There is a market, if only they could figure out how to serve it.
PS - if they added the ability to take your car along with you it would open up an even larger market.
I was approached about a job in the US recently but I declined.
But hight speed rail down either coast, why not? You'd share the same infrastructure as slower commuter trains, have large towns from N to S to stop by, and surely there's a market for people who want to travel in comfort from Seattle to SF.
On the East Coast you’d need to exercise eminent domain to make it work. As it so happens, a high speed line would run through a lot of seriously wealthy neighborhoods. These are the wealthiest and most politically-connected areas of the country.
On the West Coast, you have A LOT of big mountains and rugged terrain, the likes of which you don’t see in the Northern European plain, and also, some other seriously wealthy (and NIMBY) neighborhoods. There are a lot of people who resisted building the BART through the peninsula and Marin. Caltrain’s already got people suiciding on it all the time, and they needed to build the high speed line through it. The commuter infrastructure isn’t really there.
Well, you may get your NY to LA route because the midwest area is quietly building out their passenger rail capacity for their own needs and desires. Everything they are doing is discrete, incremental projects that have an attainable budget and timeline. They are using normal rolling stock so speeds are limited to 110mph, but they are laying the groundwork to allow for faster speeds later on.
To be fair, it was Chicago to LA ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Los_Angeles_(train)
One important aspect is that China needs capacity: It has a very large population and also has two peak periods during which literally hundreds of millions of people want to travel during the same week. I think they've concluded that planes alone are never going to handle that demand and that trains offer a much larger capacity.
According to Google, the road distance between New York and San Francisco is 4670.6 km. The travel time means that the train will take 15 hours (12 hours + 3 hours difference between the time zones).
This means that the average velocity of the train has to be 311 km/h.
At least in Europe, there exist few train lines that even allow such speed (only in France and Spain):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail#/media/File:Hi...
We're stuck with limited capacity, grossly different rail systems in each country.. I was on an international chartered train from the Netherlands to Germany recently and while the locomotive supported both systems, they had to change drivers at the border.
As a result intra-EU train travel is far more expensive and more hassle than air travel. With air a low-fare airline culture has developed, with rail this can never happen without massive infrastructure investment. All the seats are already full so why reduce their cost?
So rail in Europe is more of a national phenomenon. It's not like it's a serious alternative to flying. Most countries in Europe are too small to make national flights a thing so rail is mostly used within countries.
All those things are self imposed, and they are strangely only enforced on airplanes.
Like the 300+ lives aboard a train are worth nothing
Planes are much more sensible to all of those potential threat. That is why we ended up with such drastic security. Although I have to say, in a lot of places, security is way more relaxed. If you travel from the E.U to the E.U you have way less check and queue time.
This was attempted on the TGV during the terrorist wave of the mid-90s in France but, fortunately, it did not detonate.
That being said, I think that they have X-ray checks now on TGVs.
I think what many people seem to be missing is that you don't need to kill 3000 people. If you kill 1000, spread out across 10 cities, you're going to cause a lot of fear and chaos.
Nope.
And I really don’t want to live in a country where boarding a train is as painful as boarding a plane. Millions of people are using train to commute, adding security checks would totally kill the train.
Should the first car of a TGV explode at 350+ km/h I think it would work as a terror attack.
Yet, although train security is nil, it never happens [0]. I'm not sure why. My first guess is there are not that many terrorists. We probably could ease the security on planes with few ill effects.
[0] There has been train attacks or hijacks but no bombs AFAIK.
I didn't get checked for metal objects etc, but there is no point. You can't get to the cab from the train anyway. And the impact of knifings/shootings is the same as in a busy shopping centre. We don't do metal detections there on every visitor.
So the main terrorism risk really relevant to it being a mode of transport rather than any other crowded place, is bombing and thus derailment of the entire train. And that is something that is checked for, at least here in Spain.
It is true that it is "checked" in Spain; I experienced it this summer while going from Sevilla to Cordoba. However the check is (in my experience) quite superficial; also, as it creates long lines of people that get upset that they may miss their train, it is expedited and many things do not in fact pass through the X-ray machine. And finally, it is not checked on all trains; we were checked from Sevilla to Cordoba (the train was going all the way up to Barcelona) but there were no checks on the return leg.
So, while it would be trivial to bring bad things aboard a train in France, it seems that it wouldn't be difficult in Spain either.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Thalys_train_attack
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_15:17_to_Paris
Spain in 2004:
Pre 2001, there was more than 10 hijack almost every year.
Trains are left to themselves, there is no surveillance.
