Re:The limits of high-speed rail
by jcranmer on Friday February 07, 2020 @10:50AM
(#22267102)
> A glaring case in point, all passenger rails connecting East and West must go through Chicago -- far north of southern states. (There is one claimed southern line, but it never appears to be available for transport.)
This is a matter of geography. Your main eastern market is the DC-Boston corridor--as populated as all of the other states on the Atlantic seaboard combined. So that means that you're mostly looking at terminating there, no matter where on the West Coast you originate. If you start in the Northwest, you have to cross south of Lake Michigan to reach the NEC, so Chicago is en route. If you're in Northern California, you'll emerge from the Front Range near Denver, and you can pick whichever hub you want--might as well pick the one everyone else is using and choose Chicago. Even as far south as Oklahoma City, going to DC via Chicago only adds 100-200 miles to your route. It's not until you get to Dallas that reaching the NEC via Atlanta/Charlotte/Raleigh-Durham makes sense.
Historically, by the latter half of the 1800s, the railroad industry already settled on using Chicago as the main termination of every major railroad, and thus the major transshipment point. Geographically, the logical point is bounded by the southern tip of Lake Michigan and northern bank of the Ohio River (as you have prairies to the north and hills to the south). In principle, a city like St. Louis or Indianapolis could have grown up to be the major transshipment hub instead of Chicago, but you'd still be complaining about the lack of southern East-West lines in that scenario.
This is a matter of geography. Your main eastern market is the DC-Boston corridor--as populated as all of the other states on the Atlantic seaboard combined. So that means that you're mostly looking at terminating there, no matter where on the West Coast you originate. If you start in the Northwest, you have to cross south of Lake Michigan to reach the NEC, so Chicago is en route. If you're in Northern California, you'll emerge from the Front Range near Denver, and you can pick whichever hub you want--might as well pick the one everyone else is using and choose Chicago. Even as far south as Oklahoma City, going to DC via Chicago only adds 100-200 miles to your route. It's not until you get to Dallas that reaching the NEC via Atlanta/Charlotte/Raleigh-Durham makes sense.
Historically, by the latter half of the 1800s, the railroad industry already settled on using Chicago as the main termination of every major railroad, and thus the major transshipment point. Geographically, the logical point is bounded by the southern tip of Lake Michigan and northern bank of the Ohio River (as you have prairies to the north and hills to the south). In principle, a city like St. Louis or Indianapolis could have grown up to be the major transshipment hub instead of Chicago, but you'd still be complaining about the lack of southern East-West lines in that scenario.