The big news in transportation over the last couple weeks is the completion of the Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland.
The tunnel was a necessary piece of infrastructure, as you can see above. The original route is long and circuitous, and the Swiss want to move trucks off of the roads and onto the rails. The Gotthard Base Tunnel accommodates freight and passenger rail.
Once fully functional, the tunnel will not just slice 45 minutes off the journey time between Zurich and Lugano, but also form a central building block of the so-called Rhine-Alp corridor that stretches from the sea ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp via Germany’s industrial heartland down to the port of Genoa in Italy.
The new Gotthard base tunnel, which has been in planning since the 1980s, will bypass the old Gotthardbahn rail tunnel, which rises and falls through the massif in a winding route. Unlike its predecessor, which was completed in 1882, the new line will run on a flat low-level route, the first of its kind in the Alps.
It’s part of some widespread and huge infrastructure projects Swiss Federal Railways and AlpTransit are constructing in the Alps. Swiss voters (well, 45.9% of them) approved the projects in a September, 1992 referendum. The Swiss dedicated certain taxes to the tunnels construction, amounting to some $33 billion that are set aside specifically for these tunnels. Gotthard took 17 years and cost $12 billion.
Now, there are complaints in Europe that the whole project is rife with cost overruns (and in Germany and Italy, the connecting projects are way, way behind) but here I am scratching my head. Amtrak will have to replace the far-shorter Hudson River tubes sometime in the next twenty years, and their cost continues to balloon—not that we ever really get access to the background documents on them. Gateway is well north of $20 billion, admittedly it also includes several bridges that are over a century old. Still, maybe we should hire AlpTransit or at the very least, look at how they financed it.
HYPE(r)LOOP IN EUROPE
This is an old story but one worth mentioning.
Dirk Ahlborn, chief executive officer of Hyperloop Transportation Technologies (HTT), announced on Thursday that HTT has reached an agreement with the Slovakian government to explore building a local Hyperloop system. A transport system capable of speeds of up to 760mph (1,223kph).
According to Ahlborn, the next steps will include identifying a route that could connect Bratislava, Slovakia’s capital, with Vienna and Budapest.
“Slovakia is a technological leader in the automotive, material science, and energy industries, many of the areas that are integral to the Hyperloop system,” said Ahlborn. “Having a European Hyperloop presence will incentivize collaboration and innovation within Slovakia and throughout Europe.”
Vienna and Bratislava are 60 minutes apart by car. To be quite honest, what they seem to want to build in the city of Bratislava is a vactrain version of Personal Rapid Transit, an example of which exists in Morgantown, WV. The PRT people elsewhere on the internet are very weird. They seem to think their idea is great (and it might be!) but fail to appreciate the massive amount of infrastructure they’d have to have built for their pods.
As for Hype(r)loop, I often wonder why anti-corporatist progressives and otherwise Big Government types fawn over this vactrain and react hilariously bad at the mildest of criticisms of it. I learned a new German word (Schnappsidee) when the news about Slovakia came up in March. I chat with transportation folks who blog and they’ve gotten death threats for even pointing out that things cost money---although that’s just the way people do things these days. It’s sad. It’s almost as if some corporations are okay (and as an off-topic aside, some mostly unregulated industries are also okay) and others are not. Anyway, if they’re serious, they ought to get Musk to buy them a ballot initiative/referendum to de-authorize CAHSR (remember, 52% of the voters in 2008 approved it in an election whose turnout was about 80%, according to Ballotpedia) and then buy another ballot initiative/referendum to authorize their project. Good luck!
UNION PACIFIC LIES
An oil train on Union Pacific’s trackage derailed and caught fire in the Columbia Gorge yesterday. It was carrying Bakken Crude. Those trains have been given the moniker “Bomb Train.” I won’t belabour any point about that. I don’t want them going through my town either.
But Union Pacific today claimed in a statement that Positive Train Control doesn’t exist.
PTC is a Congressional Mandate—on all railroads public and private, passenger and freight, and a necessary one. As is typical, mandates come down and they don’t fully fund them so they can be completed. Several railroads have asked for and received extensions. But it absolutely works. It could have worked for Amtrak 188, which derailed in Philadelphia---the NTSB’s conclusion is the conductor was momentarily distracted by radio traffic. Amtrak 188 was going too fast when it entered the Frankford Curve, and 8 people died.
I’m not sure what derailed this oil train---I would not be surprised if extreme heat buckled the tracks as it’s very hot in the Pacific Northwest this weekend—but if we find out PTC could have prevented this, ima be mad and you should be too.
Gotta spend money to make money, Union Pacific, so just do it.
DID YOU KNOW NEVADA HAS A HIGH-SPEED RAIL AUTHORITY?
Yep, so I’ve been saying that “49 of the 50 states have no interest in HSR.” I’m clearly wrong. It’s 48 of the 50 states.
But it’s true, Nevada has an interest, they established an actual authority to look at it and their HSR authority actually had a meeting late in May. You can read the minutes and testimony given here. It’s 99 pages and it’s worth reading. There are some….eclectic proposals in there.
The only proposal that seems to be ready to go is XPressWest. A train linking Los Angeles and Las Vegas has been on the books somewhere for decades. XPressWest is the latest, although they’ve been working on this since 2005. It’s got many of its approvals already from the Federal Government and is working on getting its funding. Also the technology exists---it’s a train, unlike the Skytram and the autonomous pod cars also offered to NVHSR (seriously, read the PDF linked above.)
There are a bunch of proposals linking LA and Las Vegas but only XPressWest is close to the point where they can begin right-of-way acquisition and construction.
I HATE MEMES
This is a meme that danced down my Facebook timeline one day. The biggest question I had was: where’s the Acela? It looks very much like the other five trains and is capable of up to 165mph (and probably faster, if it weren’t so damn heavy).
I get what the meme is trying to do. Trains are slow here, Yada, yada, yada. But I suspect there’s something else going on here too, one involving technological greatness. That’s not true, the other five nations aren’t any more advanced than we and Alstom, Siemens, and Bombardier—all build parts of or all of some of the trains above and the Acela. The barrier (frankly, excuses) here in the US is entirely political. When 48 of the 50 states don’t have any real interest in high-speed rail, that’s a problem. We railfans have a lot of work to do.
I THOUGHT THIS WAS INTERESTING
This is an annual report from JR East—the operator of much of the high speed rail on Honshu. It’s an interesting read.