building a shinkansen between LA and Las Vegas would cost $10-15 billion. A reasonable return would be around $1.5-2 billion per year. Assuming that tickets cost $100 each way, 7-10 million riders per year would be required to make this profitable.

Does this many people travel between Las vegas and SoCal each year?

Obviously, it will be cheaper if it is built as a purely private effort rather than as a California public-works project (like a freeway). If it is build as a state project, the costs would be more like $30 billion or so because of all of the BS involved in government projects (Boston's big dig and the replacement for the Bay Bridge as example).

The problem with government projects is all of the corruption involved in selecting the contractors as well as the politically driven politically correct stuff (like minority-owned contractors, having enough ethnic people in the work crews, etc, etc, etc). These costs and hassles would be even greater in the People's Republik of Kalifornia.

There's also one of the biggest problems, which is the fussing you have to do at either end. It may be that a lot of people funnel into the I-10 or I-15 at certain times, but they are definitely not all leaving from the same point and arriving at the same point. So it's quite unclear that building a rail line is going to help the situation.

If people have to choose between spending 2-3 hours sitting in a traffic jam versus 2-3 hours getting to and from a rail station not close to their house or destination, rent transportation or parking at either end, or stand in endless lines for tickets, security, et cetera -- we already know which way they'll choose to go. That's why the traffic jams exist.

The problem in transporation is very similar to the problem of broadband Internet. It's not the existence or cost of big pipes for backbone traffic that's the tricky bit, it's that dratted "last mile" problem. In the case of the 'net, it's getting a fat pipe to each and every house economically, currently not possible unless you piggyback on cable TV, which only got built because of lucrative monopoly deals made with local governments unlikely to be repeated.

In the case of people transporation, you've got to solve the problem of taking several million people dispersed over several hundred square miles (in the case of LA), collecting them (hard), transporting them in bulk somewhere (easy), and then dispersing them again to their multitudinous individual destinations (hard again).

Train advocates focus on speeding up the middle portion of the trip, but as we all know, this is a solved problem. It's the beginning and the end part of the trip that are unsolved problems. (Which is one reason comparisons between the low-density US and either Japan or Europe are inapt: both of the latter have far higher population densities, i.e. people are already a lot more concentrated at both ends of their trip.)

Now, bring me a system where I can drive my car to a local train depot, drive it onto a car-train like what you have through the Chunnel, then sit back and listen to the radio or surf the 'net on the laptop ('cause the train has WiFi) for a few hours while I'm whisked to Nevada, where I can drive off and go where I please, and maybe we'll have something useful, something for which I'd pay real money. It doesn't even have to go at 180 MPH, it can dawdle along at 80 for all I care, so long as it doesn't stop so much that it ruins the average speed and is on time.

Kurt9, Boston-NYC-DC has a "high speed train?" Really? The Acela? You've obviously not been on it if you think it's high speed! In the USA we have no high speed trains, none, zip.

A tourist does not need a car in Vegas or surrounding area. Between monorail, buses, taxicabs, and much of what they come to Vegas for being within walking distance, a personal car is a liability.

Forget Bullet trains. I want my flying car and I want it NOW!

Well, there's a partial effort that is in the dream stages.

There is a (mostly) private non-government consortium that is attempting to build a high speed rail line between Victorville and Las Vegas.

Link:
http://www.desertxpress.com/need.php

Howevever, even train fans are rather skeptical. Knowledgeable ones think the cost estimates are low-balled by at least 50%, and believe it's a half-way measure doomed to failure. They think at the minimum there needs to be a good, timed connection at Victorville with trains from the LA basin, but don't even think that will be enough to make it successful (unpopularity of having to transfer, etc.).

Perhaps we could combine the high speed track with a STOL launching track. Then the hills would be an advantage.

Just sayin.

A tourist does not need a car in Vegas or surrounding area.

Comes in handy here in LA. I recall once, being a good citizen, calling up the local transportation agency to find out how I'd take public transporation to reach the airport, located 2 miles from my house. She asked when my flight took off. I said 9 PM. She said: well, first you need to catch the 7.30 AM bus from Foo Street...

Hold on, I said, it was 9 PM, not AM. Oh I know, she said. But like I said, first you have to catch the 7.30 AM bus...

I called a cab. I believe it was a natural-gas powered cab, however.

There's another slight problem - London to Brussels is flat. LA to Las Vegas is not even vaguely close to flat.

Ability to handle higher grades was one of the selling points of maglev trains. As I recall, one was proposed, for a while, between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Pity the business case never closed, maglev was cool. Perhaps it's not surprising (especially considering their relation to mass drivers) that Gerard O'Neill was a terrestrial maglev advocate.

Every time I see a high-speed rail proposal, I multiply the ridership prediction by the proposed ticket price and subtract the product of the employment prediction and a guestimate of salary+benefits. The difference is never large enough to cover the interest on the capital costs, let alone paying back the principle or doing maintenance.

That analysis is actually extremely favorable towards such proposals because those proposals always overstate the viability.

Rand: Yeah, though I suppose the question is how steep the curve is for construction costs (not to mention maintenance costs vs. operating income)...

I mean, certainly it's possible to build a high-speed train from LA to LV. I'm just not sure it could be done in any sort of cost-effective manner anytime soon.

funny how Simberg is mooning over a state enterprise
like Euro-star.

I thought in the neo-con world no state enterprise was
ever worthwhile.

funny how Simberg is mooning over a state enterprise
like Euro-star.

I thought in the neo-con world no state enterprise was
ever worthwhile.