With the success of Abenomics making orders from Tokyo a bit more affordable, and with yours truly having successfully escaped the snowbelt for a bit of a pay raise and an inexpensive Sharpstown crash pad, I thought I might pick up the recently re-released 383 series in N gauge. (Some people start fights, some people smoke rocks, I collect Japanese trains.)
So I punch in Osaka to Nagano (the 383′s home turf) in Google, and it sends me through… Tokyo.
What in blazes?
Sure, Shinkansen is fast. But the 383 is no slouch – it cruises at a hare above 80, and tilts into curves. The closest US analogue is Amtrak Cascades between Portland and Seattle. Surely there must be something up. Especially since Google’s second choice routes us over… Kintetsu?
Right. Not all Shinano services operate the Osaka-Nagoya segment. So let’s stack the deck in favor of the 383. What can we get? A perusal of multiple departure times and settings suggests there’s no way to get Google to route you over the Osaka-Nagoya segment via the 383. You’re on Kintetsu or you’re on the Nozomi, period.
With a 6:00pm departure, you can swing a 7-minute transfer at Nagoya, which is in the realm of “shit you’d be an idiot to try in the US, but since it’s Japan you’re probably okay.” That gets you some decent Shinano seat time:
Except, glance at the itinerary, and right there below the 383 is… via Tokyo.
That routing nearly doubles your distance, from 280 miles to 470. And all it costs is… a half hour. Even with the best-possible timing, the most you can hope to gain riding state of the art trains on a direct route over the conventional rail network is… a half hour.
How indirect is the Tokyo routing? Put it this way. It’s like going from Houston to Dallas… via Seguin.
That’s what we’re talking about. That’s what you can do with a high speed rail network. You can route Austin to Houston via Temple and BCS. You can route Dallas to Houston via Fort Worth and Temple. You can do all sorts of crazy. And you’ll still end up with times that are faster than driving, or 80mph trains on Union Pacific trackage that you’ve upgraded at great expense.
It is 75% more expensive though.
This also suggests that the oft-derided Palmdale diversion in CA isn’t that big a deal either (though I’m not sure about the capital cost of crossing the transverse ranges twice instead of once).
Oh yeah, certainly. The Nozomi is tre expensivo. If it was me, I’d be enjoying the scenery on Kintetsu and the 383.
But the question is now, suppose that there was no existing passenger service on the Nagoya-Nagano line, suppose that it was owned by an ornery freight operator that doesn’t want to play nice with passenger operators. Would it be worth it to spend a bunch of cash upgrading the trackage and signaling systems to run 80mph trains when you could just route everyone through Tokyo?
Nooooope.
“or 80mph trains on Union Pacific trackage that you’ve upgraded at great expense.”
It’s not _great_ expense in comparison to the expense of the HSR alternative. (that doesn’t mean HSR isn’t something to do eventually, but upgrading the existing lines _can_ be a good first step).
It absolutely is. Most of the Texas freight rail network (at least within the “triangle”) is at capacity, so you’re looking at laying new ties and rail either way. But FRA-compliant trains in mixed traffic weigh more than off-the-shelf Japanese or German designs, so you end up spending more per mile on track and structures than you would if you just built the damn system from scratch. Likewise, Texas doesn’t have PTC, so you’re looking at installing that either way as well.
Catenary is a sizable capital expense, but there’s nothing to stop you from building HSR on new alignment and initially operating with diesel trains. My understanding is that CA’s initial Merced-Fresno segment will do exactly this, as it will initially be used by the San Joaquins operating at 110.
“This also suggests that the oft-derided Palmdale diversion in CA isn’t that big a deal either”
It is one thing for periphery-periphery journeys like Nagano-Osaka to be routed indirectly. But the trunk routes to/from Tokyo are about as direct as possible given Japan’s topography. If the LA-Central Valley corridor is unnecessarily lengthened, it affects pretty much every traveler in a future West Coast HSR network. Not only LA-NoCal, but also Phoenix-NoCal and San Diego-NoCal. That is a bigger price to pay.
“but there’s nothing to stop you from building HSR on new alignment and initially operating with diesel trains”
I can see how the speed of HSR can make up somewhat for non-ideal alignments, but if the first stage were to be running slower diesels over them, that would seem to compromise the viability of the system.
