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Hmmm... while flying on an airplane puts no fear in me at all, a train speeding along at 120 mph just seems scary!

The scary part of this is the 38.3 million dollars per mile price tag, and that doesn't include the land acquisition, and if they go with Maglev it will be over a billion per mile final cost. Then we have operating expenses. Now will someone smarter then I am please do some math and see where this is a great investment. A lot of pocket jingle to spread around here. How many people make this commute daily? Tourists will still drive so they can have their cars and go North a different route.
I love trains, but IMHO this is pie in the sky waste, and the construction cost is way out of line.
I would guess rail can be had for $1000 a ton, and I know a great tie can be had for less then $100, so for 300 miles I say you have 75 million in rail, 100 million in ties (should be less) 70 million for plates and allow another 70 mill for anchors and spikes. Then there is the cost of ballast, building bridges, grading, and labor. Then we string the wire. I know what it will cost, and I know what it should cost. The difference is what ticks me off. (don't forget they need to acquire the land too, not included in the price). You pad the price with EPA fees, engineering fees, architect fees, inspection fees, flagmen fees, utility fees.
Sorry I am a bit Jaded.
Charlie

Tampa to Orlando, the state already owns the right of way. It is the median of interstate 4. Orlando to Miami, they would need to buy the right of way. A friend of mine read that the cost of regular commuter rail service is such that it would cost less if the government just paid everyone $50,000.00 and let them drive. I'm not sure if that figure takes highway construction costs into consideration. I read or heard something somewhere, it may have been an interview on tv, that the reason why we should forget about high speed rail service in North America for the near term is that in Europe, Japan, and China where they are running high speed trains, they already had established passenger rail service pretty much blanketing the country. Here we don't have the basic service in much of the country, so putting in high speed rail in places other than the North East Corridor, or between Los Angeles and San Diego or the San Francisco Bay area doesn't make a lot of sense.

I can see where Florida makes sense for rail service. They have enough retired people who may no longer be driving to provide potential passengers. The other factor for Florida is that they have no hills or mountains. The landscape has some rolling hills in the North part of the state, but they are very gentle.

They are talking about high speed rail in So Cal between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, but it would seem that Cajon Pass would slow things down quite a bit. Even between Victorville and Las Vegas there is still a big hill east of Baker where the elevation changes from 2000 feet to 4500 feet in about 10 miles and then back down to 2000 feet in the next 10 miles.

Charlie B Wrote:The scary part of this is the 38.3 million dollars per mile price tag, and that doesn't include the land acquisition, and if they go with Maglev it will be over a billion per mile final cost. Then we have operating expenses. Now will someone smarter then I am please do some math and see where this is a great investment. A lot of pocket jingle to spread around here. How many people make this commute daily? Tourists will still drive so they can have their cars and go North a different route.

Isn't America broke? I mean, where do the governments expect this money to come from? The already overburdened U.S. workforce?

From nothing to high speed rail is a big jump.

Here in Ohio, we will be getting about $400mm to upgrade existing lines to reestablish passenger rail between Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati. Max speed will be 79mph. Not high speed, but an alternative to the stress of driving. Currently Interstate 71 (which connects the three C's) is at capacity in many stretches, so rail makes sense here.

I think reestablishing medium speed rail such as the above is a good compromise, but Amtrak tells us that we'd get more riders with high speed.

I personally am a fan of re-establishing routes on abandoned rights of way from my city (Columbus). This wouldn't be high speed, but you'd get the benefit of not having to build right of way from scratch - you'd be leveraging works that were built when labor was a LOT cheaper! I also think it would be beneficial to establish these routes OFF of current commute paths; people who are interested in commuting by train would drive development of new residential areas that are centered on rail. A big complaint against rail is that it is not convenient to where people currently live - cars have scattered us, and that's a valid complaint. The idea above would allow car-centric communities to stay that way, or have more time to change to other modes of transportation.

Unfortunately, I don't think most of the U.S. likes to plan for development in that manner. Subsidizing rail to nowhere would be a very hard sell!

tetters Wrote:

Charlie B Wrote:The scary part of this is the 38.3 million dollars per mile price tag, and that doesn't include the land acquisition, and if they go with Maglev it will be over a billion per mile final cost. Then we have operating expenses. Now will someone smarter then I am please do some math and see where this is a great investment. A lot of pocket jingle to spread around here. How many people make this commute daily? Tourists will still drive so they can have their cars and go North a different route.

Isn't America broke? I mean, where do the governments expect this money to come from? The already overburdened U.S. workforce?

These funds are coming from the government bail out money the feds are passing out to try to get people back to work by rebuilding infrastructure. I think Fluesheet is right however, it would be money better spent to build light rail lines from where people live to where they work, than to spend all of the extra money for high speed rail. I think much of the North East is ripe for a system patterned after the interurban lines that used to exist prior to WW2.

Russ Bellinis Wrote:Fluesheet is right however, it would be money better spent to build light rail lines from where people live to where they work, than to spend all of the extra money for high speed rail. I think much of the North East is ripe for a system patterned after the interurban lines that used to exist prior to WW2.

