* Existing NEC (DC to Boston via Baltimore, Philly, NYC, Hartford/Springfield/Worcester or Providence)
* NYC to Montreal and Boston to Toronto, with an interchange at Albany
* Midwest star shape, centered at Chicago, with prongs to Minneapolis, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Louisville or Cincinnati. The southern Midwest region is kind of hard for me to crayon a network.
* (Not part of the US strictly speaking) Detroit to Quebec via Windsor, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal. Basically all of Canada's population on one rail line, with easy access to the US via interchanges at three separate points.
* Hooking up the Midwest to the NEC, although I'm somewhat dubious of the viability here.
* Texas Triangle (Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio)
* California: SF, San Jose, Sacramento, LA, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix.
* Maybe viable: Portland-Seattle-Vancouver
* Maybe viable: SEHSR, from Miami to Atlanta, and thence to Midwest (via Nashville) or NEC (via North Carolina's Research Triangle and Richmond).
(Citation: this is largely based on Alon Levy's crayoning, found here: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2021/03/22/high-speed-rai...)
This is the problem. The real route is Boston - New York - D.C. The others are lower population, lower GDP and not in line with the other three. But if you build the core route and exclude Philadelphia, you'll have an uproar in the Senate.
One of the chief advantages of trains is that you do not have to cater only to point-to-point routes; you can instead serve a combinatorial explosion in routes for comparatively little time: a stop adds only ~5 minutes to a HSR train, and that's the worst-case scenario.
There is no advantage to bypassing Philadelphia: the amount of money it costs to bypass the city is going to be quite large, and you will miss out on all the potential revenue from stopping at the city itself. From my practical experience riding the train, the biggest factor in existing slow trains in Connecticut isn't all the stops it makes in Connecticut, but the incompetence of Metro North's dispatching that keeps a high-speed train plodding along below highway speeds between stations.
(Also, side note: Philly's MSA is larger than Boston's, and Philly provides more Amtrak riders than Boston's 4 stations combined--and one of those isn't even on the NEC!).
Is that accurate? When I road HSR in Japan, I remember the speed in-city being much lower than in the countryside, so bypassing cities seemed key to maintaining the high speed part.
What you're talking about instead is the penalties imposed by a more constrained right-of-way in urban environments. Except when we're talking about Philadelphia (or most of the Northeast in general), you can't really escape from a constrained right-of-way anyways--a quick crayoning suggests you're adding about 20 miles of railway route which, even at 200mph, adds more time than you're saving by itself.
Consider again the cost of bypassing to save time. How many millions of dollars are you willing to save a minute of travel time? It is far cheaper to put that money into straightening the worst curves of legacy inner city track than to spend it bypassing the city altogether, not even accounting for the loss of revenue by not serving what are objectively large cities.
The coupling of modern high-speed trains is also a significant part of their crash safety. Keeping the train connected if it derails means there's less chance of a loose vehicle punching through another. (See how e.g. [1] has most of the vehicles pretty much intact.)
I think in most cases, running an express train followed by a stopping train is good enough.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/547c9037ed915...
The issue is that steel wheels on steel tracks doesn't provide enough grip to accelerate, so the train takes a lot of the time to get up to speed.
Maglev, meanwhile, uses a linear motor, so you can accelerate very fast if you want to.
70dba is rather a lot, though, I imagine you'd end up with a lower limit in the US since I don't think most people are going to be easily convinced that another inter-city transit method is going to be worth the noise to them.
Trains spend a lot of time speeding up and slowing down. A single stop adds much more than five minutes to total transit time. [EDIT: Apparently this doesn't apply to maglev. This could be a game changer for HSR in the American political landscape.]
That is false even for non mag-lev. Do the math as I did: at .7 m/s/s (which is what shinkansen does) it takes less than 90 seconds to get to 300 km/h. That leaves far more time than is needed at the station (1 minute is plenty if the train is designed right). You don't count stop time at all because it averages out with the acceleration.
By contrast, when a train departs a station, there are frequently passengers who are still roaming the aisle with their luggage. And I might have a cup of coffee or something sitting on the table in front of me (or behind me, from the perspective of the train's direction of acceleration).
For the sake of comparison - a Toyota Corolla will do 100km/h/6s. You don't need to fully stow your cargo, you just need not to have drinks on the table. Even standing you would be fine, though there is some danger you'd trip.
Beyond that, buses see accelerations on the order of ~0.2G often, and that's with people standing up, in an unpredictable fashion.
FWIW, the numbers I generally see bandied about for acceleration on (decent) trains is about 1 m/s^2.
0.1g is the acceptable lateral acceleration when standing up without bracing. (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40864-015-0012-y)
If you get caught standing up, even 3.5 m/s/s is not dangerous. It is uncomfortable, but in a high speed train you are expected to be sitting down.
Also you wouldn't need to put drinks away. As I said, that's the acceleration of a Toyota Corolla. You would need the drinks to be covered though.
The limiting factor in longitudinal acceleration in trains is that we expect people to be standing up for the whole trip. This isn't the case in a high speed train.
As for curves - the solution is not to go through any sharp curves unless you are already close to a stop and would have to slow down anyways.
Perhaps this would be interesting to you, "Passenger Stability Within Moving Railway Vehicles: Limits on Maximum Longitudinal Acceleration".
You don't need to wait for everyone to be seated. You're not going to fall over at 0.2G or 0.3G, it will just be uncomfortable. But you should plan for everyone to be able to find a seat.
Ah, wasn't aware of that. Thank you.
The whole reason the Houston to Dallas route is workable is that it does not stop at all in between.
Feeder trains bring new passengers on board the primary train. They leave the station a little ahead of the incoming primary train in order to accelerate up to its speed just at the rendezvous point.
Another empty feeder had already rendezvoused with the primary before the station and passengers disembarking were offloaded onto it.
In short, the feeders can be small. The primary train need not stop at all the points in between.
I would love to model this graphically.
The major Midwestern cities are remarkably close in distance from Chicago as major French cities are from Paris, and in terms of population counts, the US has consistently larger cities.
In France, the cities are dense with decent to great transit.
In the US, you have low, flat, sprawling cities with no real transit to speak of. You have to drive.
car rental, ridehailing, metro bus/train, taxi, friends/family pickup, etc., just as with air travel.
Clearly not having overheads of airport security will probably reduce the minimum distance required for this, but as a first pass it's good data source.
Most local transit systems are run by people who drive though, and it shows in how bad the majority of the system is.
Historically, the cheapest ways to ship anything are by sea, by rail, and by truck, in that order. Airplanes are still inordinately more expensive but folks are willing to pay for that quick delivery that trucks and rail simply can't do.
Kind of like how, supposedly, 4G networks were more widespread in pockets of Africa you'd never expect before they were widespread in the US, because those parts of Africa didn't have 2G/3G infrastructure to depreciate and customers to migrate off before 4G could be deployed.
Right not politicians are looking at things like hyperloop which maybe can be useful in the future, but right now are power point slides and other hype. Instead we could go with something that works - there is plenty of things much better than we have.
I'm very ignorant on the topic, so please enlighten me if I'm missing some stuff, which is very possible. I'd honestly love to know.