Certainly, it limits your flexibility. But again. Dallas to Houston via Temple and BCS (the “T-bone” routing) is 300 miles. At 110mph plus 30 minutes for stops and their associated accel/decel that’s a 3:15 trip, as opposed to 3:30 on I-45. Houston to Austin via Temple and BCS is 250 miles, or 2:45, which just about matches the drive time.
And you get to carry forward all the investment on track and ROW into your ultimate system, whereas money spent upgrading the freight network is made redundant as soon as you open HSR on new alignment.
Palmdale adds about 40 miles and one stop… which at the speeds we’re talking about is maybe 15-20 minutes of travel time. It’s not a huge deal. The Grapevine is more direct but it’s a lot steeper.
If you don’t ever see your corridor having a need for more than 80-100 mph, you’ll do fine upgrading your freight network. A lot of track in Texas (though I don’t know about the triangle) is already good for 79 and the limit there is that the RRs didn’t want to install cab signals. The Class Is in Texas will definitely have PTC on their mains but it remains to be seen if the FRA will relax its other regulations on PTC-controlled lines.
If you see your corridor needing 200 mph trains some day, you might as well just build that. People love “incremental” investments but sometimes it just doesn’t make sense. You can’t build an at-grade light rail and then incrementally turn it into the Lexington Ave line, and you can’t build an 80 mph freight corridor with 1-degree curves and incrementally turn it into the Shinkansen.
What about the Texas Central Railway? If they build first, you can do an L shape the other way and route everyone going San Antonio-Dallas via Houston, but that cuts off Austin and would make me sad.
Sigh. Your spamfilter eats my comments. (Email changed to avoid it.)
Okay, so Houston – Seguin – Austin is something you “can” do with high-speed rail. The question then becomes, is that something you SHOULD do? Just because we can theoretically justify left-hooks and U-turns and all sorts of (dare I say?) zany routings doesn’t nullify the fact that a straight a line as we can possibly get is going to be better every time without one hell of a ridership hook or environmental/political/historical obstacle standing in the middle of a straight-line alignment to justify the detour.
I think San Antonio, another 35~50 miles out, probably provides adequate reason to hook the line – but once you run out to San Antonio, I’m not sure that a right turn up to Austin/Dallas is going to light the world on fire when run up against the possibility of New Orleans – Houston – San Antonio (or perhaps even, somewhat counterintuitively, New Orleans – Houston – Austin – San Antonio) as a distinct line with a connection to Corpus Christi – San Antonio – Austin – Dallas/Fort Worth as a separate and distinct line. There is generally an upper bound to how large a line can get before it needs to be split – even if the split is purely artificial, such as a cross-platform transfer.
You’re right, Houston-Seguin-DFW is poopy routing. The point was to show the futility of upgrading the conventional rail lines, to point out that hundreds of millions spent giving UP or BNSF upgraded rails and a fresh new PTC system would still end up slower than something as eminently ludicrous as… Houston-to-DFW-via-Seguin.
Whatever happens, you gotta figure we’re going to end up with a DFW-Austin-San Antonio spine and a side leg to Houston that intersects it somewhere outside of Austin or Temple or Waco or perhaps some combination of those. Or maybe you bend the DFW-SA spine inward a little and put the Wye outside of Hearne, ’93 style
I think trying to avoid ever having to play ball with UP and/or BNSF is a laudable goal on its face – but I somehow doubt that it’s 100% doable without spending dollars on the cost of expensive downtown land acquisition to save pennies on the cost of having to upgrade existing trackage and pay off UP for access. All other things being equal, I have a tough time imagining that UP would/could demand enough money for access rights that buying up downtown land becomes the better option – and I’m cautiously optimistic with regards to getting waivers from arbitrary FRA restrictions.
Of course, once you get out of the city, there’s really no reason not to run brand new lines every which way because there’s no shortage of open space in rural Texas. That’s one of the nice things about this whole adventure.
I’m guessing 90/10 split of new HSR track to upgraded existing track is probably what we’re going to end up with.
Yeah, my argument isn’t against paying UP to use 4 miles of the Terminal Sub to get from Downtown to Hempstead, it’s against paying UP or BNSF to use 300-500 miles of track to run 79mph or 110mph diesel trains as an “interim” service. This has been proposed and extensively studied by TxDOT and other agencies, and is a horrible idea.