r/highspeedrail

Hopefully Alto are learning lessons from HS2 and Canadian land/construction costs are lower. Making the London entry from suburban Old Oak Common to Euston nearer downtown is going to be very expensive and delayed to later. Like Laval to Montreal?
https://www.railjournal.com/infrastructure/hs2-delayed-again-as-costs-surge/?utm\_source=&utm\_medium=email&utm\_campaign=58659

Feel the Speed!! 🚅

Note: These figures represent the per-passenger cost for energy, fuel, chicken nuggets, or electricity, rather than actual ticket prices.

• By Car: The average travel distance is 520 km with an average travel time of 8h 10m acc Team-BHP.
  Fuel costs are based on a Petrol Maruti achieving 17 kmpl with 4 passengers onboard.
• HSR (High-Speed Rail): Covers 508 km in 2h 07m according to public information. Electricity costs are loosely taken at 30 kWh per km at ₹9.8 per kWh, assuming an 8-coach train carrying 750 passengers.
• Flight: According to MakeMyTrip, the duration ranges from 1h 10m to 1h 30m, so I've averaged it to 1h 20m over a flying distance of 450 km. Fuel costs per passenger in an A320 are calculated at 15.4 liters of fuel at ₹90.4 per liter.
• Vande Bharat: Covers a distance of 491 km in 5h 30m acc to RailYatri. Electricity consumption is 20 kWh per km acc to TOI at a price of ₹9.8 per unit.
• Usain Bolt: With an average speed of 9.58 m/s, many tabloids say that Bolt consumed 100 chicken nuggets a day in his prime while running approximately 500m at sprint speeds. At a price of ₹200 for 9 nuggets, Bolt would consume 100 nuggets to run 500m at full speed.
• Walking: Based on 5 km per day at an average speed of 1.34 m/s. This requires 2,500 calories or 50 nuggets at a price of ₹200 per 9 nuggets.

215km of HSR lines.

78km of upgrades to the Hunter line.

44km of new line from Wilton to Wollongong via an existing reserved corridor.

The population of this region is 8 million, so the size of a Scandinavian country but in a far smaller area.

All stations offer connections to existing conventional rail, metro and light rail, with some stations offering highway bus (coach) connections too.

If this proved a success, the next stage would extend 180km to Bowral, Goulburn and Canberra.

About a year ago I asked about what was in store for the Wolverine corridor in terms of service improvements, travel time reductions, etc. Do we know what’s next for these trains? Michigan can do a lot of good with these trains. I know they are upgrading the entire Michigan section of the line to 110 MPH speeds. When will we see the first travel time reductions and by how much? Will we see sub 4 hour travel times between Detroit and Chicago eventually? (needs to be rerouted through Indiana via the South Shore Line for that to happen). This line has so much potential to be a great line and eventually high speed rail line when we get there when we’re all old and gray. For any of you that are in Michigan and or know about this corridor, please let me know!

These slides were mostly presented in the ILHSRA’s meeting virtual meeting yesterday. Slides and presentation are not yet uploaded to their website.

The last photo is my attempt to quantify such ridership using “transportation density”, the average number of people who pass through a given point on the railway per day, averaged out through all inter-station segments. This provides us a good basis for revenue and costs, as this measures intensity of passenger demand across a whole line without being biased by line length.

2300 is very low for a high speed line, lower than the 3100 seen on the Hokkaido Shinkansen in 2022. This is low enough to cause an operational loss (line 19). It currently runs less than 1tph, averaging around 13x 10 car trains a day. Illinois should expect to run 4 car trains for the expected demand, perhaps hourly at peak, and every 2 hours midday and later at night.

Indeed, Illinois expects to pay a subsidy to maintain service on the line, even under a 8 train a day scenario (last slide). Most high speed lines are operationally profitable due to high ridership, but these forecasts really give me pause about the viability of this project.

Unfortunately this presentation does not give me a lot of optimism for the prospect of HSR in IL. It is possible that the numbers are too low however, as they did not include transfers from the existing Ilini service, of which the HSR will take over part of the route. Indeed if construction costs in the US was 1/3 of what it is, and operational costs were lower(like Spain), this very much could work out. But under the current environment, I don’t think IL would want to fund this.