All over the world, high-speed trains travel from city to city, sometimes reaching speeds of more than 250 miles per hour, and then drop off hundreds of passengers right in the city center. However, in the US, the idea of efficient, fast and environmentally friendly travel remains a dream.
Japan has built more high-speed trains 50 years agoa miracle of engineering then and Now. Its bullet trains (a term coined by the Japanese) unite the country’s megacities with amazing levels of efficiency – the average latency is less than a minute. China has 23,500 miles of high-speed roads crisscrossing the countryside and linking coastal metropolises such as Shanghai and Shenzhen with each other and with the country’s vast hinterland. European railways connect the continent so well that they serve both tourists and executives rushing from one country’s financial capital to another on trains such as the Eurostar London-Paris.
USA, on the other hand, looks. According to Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner, it’s not because we lack the technical know-how to build high-speed rail, but because politicians lack the will to fund it.
“This is a financial conversation, not a technical one,” he said. Luck in an interview. “There are no technical obstacles to the construction of a high-speed railway. But to make investments you need political and financial coherence.”
In the US, passenger rail service is stifled by aging infrastructure, a problem that has only gotten worse for decades. political differences and before lobbying from the automobile and aviation industries, which required competing investments in their infrastructure. In some sections of the Northeast Corridor, train speeds are reduced to 30 mph due to tracks built during the Reconstruction era.
Even the $66 billion in federal funding for rail in the 2021 infrastructure package is just a drop in the bucket of what it will take to build high-speed rail. The cost of building such a network in the US would be approximately $4 trillion, according to the libertarian Cato Institute, which does not support building a passenger rail network on the grounds that it would be too expensive.
“We have to decide to do it, it really is that simple,” Gardner says. “The decision must be made by the federal government of the country. Here’s how it happens. This happens all over the world.”
This does not mean that the money allocated for the infrastructure bill will be wasted. Instead, it is modernizing passenger rail infrastructure across the country, from the Cascades in the Pacific Northwest to Texas and Appalachia. The funds will also be used to purchase a new fleet – both cars and locomotives. Amtrak has already committed $7.3 billion for 83 new trains from the mobility division of German industrial giant Siemens, the first of which will begin carrying passengers in 2026. These trains will have a top speed of 125 mph. A new, faster model of Acela trains that can travel at 160 mph on some portions of the Northeast Corridor. test runs have begun in January, according to The newspaper “New York Times.
Both of these trains are still much slower than trains in France, Japan and China, where fastest train in the world, reaching 286 mph at top speed. In fact, new trains in the US often don’t even reach their maximum speed. The winding tracks mean that trains on the Northeast Corridor travel at an average speed of 70 to 80 mph. To achieve truly high speeds, the U.S. will need to build specially designed and more direct tracks, Gardner said. This project will take at least 10 years, and possibly as long as 30 years.
Funding these projects is also no small feat. Every second high-speed rail network in the world has been built through huge investments from governments that have made it a national priority. Governments often have to subsidize rail investment because virtually all railroad companies are unprofitable, or at least do not make enough money to regularly finance tens of billions of dollars in capital expenditures. Even China’s vaunted railway system is raising fares as its state operator is burdened $870 billion borrowings.
By comparison, U.S. investment over the years has been “almost a rounding error on the amount Europe has invested in its network,” Gardner said.
When asked for more details on the CEO’s comments, an Amtrak spokesman provided per capita spending data from German trade group. It shows the biggest rail spenders in Europe in 2022 were Luxembourg at $625, Switzerland at $489 and Norway at $376. In the US, the comparable amount was just $39, trailing even the stingiest spenders in Europe, such as Spain’s $73 and France’s $50.
Passenger and freight railway transport
In addition to pursuing a massive infrastructure project like a railroad, Amtrak also has to deal with stakeholders with whom it doesn’t always see eye-to-eye. Amtrak has to partner, sometimes reluctantly, with freight rail companies, which own about 71% of the tracks on which Amtrak runs many of its trains. There are sometimes tensions between the two groups because Amtrak claims they do not comply with laws designed to give passenger trains priority over freight trains.
“These laws haven’t been enforced for decades,” Gardner said.
Now Amtrak is preparing to take on freight rail operators. In recent years, Amtrak has increasingly alleged what it sees as repeated violations by host railroads of right-of-way laws that date back to Amtrak’s creation. After years of frustration, Amtrak called on federal regulators in 2022 investigate delays caused by freight transport and is also lobbying for the right to sue these operators in federal court if it believes they are not following the law.
When contacted for comment, a spokesman for the Association of American Railroads (AAR) instructed Luck to a trade group letter dated May 2023 blaming Amtrak for poor performance on the Sunset Limited line, which runs from New Orleans and Los Angeles. The representative also referred to the AAR section. Web site It calls on policymakers to ensure passenger rail expansion “without compromising the ability of freight railroads to serve current or future customers.”
In other parts of the country, several private passenger railroad companies have also entered the fray to compete with Amtrak. Brightline, which claims to be the only privately owned intercity train company in the U.S., broke ground last month on a $12 billion project to connect Southern California’s Inland Empire to Las Vegas. Brightline already operates a rail route from Miami to Orlando and plans to expand to Tampa Bay by 2026.
The US is too big for high speed rail everywhere
But all high-speed rail in the US, be it Amtrak or Brightline, has to contend with real geographic considerations that make it more difficult to implement than in other countries. Namely, according to Allan Zarembski, director of the railroad engineering and safety program at the University of Delaware, the United States is a huge country.
Certain train journeys will always be less attractive than flying. Traveling from Houston to Boston or San Diego to Milwaukee will almost never make sense by rail, even on a train that travels at 286 mph, as do the fastest trains in the world. The two trips will take six and a half and seven and a half hours respectively, and that’s non-stop, which is unlikely for a trip of roughly 2,000 miles. For that reason, Gardner says he doesn’t see air travel as Amtrak’s main competitor.
“The automotive market is the primary market we compete with,” Gardner says.
High-speed rail is best for travel between cities near each other, where the train ride takes about the same time as a short flight, without the need to travel to and from the airport. Rail transport is also a much cleaner option than carbon-emitting planes. A flight from Washington to New York emits 1.4 to 3.7 times more greenhouse gases per person than a train, depending on the type of locomotive, according to an Amtrak analysis. Traveling by car along the same route produces 2.2 to 5.8 times more carbon per passenger, due to the fact that cars carry far fewer people than trains.
“If we’re going to seriously tackle carbon emissions, we need to get more passenger and freight travel on trains,” Gardner says. “There’s no way around that fact.”