Amtrak’s plan to use most of the $2.45 billion “loan” it received from the Department of Transportation to buy new high-speed trains for the Northeast Corridor has come under fire from, of all people, a high-speed rail advocate named Alon Levy. The new trains will cost about $9 million per car, which Levy points out is nearly twice as much as France is paying for Eurostar train cars. The reason for the high cost is that the new trains can go more than 200 mph and tilt on curves more than any previous trains.
Levy is a transportation writer who takes a highly mathematical approach to reviewing proposals and who says he is for “good transit” but against boondoggles. He says the problem with the expensive new trains is that Amtrak tracks can’t support trains that are as fast as they can go, and in order to support such fast trains, they would have to reduce curvature so much that they wouldn’t need to tilt as much as the new trains. Levy argues that Amtrak should have spent less on the trains and more on the infrastructure needed to boost speeds. As another high-speed rail advocate put it, “They need to speed up the slow bits first, which isn’t something you do by blowing money on trains.”
Amtrak hopes that Democrats will sweep Congress this November and give it the $290 billion it wants to rebuild the Northeast Corridor to higher speeds. But, as Levy points out in other articles, Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor plans are far more expensive than they need to be.
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At every level, then, Amtrak appears to be gold-plating its projects, spending way more than is really necessary to get the job done. And, so long as it gets to spend other people’s money, why shouldn’t it? This is a major problem that high-speed rail advocates don’t get: funding a project out of user fees imposes a discipline on planners to keep costs down. When it is funded out of taxes, however, that discipline disappears and costs go out of control.
My daughter just took an Amtrak from Richmond, VA to New Haven, Connecticut (approx. 410 track miles). It made 17 stops.
From New Haven to Boston, (around 150 miles) there were 9 more stops.
By the time a train gets up to anywhere near those speeds, it will start braking for the next stop,
I assume, like cars, that to speed up quickly to go faster for a short period of time uses more fuel and to constantly having to stop from high speeds adds to maintenance problems and breakdowns. So the high speed trains are anti-environment (in addition to anti-common sense).
All of this will reduce times by minimal amounts. The money would be much better spent to add an additional track in the northeast. Many delays and scheduling problems are caused by too many trains on too few tracks. The current speeds would work fine.