Actually, I was proposing something a little more out of the box than building to where people live. To some degree, I don't think it's possible, especially in the short term (10-20 years) to build lines into existing sprawling suburbs. I've got co-workers, friends and relatives that live in one low density subdivision after the other, and they state, rightly, that they don't think rail is worth it because no one lives near rail and prefer their current lifestyle. These same friends, etc., are also not in the least interested in having a railroad built into their car-centric neighborhoods for expense, safety, NIMBY or other reasons.

There are, however, people of all stripes that would ride rail - for environmental, convenience, economic or even romantic reasons.

My proposal, after reading Russ's post, is similar to the interurban lines he described, with a twist. The proposal would be to build (or re-develop) rail where people aren't! Old rights of way in Ohio pass through small town after small town (small meaning less than 10 intersections). My supposition is that the people mentioned above would be attracted to those locations precisely because they are near rail (the opposite of my suburb and exurb friends). This mindset would lend itself to denser development - to stay close to the station - that is walkable so you don't HAVE to get in the car to go to the grocery, bank, postoffice, etc.

Change this fundamental would take decades to be accepted. Forcing it on people would be a mistake. This strategy would allow those who are used to a car-based lifestyle to continue in that manner, while those who are interested in using the car less would have that option - allowing larger change to occur over time.

But as noted in my previous post, no one would vote to fund a rail line that doesn't go anywhere important, and if it goes somewhere important, no one will vote for it because they don't want it in their backyard. I'll make you a deal - I'll vote to maintain your roads if you vote for my rails!

The one thing that got me, a fairly conservative individual, thinking about this is looking at google maps and seeing all these unused rights of way. The work that went into those is WELL amortized - I like the idea of recycling 100 year old labor!

And of course, it all leads to the philosophical issues of "should your tax dollars pay for my railroad?" But that is beyond the scope of discussion in this forum.

Fluesheet Wrote:Here in Ohio, we will be getting about $400mm to upgrade existing lines to reestablish passenger rail between Cleveland, Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati. Max speed will be 79mph. Not high speed, but an alternative to the stress of driving. Currently Interstate 71 (which connects the three C's) is at capacity in many stretches, so rail makes sense here.

Ohio's plan has some serious flaws, but it's a start. If the initial investment is followed up correctly like the Cascades corridor or Hiawatha service then Ohioans have the beginning of a sustainable system. if it's left to languish, however, like the Missouri trains, then we're just wasting our money. Three daily round-trips is just the beginning. Ideally we should have hourly service with twelve daily departures and spurs serving Toledo/Detroit and Youngstown/Pittsburgh. All of that coupled with increased national service along the lake will make a successful network. As it is planned, however, with a miserable average speed, a Cincinnati terminal near nothing, and DMUs, I'm not holding my breath. Again, this is just a start, and with the proper investments in the future it can be made into a world-class system.

You fellas who live up north where there was a thiving commuter rail business at one time, and have large cities with suburbs fanning out around them have a different situation. I can understand your position on re-establishing rail service. But down here in Florida, where the only real rail service for practically a hundred years has been down the east coast (due to Flagler, et. al.) and people are not conditioned to use rail travel. Especially not over here on the west coast of Florida. The closest steel rails to where I live are from Ft. Myers up to Punta Gorda or Port Charlotte, possible as far north as Sarasota, maybe 45 or 50 miles, where a Mystery/Dinner train runs on the weekends. Yeah ... we have bus service in Ft. Myers, but it operates at a loss each year due to lack of ridership because no one wants to wait on an uncovered bench in the hot sun (because the bus you wanted was early due to not having to stop to pick anyone up and was 250 yds. past your stop when you got to the bus stop) and the next bus doesn't come for 2 hours or more.

Amtrak hits Orlando and cuts sharply east and down the coast to Miami. They have commuter service in Miami with those Bombardier double-deck push-pull cars that run at a major loss every year. That means that we over here on the west coast are helping to subsidize the line with our taxes but get no benefit from it whatsoever.

Someone a couple of posts above this one commented that tourists would drive from Orlando to Tampa and take an alternate route back north. RIGHT ON! That's what happens thousands of times a week. The distance is such that no one who lives in Orlando works in Tampa and the reverse is also true. So residents wouldn't use the high speed rail line either. Yes, some jobs would be created for the amount of time it would take to build such a piece of infrastructure, but those jobs would go to companies from up north whose workers would come down here for the length of the build and return to their homes up north when it was completed. There are no companies down here with backgrounds in railroad building. Not many carpenters are needed to lay rail. Some jobs would be created to operate the rail line, but not really enough jobs to make a big enough difference.

There was a petition against the bill to build, but the Liberal House up in Tallahase saw Federal money to spend and passed the bill anyway. So if you think about where the Fed gets its money, you guys would be paying for this rail line down here, too.

And it will be a burden to the taxpayers of Florida for decades to come!

bil

About 20 years ago, they started building extensive freeways around here. At the time, the freeways were planned to run in the middle of nowhere, through cotton fields and to places so far out I could not imagine anyone would want to live. Yet, the freeways got built at great expense - and sure enough the land around them was quickly developed. The taxpayer expense of the freeway stimulated growth (the developers were quite pleased). Of course, the new houses were mostly bought by investors who only planned to resell a year later and make a profit - and we all know how that turned out in the end... Of course, the freeway was cheaper per mile than this railroad . And yet they still talk about more freeways and more tax dollars to further out in timbuktu to spark development again . Personally, I would rather encourage people to just live closer to where they work rather than subsidize their transportation costs.