Biden's Big Rail Investment & Amtrak's Great Vision: how realistic is clean air and less traffic by 2035?

[hemanthaa@mail.com + 64]

No sooner had President Biden, a big fan of American Railways, unveiled the big rail investment plan recently, with a record sum of $ 2 trillion than Amtrak came up with its grand vision to complement the ambitious goal.

Amtrak hopes to reduce pollution and road traffic significantly in 15 years; how realistic is this gigantic project?

Amtrak's Vision for 2035

Edited April 16, 2021 by hemanthaa@mail.com

[markslawson + 1,058]

5 hours ago, hemanthaa@mail.com said:

No sooner had President Biden, a big fan of American Railways, unveiled the big rail investment plan recently, with a record sum of $ 2 trillion than Amtrak came up with its grand vision to complement the ambitious goal.

Amtrak hopes to reduce pollution and road traffic significantly in 15 years; how realistic is this gigantic project?

The link doesn't work but that seems to be a problem with the web site.. here is a media story on the proposals

There's nothing wrong with the proposals as such, but I'm not sure they really address the problem of rail competing with air and road transportation.  Why add more lines? Is there a reason for this? Are the existing lines profitable/reducing emissions or whatever? Rail can be very convenient in connecting directly from one city centre to another, where the cities are comparatively close together - rather more so than in Australia, where the major cities are a long way apart. They are also very good and moving commuters into and out of the city centres. There is no sense that the additional money will play to those strengths.  Now that I think of it Amtrak must a long distance rail company, and not intra-city. I would have thought the big gains in reducing emissions and pollution would come from investing in intra-city.. 

[footeab@yahoo.com + 2,190]

On 4/16/2021 at 11:36 AM, hemanthaa@mail.com said:

No sooner had President Biden, a big fan of American Railways, unveiled the big rail investment plan recently, with a record sum of $ 2 trillion than Amtrak came up with its grand vision to complement the ambitious goal.

Amtrak hopes to reduce pollution and road traffic significantly in 15 years; how realistic is this gigantic project?

Amtrak's Vision for 2035

Amtraks plans are an absurd joke always have been and this is nothing they haven't been pushing for 40 years now.  The one and ONLY way you can make high speed rail work is to IGNORE existing rail infrastructure and build completely new track/easements as High speed rail requirements for curvature, smoothness, gradient, no road crossing intersections are completely and utterly different.  Japan learned this back in the 70's and every single other country which has done it since then has had the exact same conclusions.  Why?  You cannot mix freight and passengers, it just does not work.  Amtraks proposal is to do just that, mix passengers and freight on existing infrastructure. 

Yea yea, Amtrak has some new lines, but they are parallel lines and as stated above IT DOES NOT WORK as this severely LIMITS the speed.  So the  top idiot  speed is ~120mph/180kmph instead of +200mph/300kmph without road crossings or freight cars in the way etc.  You MUST have the speed, otherwise airtraffic is vastly quicker and cheaper I might add.

[turbguy + 1,544]

The proposed link between Cheyenne, WY and Pueblo, CO, makes some sense.  That's kinda intercity.

Actually, the should name everything between the two cities as "The City of Front Range".

ANYTHING to get some traffic off of I-25.

In the early 1900's the Great Lakes region was surrounded by electric "Interurban" lines, handling both perishable freight AND passenger traffic.  You could book travel from Cincinnati to Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, MI, Erie PA,  and beyond, with rural stops all along the way.  More or less intercity higher speed trolleys.  The system was actually quite extensive. Too bad they are gone.  The paved roads built by governments killed them.

Edited April 18, 2021 by turbguy

[footeab@yahoo.com + 2,190]

7 hours ago, turbguy said:

The proposed link between Cheyenne, WY and Pueblo, CO, makes some sense.  That's kinda intercity.

Actually, the should name everything between the two cities as "The City of Front Range".

ANYTHING to get some traffic off of I-25.

Cheyenne is smaller than Fort Collins... And I-25 is jugged mostly because central Denver is a nightmare of IDIOT planning of said highway, putting S curves in the damned thing and 6 trillion road junctions all in the same place downtown Denver is beyond stupid, combined with mega growth along I-25 since its construction.  Need a 2nd parallel highway for the inevitable accident that plugs it.  Driven that road many times.  Actually, think the speed limit needs to be dropped, if you aren't driving 80, you are getting run over on that road section which is kind of funny as outside of that region even though the speed limit is the same the actual speed everyone drives is actually slower. 

[frankfurter + 562]

the Biden Harris announcements to print money out of thin air to spend on so-called infrastructure is nothing more than the plan to reduce America to a command economy. hello comrades!

[turbguy + 1,544]

If the money supply isn't to be "printed out of thin air", where else does it come from?

[Strangelovesurfing + 737]

On 4/17/2021 at 2:53 PM, turbguy said:

The system was actually quite extensive. Too bad they are gone.  The paved roads built by governments killed them.

You can also thank the oil industry, they convinced everybody that trains were old technology and ICE’s were the future. 

[Jay McKinsey + 1,490]

On 4/17/2021 at 5:53 PM, turbguy said:

The paved roads built by governments killed them.

But it was all the free land the gov't gave them that built them. In the west it was one square mile for every mile of track.

[turbguy + 1,544]

39 minutes ago, Jay McKinsey said:

But it was all the free land the gov't gave them that built them. In the west it was one square mile for every mile of track.

Yes, the UPRR won big on that one.

I doubt that occurred in the 1900's around the Great Lakes, though.

 

[Jay McKinsey + 1,490]

8 minutes ago, turbguy said:

Yes, the UPRR won big on that one.

I doubt that occurred in the 1900's around the Great Lakes, though.

 

Here is a close up of a great RR land grant map I found at https://www.geographicus.com/P/AntiqueMap/WesternStatehood-hart-1940-2

 

[turbguy + 1,544]

Yeah that happened elsewhere, too.  The interurbans were more dense.

 

[turbguy + 1,544]

I can recall riding lots of trackless trolleys, too.   Still a good system in Vancouver.  Oh, those overheads and sparks...

 

Edited April 21, 2021 by turbguy

[Jay McKinsey + 1,490]

1 minute ago, turbguy said:

I can recall riding lots of trackless trolleys, too.   Still a good system in Vancouver.  Oh, the overheads...

 

Yeah, San Francisco still has them as well.