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A tale of two trains: Brightline vs California high speed rail

aociswundumho

Capitalist Pig
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Florida's Brightline and California's high speed rail show the difference between capitalism and socialism when it comes to providing infrastructure. Yes, the market can and should provide infrastructure.

Brightline is:

1) Privately funded
2) Cost about 20 - 50 million dollars per mile
3) Was built in under 5 years.
4) Is fully operational, runs to 125mph, is profitable, and expanding.

California's high speed rail project is:

1) Government funded
2) The current projected cost for the full system is now over $200 million dollars per mile - over four times higher than brightline.
3) Voters approved the train in 2008 with a promise to connect san francisco to LA by 2020. But construction didn’t even begin until 2015, and nearly two decades later, not a single train is running. Meanwhile, cost overruns have pushed the price tag past $100 billion.


The results speak for themselves: one train serves the people, the other serves bureaucracies. One didn’t cost taxpayers a dime, the other cost them a fortune.

 
NJBob said:
The Acela does more than that on the Northeast Corridor running from DC to Boston.
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Plenty of trains are capable of higher speeds it just needs a straight track.
125 isnt fast at all.
 
Peter said:
Plenty of trains are capable of higher speeds it just needs a straight track.
125 isnt fast at all.
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No, it’s not, but the U.S. already has (relatively) high speed trains. The tracks were designed years before high speed trains existed.
 
NJBob said:
No, it’s not, but the U.S. already has (relatively) high speed trains. The tracks were designed years before high speed trains existed.
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Erm, the UK invented the train so we have a huge problem with old tracks and lines designed before high speed.
Most lines are twisty with no real straights which is why we invented tilting trains that can go round corners real fast.
 
Yeah, but here in the U.S. we have over sized cars and trucks and they go fast down a straight highway.
 
Peter said:
Oh wow 125mph.

Those sorts of insane speeds were only reached in Europe in 1976 in the UK.
Wow, welcome to the train tech of the 70's.
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Lol.

Japan bullet trains reach 200 mph. China’s maglev does 268 mph. China is testing a prototype that has a top speed of 620 mph, as fast as a commercial airliner.
 
Nickyjo said:
Why the beef about publicly funded trains? Europe’s seem to work fine.
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Ours work okay. I enjoyed a couple Amtrak trips I made in a sleeper between Illinois and Texas.

Do a lot of people ride our long distance trains?
 
Grizzly Adams said:
I did. Once. In 1988. From St Paul to Belton. In winter.

It sucked.
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I found it relaxing, though a little slow. But sleeping on the train was nice. Dining with complete strangers right in front of you 3 feet away wasn't my favorite part though. My wife and I did the trip from Illinois to Texas together,and then somewhat more than a year later I drove to Texas and did the trip back on the Texas Eagle solo.
 
Grizzly Adams said:
Anything you want. Make that shit happen in central California.

You can't?

Then, again, SO WHAT?
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What a weird response.

A high speed rail from LA to SF makes sense, and will eventually come to pass. They should have gone with a design-build, not to exceed contract to have it built.
 
I was far from driving, so that's neither here nor there. We rode coach. I can only imagine the same trip today would be ten times worse since I'm not ten years old.

My mom still talks about how she freaked out when I told her I got off the train in Havre, MT when I was "going to the bathroom."
 
The CA train was federally funded through billion dollar pork spending bills. Its going to end up exactly like the TX super-collider. The project will go just long enough to get the major construction done as a gift to the unions and then the federal money will dry up and whole project will be canceled. You could have predicted this a decade ago.
 
RF667799 said:
Ours work okay. I enjoyed a couple Amtrak trips I made in a sleeper between Illinois and Texas.

Do a lot of people ride our long distance trains?
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Dunno. I think that train service makes more sense in the east coast, say between Boston and DC. In the west, leaving aside the SF Bay Area and BART, we have — in addition to our addiction to cars — geography and suburbia in play. I could imagine our Central Valleys seeing huge growth, from Sacramento to Bakersfield, looking a bit like the east coast with barely separated cities, but going downtown to take a train from one town to the next is not in California genes, that is, in the minds of people who often measure distance by minutes (freeway time) instead of miles.
 
You do know there is a substantial difference in the topography of the two states, yes?

A state where the elevation varies between sea level and a MAX altitude of 345 feet (in the panhandle not on the Brightline route) is going to most assuredly have a DRASTICALLY lower cost compared to a state that is chock full of mountains, yes?

But yeah you, you got them now! Comparing a flat railroad across Florida is absolutely comparable to California with thousands if not tens of thousands of feet in elevation change between any two given cities.
 
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