Read the article—the author prefaces with their experience riding trains all over the world and has worked in rail. There is a ton of detail, much more interesting than the conclusion.
A clarification. They’ve not worked in rail. They’ve worked in hyperloop. A fantasy technology that does not, and probably never will, exist.
Imagine being able to destroy the idea of constructing rail in a few paragraphs of a tiny blog and then choosing to work on hyperloop, which has all the problems mentioned about rail but also throws in creating and maintaining a vacuum pipe in addition.
> A clarification. They’ve not worked in rail. They’ve worked in hyperloop. A fantasy technology that does not, and probably never will, exist.
Hyperloop is a marketing project which is based on the assumption that a few PR drones can be lowder than anyone with any cursory knowledge on transportation engineering.
The same goes for the boring company, where the company tries very hard to pretend they invented digging holes in the ground while using COTS tunnelers.
Hyperloop was a fantasy project pitched by Elon so that he could continue selling more cars. The same way the big Auto companies of the early 1900's bought up railroads and trams and then tore them up, to sell more cars.
I understand where you’re coming from. It’s really a shame that this article has the conclusion in it. I finished it feeling optimistic about our ability to implement reasonable-speed rail in the US.
That doesn’t track, since I was responding to a comment implying the author was ignorant of rail infrastructure outside of the US.
As to the expertise, he seems unseasoned but in command of a lot
of facts. Which is why I think the conclusion is wrong despite the post being interesting and informative. Unfortunately, my fellow rail enthusiasts think I’m against them because I read the article and ignored the headline and first and last few sentences. :)
> The article takes the premise that HSR should go 320 kph (200mph) and then explains why that is infeasible in many places.
Top speed means close to nothing, and it's one of the reason why the definition of high speed rail is not tied to top speed.
Great Britain has a notorious high speed railway corridor whose top speed is only around 160mph, and the reason is that the railway line was designed with the express purpose of preserving a cruise speed close to the top speed of the trains available at the time.
It's absurd to talk about high speed railway if it was a drag race. The main challenge in high speed railway is making it possible for high speed trains to actually travel at speeds that high-speed trains can already reach. Lines need to overcome constraints imposed by speed, geography and infrastructure costs, and tradeoffs often lead solutions to not match optimal layouts to reach top speeds.
Also, whenever a train needs to serve an intermediate station, they need to spend a great deal of time decelerating, stop at the station to serve passengers, and accelerate again. Sometimes it's feasible for infrastructure operators to spend money on a sideline to skip that station, but on some cases that's simply not realistic. Take for example Paris-Amsterdam and Paris-Cologne, which have to pass through Brussels and where the bulk of the train trip is spent passing through the inner city of Brussels alone where the top speed is 20km/h.