Ill intentioned people can change dynamic of the attack, instead of needing 2 planes and use them as kinetic projectiles against buildings, they'd need an armed guy on 10 trains
The end result in terms of human losses is the same because a guy with a gun can go through each and every compartment and off everybody before the police would even know what's going on.
Multiply that scenario by 10 or 20 or 30 and you have the worst national tragedy in the history of the nation.
I am thankful because if people on HN can't conceptualize that, then the odds of some goatfuc*er in the mountains of Afghanistan doing it are even lower....but still people thought they could not conceptualize the attacks happened in the 2000s. Everybody remembers the first, but there were also London and Madrid.
Also, your hypothesis is that a single person could kill everybody on a train, but in reality they'd get assaulted with suitcases, the doors between carriages would be barricaded, somebody would pull the emergency brake and people would flee, etc. This was actually tried once in France, and the attacker managed to kill zero (0) people before they were overpowered.
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20201217-thalys-train-gun...
There would be zero risk for the terrorist. There are no baggage check, and no one makes sure the owners of each luggage are on board. In theory each suitcase should have a label with the owner's name and address, but that too is not checked (and even if it was it would be the easiest thing to fake).
I just don't understand why it doesn't happen. I think the main reason is because there are very few actual terrorists, contrary to what everyone wants us to believe.
The amount of people per square foot surface, the fact that there is no way out and the fact that police cannot rush to the scene
This is a really strange take - security on airplanes was introduced due to hijackings, in which case the airplane can be used as a very lethal weapon to attack most anything, really. You are much more limited in what damage you can cause by hijacking a train, since trains are limited by where the tracks go. Worst you can do is probably derail the train by going to fast in a curve and potentially hurt people living near the curve, or worse, slam into a station and cause damage in and around it. Still, a fraction of what a hijacked airplane can do in terms of damage.
There are 100-200 people on a train, some have 300.
No security at all. You only need an ill intentioned guy with a gun and it's over for all those on board. They'd move across compartments and off everybody.
Multiply that by the amount of trains which travel everyday and you'd get a pretty chilling scenario.
Is it, though? There are a lot of trains where you can't even get to the locomotive while the train is moving, and I couldn't find any train accident in modern history[1] where all passengers died.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_disaster...
Put a bomb in a TGV, and you'll kill people nearby, but not in the other wagons. So it's not a particularly attractive target compared to say, a shopping mall.
Terrorists planned to derail one in the 1990s by destroying rails, they were thwarted beforehand. But even if they succeeded, TGV is designed specifically to resist derailment and not fold on itself like a regular train, so it's unlikely most passengers would have been killed.
Not sure about that. In 2015 they did a demo of a new TGV line and the train derailed just by going a little too fast in a curve [0]. It killed eleven people on board and injured 42 others.
The number of dead and injured is so low because there were very few people on board. If a bomb exploded on the first car of a TGV the number of casualties would be high.
So I stand by what I said and I claim once again that you only need one ill intentioned person with a firearm and everybody on board is basically done, they'd move across compartments and off everybody.
There are thousands of trains which all have that same vulnerability, so a coordinated attack would have a toll much higher than everything seen before.
People have a blindspot, they'd claim that such attack would never take place because the "production value" is not the same as explosive attacks.
I don't think hoping that ill intentioned people hold "production value" as rigorous parameter when planning an attack is a valuable strategy
It's not like a mall
> There is no multiplier effect
Your multiplier effect is the initial factor advantage of how easy it is to pack a firearm on a train.
A depressed kid could do it, easy target to recruit online, and doesn't even need firearm training considering that it would be as easy as shooting sardines in a barrel given the physical space in a train.
So basically an ill intentioned group would need to recruit 20 depressed kids , put them on 20 different trains departing at approximately the same time and they'd cause a toll in excess of everything seen before
A train is not a mall.
What if the train stops? This can be done by any personell quickly. Doors and windows of trains can be opened everywhere, they are designed that way. Stop the train, intercom and tell people to leave the train and the situation is over.
Chances are this will turn out differently than you assume
The TSA does not seem very effective [1], and terrorism via plane hasn't killed very many people since 9/11. Cockpits are re-inforced, passengers will fight back. It's hard to highjack a plane.
Abolishing the TSA in airports and slightly increasing vaccination requirements would be a net win/win for life and liberty.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-...
Even a lot of the more recent European high speed routes were built primarily for political reasons and carry little actual traffic. The high speed line between France and Spain has just 2 trains a day.
In the US, the distances are so much greater and the population density so much lower that it just doesn't make sense apart from a few small regions.
Covet the Urban Transport networks, the pedestrian-friendly cities, the mixed use suburban districts, yes; but long distance high speed rail is one thing that just doesn't translate.