Here is a video of what is really wrong with the NEC Catenary and how it’s preventing high speed rail

On all the city pairs you list, the mode share of air is tiny. If a single one of them has a 15% air mode share I’ll be deeply surprised. The dominant mode of transport in the US at those distances is the car. Even on Los Angeles-San Francisco, more people drive than fly, if I remember the CAHSR ridership projection documents correctly. The breakeven point for air versus driving is about 900 miles – though this is a nationwide average, which includes many city pairs on which air service is infrequent and indirect.

On city pairs dominated by air, constructing HSR is usually a folly, because the distance is so great that construction costs are very high. Only on routes that can be broken down into small components, such as New York-Chicago, or maybe New York-Atlanta, is this justifiable.

But it’s absurd to think that air travel at any price is the best way to get from Philly to Harrisburg, or from Worcester, Mass. to Springfield, from Norfolk to Richmond, from Charlottesville to D.C., from Greensboro to Raleigh, from Cleveland to Columbus, or from Columbus to Dayton or Cincinnati, or from Milwaukee to Madison, from Oakland to Sacramento or San Jose, much less to fly from NYC to Albany, from Albany to Syracuse, from Syracuse to Rochester, from Rochester to Buffalo.

We need a transportation policy and a budget that recognizes that each different mode of transport has its best place. On this site, we focus on rail, which is the mode most overlooked when the gravy boat is passed around Congress.

There was talks of extending the Pennsyvinia Catenary masts and lines to Pittsburg in the 1930′s we should dust off those old plans and extend the lines that way first and then extend the lines south to Pettersburg Virginia. The classic catenary masts have a good plan built into them with their top rows of trassmision wires that would allow them to take on power at a wind farm or a solar farm or a hyro station and ship it to substations along the lines.

There is also something sad to that I noice in Pennsyvinia along the Susahanna River there is a mainline railroad with Pennsyvinia Catenary masts and all the masts are still standing but are stipped off their wires meaning that they don’t run off eletric anymore. Also in Lancaster PA there is a rail line that follows US Route 30 that has catenary masts but they were stipped of their wires. We could easly restore eletric power to these lines by adding new catenary wires to the masts that are missing their wires.

Recently our company completed work for a descendant of Commodore Vanderbilt. All I can tell you about that experience is that the same insanity and substance abuse behind the under-running third rail and all the insanity in the bloodline that followed continues to the present day!

To run on both the Hudson Line electrification and the Penn Station electrification, an Amtrak locomotive would either need “flip-shoes” (simple) or (more complicated, but better long term) both a shoe and a pantograph and both AC and DC transformers. This is frankly a good idea but it’s tied up in failure to order new locomotives for Amtrak.

They will be, when California’s HIgh Speed rail system is built. It would be ….. inefficient to electrify it now, rip it all out and re-electrify it in 5 years.

and Empire Corridors

I’m sure they have been toying with the idea since the line was electrified between Grand Central and Croton a hundred years ago. They even actually talk about it now and then. They never do anything….