Breaking: SNCF Proposes Development of High-Speed Rail in Midwest, Texas, Florida, and California Corridors

Why these? Think of these as preemptive contract proposals. Texas, SNCF has a history with. If it gets funded, there’s no obvious incumbent contractor looming to build the line, no obvious contractor to operate it. SNCF humbly offers itself. Florida and California, there may be incumbent contractors to build the networks (Balfour Beatty just bought Taylor Brinkehoff), but there’s no obvious contractor to operate them. This is SNCF pointing out its advantages as an operator. There’s a fairly substantial section on ticketing and reservations, for example.

They may simply have run out of time to do the others. The midwest proposal shows signs of not having been fully edited. Appendix 8 on route alignments only discusses Milwaukee to Detroit. In the appendix the bypass is thought of as one possible way to get round the limitations of Chicago Union Station. A tunnel under the concourse is explicitly given as another possibility. In the main text, though, a full set of spokes is discussed and the bypass is described as providing spoke to spoke service. The notion is that service along one spoke will run into Chicago Union Station, service in one spoke and out another will bypass it. Minneapolis-Chicago runs in and out of Chicago Union Station; Minneapolis-St. Louis takes the bypass and stops at O’Hare.

Why not the NEC? I can think of a couple of reasons. As Alon noted upthread, SNCF avoids political issues. HSR in the NEC would replace an Amtrak service and the Amtrak legislation says when you do that you have to comply with a whole bunch of union protection rules. The SNCF MO is to build their own pair of tracks — on someone else’s RoW if agreement can be reached, next to it if agreement can’t be — to their own specifications, electrified their way. If they have to run on mixed tracks (because there’s no room to build new trakc son the existing RoW and there’s no way to widen it cheaply) they want to designate a pair of tracks as primarily theirs, upgrade them to their specs and electrify just them. That won’t work in the NEC.

Too, the four proposals are for projects either wholly contained in one state or where there is an existing multistate compact for HSR. SNCF’s preferred setup is that the state or group of states establish a company to which they give loan guarantees and grants and which, in turn, contracts for construction and operations. As Alon and I discussed in another thread, such an entity doesn’t exist in the NEC (nor in Cascadia).

the great lakes to keystone to northeast corridors. chicago to cleveland to pittsburgh to philly/the nec with branches to detroit and cinncinnati. this should be the only dedicated true hsr system built!(connecting 140 million people…email usbullettrain@gmail.com for more details…

Shouldn’t the Pac Northwest be included in this?

This is great! To see SNCF throw their hat in the ring gives the HSR debate a huge boost.

However lets say hypothetically this pans out, lines get built and all is hunky dory,

Would the laws passed in the 70’s during the Amtrak creation, prohibiting private passenger rail ownership, need to changed or amended to allow for a private company to be the operator of the services or does the law solely relate to ownership of a passenger rail company?

The laws governing rail need an overhaul. FRA compliant won’t reach 220 mph, maybe down a hill.

Also I think that there needs to be and ‘SNCF’ setup in the US, or rather their business model (if you can call it that) would be a good one to follow, We need an authority that has the power and resources to get shit done.

Alon said “It builds lines without regard for local politics”

Here something like that would be tough. Every local politico is going to want to either claim they secured the future of the regions mobility or claim they defeated the big bad french socialist/commi plan that was going to ruin their lives, ban any dog other than poodles, raise their taxes and destroy the fabric of American society. Local politics can’t be avoided here in the good ol USA. Also don’t tell Fox news about the SNCF plan they’ll flip balls.

No, freight railroads can opt out of Amtrak and operate their own passenger trains, as the Denver and Rio Grande did in the 1970s. None of them does because they’d lose money on it.

Yes, “on a par with equivalent highway laws.” That would be nice.

What is the problem with having seat belts on Amtrak or those of us who feel safer wearing them? ‘Not invented here’ or what? For those who don’t like them, OK, don’t wear them.

I’m not afraid of the passenger rail car I’m riding in crumpling like a paper bag, which apparently is the obsession of rail safety authorities. Accidents like that seem to happen about as often as someone gets hit by a bit of meteorite from space.

But every time I read about a routine road crossing accident, some number of passenger have “minor” injuries — broken bones, bruises, lacerations — stuff that seat belts could significantly reduce.

I’d like to see the rail safety board or whatever is the appropriate body be composed of experts from the auto and airline industries, with two or one or none of the members having railroad experience.

Maybe throw in expertise from NASA and the Navy. Because how come planes can come to a stop on an aircraft carrier deck but trains can’t stop for a mile to two? Yeah, I know, they’ll say it’s physics. Does making trains heavier in case of meteorites or crumpling crashes make them harder and slower to stop when something gets on the tracks?

I’d like to see the physics problems attacked by folks with no previous record of failure in the railroad business. Folks willing to look at parachutes and reverse firing emergency engines and whatever it takes.

One issue the Seattle/Portland route DOES have–is flooding.

I-5, as well as the UP mainline, both pass through lowlands in the vicinty of Chehalis and Centralia, which turn into a giant lake every couple of years. Unless one wants to carve a new line in the Cascade foothills, or similar difficult terrain, HSR will have to deal with this.

