It’s funny to read this article painting electric trains as a great novelty, when the majority of trains in western Europe (excluding certain island states) have been electric for decades. But good for california, sounds like a nice improvement!
Or that the Northeast Corridor (DC>Philly>NYC>Boston) is all electrified and has the fastest passenger train on the continent (Amtrak Acela can do 150mph, soon to be replaced with a 165mph variant that can do like +30 in turns). And that NJ Transit on that line (following US 1 and I-95) is electric along that massive population concentration. But yeah, good for California. I get it, running power is a really expensive project but at least this section goes back at least as far as the GG1 loco days.
America is a petrostate that uses diesel and coal for most industrial purposes and trains have usually been used as cargo movers and not people movers, so they usually use diesel.
Thanks. I was going to look it up today. I am going to try and build a LEGO version of it. I was unsure if herzog was the manufacturer or the operator. But I figured either was it was a good place to start.
If you go, pay attention to the schedule. They still run one steam loco per day, so two round trips, but most runs up and down the mountain are powered by the biodiesel fleet. The cog railroad dieselized to reduce operational & maintenance costs, and to reduce emissions. Parts for the steamers were getting hard to source, and while the coal smoke coming out of the steam locomotive makes for good photos, it’s not always the best image, if you know what I mean.
Hopefully the implementation is done in a well and thoughtful way, such as connected stations in city centers and outskirt towns.
It would also be nice to see these stations interconnected with transit hubs such as subways/trams/buses, and have a pedestrian orientation focus with cycle infrastructure included.
It would be a shame to see these station built outside of walking distance of any surrounding communities in the middle of nowhere with a carpark all around. Something similar to a Walmart Supercenter parking lot.
You can see on the California government website where the current plan is to integrate with each part of the city. Many of the bigger population centres will have stations right at (what sound like to me as) major transit hubs. Unfortunately, the 2030 target is for operation between Bakersfield - Madera, so the parts around SF and LA will still take a bit longer than that.
I can understand your skepticism, but you may be slightly misinformed. High speed rail corridors don’t pop up overnight, and they take longer if you want it to be built as economically, safe, and well-thought out as possible. For this project we are about 15 years after voters approved the idea 2008, so that part is true as you say. So planning is done to get the most efficient and effective path which takes years, consulting the public takes years, building it takes more years, then testing and commissioning is the cherry on top. The American idea of “I can do this all by myself without any European/Asian help” is certainly slowing things down and making it expensive as well. Due to inflation the costs also will rise but so will the cost of any alternative be it maintaining highway systems, managing traffic and pollution.
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