Re:Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel?
by gaustin on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @01:08AM
(#20863836)
Rail was a hugely impactful tool during the US Civil War.
I would guess that geography and the demographics of the American west are as much to blame as the relative lack of continental conflict in the rail era.
Re:Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel?
by hodgesrm on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @01:07AM
(#20863830)
Rail was in fact critical for supply during the US Civil War. The Siege of Petersburg, whose eventual loss doomed the Confederacy, hinged on the important rail junction in the town. That's just one of many examples.
Use of rail in the America conflict prefigured its application the war of 1870 and of course WWI.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_railroads_in_the_A...
Re:Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel?
by WalterBright on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @03:42AM
(#20864397)
In the Seattle area they keep tearing up the old train right-of-ways and then claiming they need incredible tens of billions of dollars and several decades to create new right-of-way.
The city also dug a new tunnel for cars. They decided the best use of the old tunnel was to fill it with rubble. Meanwhile, Seattle has some of the worst congestion in the country.
I have no idea what goes on in the planning meetings for this stuff.
Re:Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel?
by thatfrenchguy on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @03:23AM
(#20864309)
All high speed rail lines are and have to be newly built lines though.
Re:Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel?
by namibj on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @04:16AM
(#20864574)
But you need local train service to allow for the long distances between stops you want on high-speed steel-wheel on steel rail systems. And, while there are alternatives with significantly higher acceleration/deceleration performance, they are not quite practical or use a lot more energy (Maglev could allow for frequent (100km @ 1000km/h top speed) stops, but it's extremely expensive to set up and there is basically no way to evade obstacles).
These medium-speed tracks are old, but they allow up to 160km/h regularly if converted to ETCS (I think they need Level 2, due to the increased breaking distance), that is, with the normal regional trains introduced in the past few years.
Re:Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel?
by Aloha on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @02:01AM
(#20864030)
The United States has a pretty dense rail network now, even after the cuts in the dark age of railroading - I'll point out that we have 6 major west-Midwest routes, 3 Midwest to east routes, plus an equal number of Midwest to south routings. We don't need more rail, we need subsidy to operate more passenger trains.
Re:Flight risk: can we take the carbon out of air travel?
by Consultant32452 on Tuesday September 03, 2019 @03:28AM
(#20864329)
Even if the train ride were completely free I'd usually opt to drive. That's because most places in the US you need a car to get around. So I might as well just bring my own. Except for a hand full of major cities, the US just isn't dense enough for rail to work well.
There was a multi-part show I saw on BBC Four about a year ago that explained that Europe's train network isn't the result of some kind of visionary urban planning or anything altruistic. It's because European nations have such a long history of fighting one another. And in the early part of the last century, the continent went on a rail-building frenzy because of WWI.
The United States have only gone to beating each other up once, and that was before trains were viable as large-scale tools of war. Perhaps if the Civil War was delayed by a couple of decades, things might be different.
Of course, there are many other factors, but this is one that I find interesting and almost never explored.