The Economist has a great article about the US plan for high speed rail and the problems this will cause with our current freight rail system. Apparently we’re already running out of rail capacity near our cities, and without seperate rail lines we could hurt our thriving freight rail industry. I absolutely think we should use California’s HSR as a model, damn the cost. However, I recognize how tough this would be in WA with the current anti-tax attitude and our car-based spending models (not that CA doesn’t have a similar model, they just have had more money). Maybe our improvements aren’t so bad after all, and if we ever do gather the political willpower for seperate rail we’ll be leaving our freight system in very good shape.
As a side note, I’m intrigued by the discussion about coal and rail. 45% by volume of material we move around in trains is coal (wow!). Before the recession, the cost of shipping coal shot up along with the cost of oil, causing the coal industry to get nervous. One big fear about peak oil is that it may cause an increase in coal use. Coal has earned it’s reputation as enemy of mankind, as it has far more global warming potential than any other fuel. But if the costs to ship coal around go up along with the cost of oil, maybe this won’t be quite as large effect as feared. (unless, of course, we do something really stupid like allow coal powered engines back on the track…)
TTP had a good follow up on the Economist piece:
http://www.thetransportpolitic.com/2010/07/24/the-u-s-emphasis-on-passenger-rail-and-the-future-of-freight/
Good article, but this strikes me as a little off:
“Freight lines that run through the center of cities should be moved to new routes that detour, allowing passenger services to take over these access corridors much more essential for people than for cargo.”
Can you imagine Seattle, San Francisco, or Oakland with freight rail bypassing the city? Ports almost always become big cities, and rail is just important in these cities for freight as it is for people (arguably more so). This means there’s no cheap solution for Seattle – if we want fast trains without sacraficing our freight, we’ll need another downtown train tunnel.
Oh, and aren’t we all now a bit more appreciative of high school math problems? If a freight train travels from Seattle to Portland going 50 miles per hour, and a 180 mile per hour passenger train leaves Seattle 2 hours later, how many passenger trains could have travelled to Portland leaving 30 minutes apart if the freight train ran on seperate tracks?
B-b-but….I thought tunneling under Seattle posed an “unprecedented risk”. And, you want to talk cost-overrun, check out what it cost them in Europe to create high-speed passenger rail. Think 10-20 times the original estimates to get the picture.
But, who knows, maybe people don’t worry so much about unstable soils or cost overruns when it’s something they want to do.
The coal could be deceptive. When I was in college I interned at the Alabama State Port Authority Office of International Trade (don’t laugh, at the time Mobile was 13th largest port in the nation, now that the expansion is complete I believe it is 8th) for six months. Anyway, what I found interesting is Alabama is one of the largest producers of coal and Alabama Power one of the largest consumers but we exported almost all of our ‘dirty coal’ to China and imported ‘clean coal’ from South America. While alot of that moved by barge, Alabama has one of the most extensive rail networks (King Cotton legacy) in the nation so alot moved by rail.
[sco] As I’ve said, I’m fine with risk. The issue is making Seattle pay for cost over runs. But that’s a different thread. Plus a train tunnel would be a standard scale bore, not something you could fit a 5 story building in…
[Anc] What this story made me think about is that although we use coal because it’s cheap as hell, it’s also quite bulky. So bulky that even shipping the stuff in multiple-mile long trains is sensitive to the price of oil. This should extend to shipping as well.
Of course the bad news in your comment is that they produce and consume the stuff, which means they could just stop the export/import process and just use dirty coal. But my hope is that our regulations would be at least good enough to stop that (that’s the reason they do the import/export, right?).
Yes it’s environmental regulations and PR that drive them to do this. IIRC Southern Company (owner of Alabama Power, Georgia Power, Mississippi Power and Gulf Power) gets around 45% of it’s electricity from coal, 30% from Natural Gas and 10% from Oil.
So yeah, they are very vulnerable to Clean Air Act Lawsuits and bad press.
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