Costs lots to dig the tunnels, tho’.

Obama mentioned in his address that people travel by high speed train from Madrid to Seville more frequently than by car and plane combined. I have no doubt that that is true. I’ve made that very trip by high speed rail and it was a wonderful experience. However, the distance from Madrid to Seville is about 530 kilometers, or roughly 330 miles. The trip takes a little over three hours.

Spanish AVE is great, and I’ve been on that route myself. The train I was on was the same Siemens rolling stock I’ve ridden on in Germany, the 250 km/hr (150 mi/hr) ICE trains. Both Germany and Spain are upgrading some routes, at least, to 350 km/hr (220 mi/hr) trains, I think the Madrid to Grenada train might be using that technology now. Obviously you can’t throw out a bunch of perfectly good working 250 km/hr trains to upgrade all at once, I imagine it will be a slow process as the existing trains reach the end of their service life.

Maybe if we just endlessly remind opponents that the french, the croissant-eating, wine-sipping, pate-loving FRENCH, build trains that make our rail technology look positively stone-age they’ll come around out of sheer dislike of the idea.

True high-speed rail (150-200 mph ) as in Japan and parts of Europe requires separate rights of way: broad curves, shallow grades, and no freight sharing the track. It is very expensive to engineer and maintain.
This plan using existing infrastructure will do 90-mph max and share the track with existing freight traffic (60 mph max).

If you believe that greenhouses gases are a problem, you don’t want a shared passenger/freight system. One of the reasons why Europe is doing such a wretched job of complying with Kyoto is that it does only 10% of its freight by rail, as opposed to 51% in the U.S. Europe moves more people by rail, and more freight by truck. Our intermodal system of truck-to-rail container transfer helps account for the fact that freight emissions of greenhouse gases are 155 grams per ton mile in the U.S. compared to 193 grams per ton mile in Europe.

This would be a step up for most of these existing lines.

Now if we really want to have a much more efficient alternative to aircraft travel for shorter distances (say Chicago to St. Louis) then we need dedicated electrified high speed tracks that would support +200mph trains – for all the talk in the speech, that isn’t anywhere on the horizon (except in California’s own project if that state can find the money somehow).

Joe is right about commercial aviation – it will become a shadow of its former self when oil starts marching back up again. Its hope lies in Algae based biofuel (makes an excellent jet fuel replacement and can be grown in salt water of course) which by 2020 is projected to be down to ~$1.00 gallon to produce, but before we get to that (assuming it pans out) commercial aviation gets to go through peak oil and it (and the commercial manufacturers who make the planes) will be one of the most decimated industries because of it – JMHO.

Good speech and a nice small step forward for the administration on rail – thanks for highlighting this Joe.

We are so close to the IPCC tipping points that we seriously have to start taking into account these emissions.

If we find that these large projects don’t fly, then the real cost of moving to a zero emissions CO2 society becomes more clear.

I would agree and go so far as to suggest that electrification of the transit of goods is more critical to our economy and environment. On the other hand, if you improve the rail / electric power infrastructures, such improvements could benefit freight and passenger transit. And, such growth might seem less controversial to the general public.

http://350conference.org/location/

I used to fly a lot but gave it up completely about 10 years ago. Over the last 4 years we have completely switched from gas central heating to wood burning stoves. Sometimes I think I am wasting my time.