Last winter, Seattle (and NW Washington in general) was pretty much cut off from the rest of the US, at least as far as overland routes were concerned–record snowfall closed the Cascade passes, and the aforementioned flooding closed off the freeway south. You could still reach BC IIRC,and a route to Oregon via US101 might have still been passable.

But a big problem for HSR up here in the Pacific Northwest is that we are VERY geographically isolated from the rest of the US and Canada. Once you leave the Cascadia corridor (Eugene OR to Vancouver BC), the nearest major city would be Sacramento, over 400 miles south of Eugene (Reno is a similar distance). Salt Lake is 800 miles from Portland, Calgary is 600 miles (1000 km) from Vancouver, etc. And any route out of the corridor will involve some pretty nasty terrain. (Obviously I’m excluding medium-sized burgs such as Spokane, Kamloops, Redding, and Boise from my list of “major cities”).

I’d love HSR here, but 220MPH HSR is probably overkill for the population densities and distances involved.

It possibly could–not sure how need you be to get above the floodplain. It wouldn’t need to be as long as the example you cite; OTOH I suspect such a thing would face opposition–both from environmentalists, and from those who would rather elevate I-5.

Talgo speed:
What is the highest speed at which a Talgo is run in Spain? I think there is a new model that exceeds 150 m.p.h. The real problem is inertia in FRA, Congress, and local political bodies. The NIMBY problem is often a mask for other, nastier interests: FELA, crossing collisions with jury trials, local pols whose relatives are car dealers, &c, &c. A federal law declaring any damage suit for a pedestrian or a motor vehicle hit on a railroad right of way an undue burden on interstate commerce (accompanied by a federally-administered accident insurance scheme to pay periodically people utterly disabled) in such accidents could help.
As long as there is a significant class of people who try to make a living by getting their fingers stuck on money not theirs, we will have extreme difficulty getting anything done. If we eventually permit subdividing rural land for housing without building any streets or roads so people get around in ATVs, civilian Strykers, &c, then our citizens might learn that aside from living alone a huge ranches people need to share improvements–costs and uses.
In France administrative law favors the government. When the French decide to build, they do–straight.
Lots of suburban housing is flimsy compared to pre-1940 houses.
When the suburbs begin to fall apart, become slums filled with squatters, then the middle classes may come to their senses; be certain to hedge any bets!

One important thing to remember about SNCF is that they’re strictly at this point a train operating company, not an infrastructure company. The business model they have now in Europe, which I suspect is what SNCF is counting on evolving here too, is one where government hires or franchises a train operating company to run the service and a separate infrastructure company, which for high speed rail in the US would presumably be government owned as with the Interstate Highway system, is then paid by the train operator for the paths (slots) to run trains over the network.

So SNCF, given this business model, is cherry picking — picking out the routes that, given the proposals that have been talked about, have the best shot at making money. California, there’s a huge government commitment to high speed rail. The Midwest and Florida, you have flat geography and wide rights of way and therefore the possibility of doing HSR on the cheap, at least in relative terms to California.

As for Chicago, it’s a bit of a barrier, but here’s what’s proposed, and then I’ll go on to add what they ought to do.

THe city has proposed a “West Loop Transportation Center”. This would involve digging up Clinton Street and installing multiple levels of infrastructure — high speed rail platforms, a new subway line (the Clinton Street subway), a busway and a pedestrian concourse linking Union and Ogilvie stations. It’s a good start, but only a start because two HSR platforms won’t be enough in a finished system.

So the city needs to find some way to mate the two halves of Union Station. At present, the 222 Riverside Plaza building and the former CMEX change (now a health club) block the way and the passenger concourse sits in the basement between the two sets of tracks. The Riverside Plaza building is immense, more than a million square feet of prime office space, and therefore not cheap to buy out. The former CMEX structure is more easily expendable. But if you were to gut out the Riverside building up to about third floor level and remove the CMEX building altogether, you’d create the opportunity of having an above-ground passenger concourse over the tracks, and through tracks below.

There’s still the matter of the bottleneck at the north end of the station where the only way of adding to the three tracks that are there is with massive demolition of high rises, so in reality, probably both West Loop AND through platforms in the main station are needed if we’re to have a truly high-capacity system.

In peak on Paris-Lyon SNCF HSL you have one TGV every 4′, which means 15 per hour, running at 186 mph, and on HSL North Paris to Belgium or London one every 3′.

Here’s a point to consider about SNCF’s Chicago bypass route. It would take less time to build and get running. Once it’s up and running then the heat would be on the city of Chicago to get the lead out.

I’m in California and use various train services (SFMuni + BART) regularly. Sometimes you’ve got to do things in stages. The previous poster that talked about the difficulties of tying Union Station together left out the furballs that would be triggered by such an effort. The cut and cover tunneling of the Market Street Subway and BART’s Mission Street bore were monster headaches to plan and very painful in their execution. The distance in Chicago may seem short but I expect the infighting will be epic.

Woody – if you really want seat safety in a trainwreck, you don’t want a seatbelt – you want to sit in a backward-facing seat.

Answer to Mr Alon LEVY comment #44 :
what you say is not true : there is no locazl train on HSL North from Paris to Lille and Channel Tunnel : you certainly speak about Paris North Station where suburban and regional trains can leave at same time than HS TGV.
On the HSL TGVs are running at peak hours at 3mn headway.

John Mica really needs to see this. It is the best private sector view on what it will take to build out HSR in this country.