Aiden said-

Comment 1-

Canem,
You seem to have far less understanding of civil engineering than you think you do. Many of your apparent problems are really non issues.

Answer 1- You seem to be challenging me to a test of brute civil engineering strength. Myself I couldn't be bothered pitting myself against you.

Comment 2-

Not every train has to stop at every station.

Answer 2-

In the past perhaps not now as I'm not up on train tech the fast trains needed to slow even if they didn't stop at the station due to the larger clearances required for faster trains.

Comment 3-

The more people there are, the more economically viable high speed rail is. The initial problem is not too many people, but too few. Indeed high speed trains can be made with such high capacity that they'll be running profitably for decades before more line capacity is needed - and when more is needed, it can be added in a way that improves connectivity as well as capacity.

Rand didn't understand macroeconomics. If she had, she'd have known that government borrowing to fund infrastructure is not a problem.

Answer 3-

You probably don't understand Ayn Rand either. If you had you'd understand her comparison between the value proposition between cargo and passengers.

* Not that you need to understand Ayn Rand but you could have just asked CM which comment of Ayn Rand he was referring to.

Rand's point I believe is that generally passenger trains pick up along many points along a branch line whereas freight trains pick up at one point and don't need to stop. Also freight trains have few customers compared with the many of passenger trains. These two items add significantly to the costs of passenger trains over freight trains. Rand seems to believe in a user pays model and it's historically difficult for governments to drive such models. Rand agrees however that trains and infrastructure are the circulatory system of the nation. She sees government sponsored infrastructure as unsustainable.

Also there are some that want to see growth not because it's in the communities interest but for self serving profit. Such as the property developers in the major cities of Australia. Large engineering companies cruise the globe for governments willing to spend money on their services on large projects. From memory they make 10% of the value of the project for consulting on these huge projects (for the Channel Tunnel this means $600M). There seems to be a lack of competition in this space.

Comment 4-

High speed trains are generally less gradient sensitive than conventional trains.

Answer 4-

I agree that fast trains are less gradient sensitive but I was referring to the change in gradient and the inherent centripetal forces at high speed (v^2/r).

Comment 5-

The main reason tunnelling costs went up is that the specified requirements went up. But tunnelling technology is improving rapidly, and Musk's company is far from the only one working to get the costs down.

Answer 5-

My costs here may be a little loose. But if you take $6B / 40 km you get $150M per km for the tunnelling costs on the "Channel Tunnel". The costs will be multiples higher now but not all lines will need as much tunnel. There are also the costs of compulsory aquisition of the land for the rail corridors which need some modifications for the larger radius curves. Also the community impact.

In theory any point less than 150 kms from the city centre should be under 30mins for a 300 kph train- this in theory would imply that cities can be up to 300 kilometres across- but in practice there are practical considerations. Even at 100 kph the city commutes a 100 km diameter city in under one hour- in theory.

To me its not the speed of the trains that is important for short commute times- but the bottlenecks- I believe most people would like to see more "express trains" but I respect that there may be reasons why the train operators don't. Ayn Rand likes to leave things to market forces- if the train operators don't run a good service then more will drive cars. But everyone seems to be trying to create opportunities to dip into the public pocket- the engineering companies (charging for creating the infrastructure), the government (through increased immigration that demands the infrastructure)- like others have said it's a "comedy of errors".

This is our future we cannot have others drive it for us.

I remember the CEO of P&O (having an IT background) saying to his staff "are you about information or technology".

This is a question we need to ask of those who develop our community infrastructure

I question the constant strive for speed. Constant & reliable efficiency are far more preferable in my book !

Canem,
1. Such a challenge was not my intention, and I apologise for giving you the impression it was. My point was that if you take the time to learn more about it, you'll find that what appear to be major problems can actually be dealt with very easily.

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G4296G7M1o

If the track is designed for high speeds, the trains won't need to slow down.

3. I did understand the comparison, but i found it largely irrelevant.
Rand saw everything in dollar terms and never even sought to understand opposing views. Her stories are contrived to make her views seem reasonable. What else is there about her that's worth knowing?

Can you comprehend how stupid it is to regard government intervention in "the circulatory system of the nation" as unsustainable?

Branch lines and high speed railways are very different. The former have many stations, often with few people using them. The latter have few stations, usually with many people using each - although some of them will use the branch lines to reach the stations on the high speed line.

Some see our population as a great problem, overloading our infrastructure. But I see it as a great solution, allowing construction of infrastructure which would benefit the communities, but which isn't economically viable without more people.

Cost Plus contracts, where the construction gets a fixed markup on their costs including on cost overruns, are a stupid idea; everyone knows this, so they're rare.
But there are other reasons for inflated costs, and PPP contracts are often economically inefficient and lucrative.

As with other kinds of civil engineering, tunnelling can be very profitable when you get it right, but conversely you can lose a lot of money if you get it wrong.

[chunnel comments moved to response 5]

4. Vertical curvature is rarely severe enough to be a limiting factor.

5. It is silly to base cost estimates of tunnelling under land on a tunnel under water. And there are good reasons why Chunnel costs overran: firstly, preliminary geological investigations had indicated the ground was less fractured (so easier to tunnel through) on one side than the other, but during construction this was found not to be the case. Also the original plans used the cross passages for ventilation, but subsequently it was determined that separate ventilation ducts were needed.

Those weren't the only reasons for Chunnel cost overruns, though. The TBMs were built to cope with the unexpected, but that versatility involved a lot of extra features which made them more difficult to use. By the time the crews had mastered it, the tunnelling was almost finished!

You seem to imagine tunnel costs are on a steep upward trajectory. That's wrong. The huge inflation of the 1970s and '80s is gone. Nowadays tunnelling costs are all over the place, with costs very much dependent on specifications. But there some obvious efficiency gains to be made by better coordinating projects, and Madrid has demonstrated.

Land costs, though, have risen substantially and will continue to do so. Because of that, more tunnelling is likely to be economically justified than was originally envisaged.

>In theory any point less than 150 kms from the city centre should be under 30mins for a 300 kph train
If that's what you think then you don't understand the theory correctly. Acceleration and braking take a few minutes. And it's not just any point; the point has to be a station. And you're assuming the line to be straight, which even for lines in tunnel isn't always the case.

When you simplify a theory to the point of uselessness, it no longer deserves to be called a theory.

Removing bottlenecks is a worthy objective, but has little to do with whether high speed rail should be constructed, except in the rare instances where bottlenecks can be removed by building new high speed lines.