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More Rail Follies

By | | Transportation
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Speaking of faulty railcar wheels (which I wrote about in Monday’s post regarding the Hawaii rail debacle), Washington’s Metro has been forced to drastically reduce rail service due to wheel problems that are causing its trains to frequently derail. The National Transportation Safety Board discovered that Metrorail trains have suffered dozens of minor derailments since the 7000-series of cars were put into service in 2015.

A Blue Line train derailed last week, and investigators found that it had actually derailed twice before that same day. Many other trains were delayed as it took two hours to evacuate the 187 passengers on board. In a press conference early this week, National Transportation Safety Board officials said that the derailment could have been “catastrophic” if the wheels had hit the third rail that powers the trains.

As a result, Metro is taking the 7000-series cars out of service for at least a week while it tries to determine what to do about the problem. Since those cars make up 60 percent of the system’s operable fleet, that means reducing service from as frequently as every five minutes to as infrequently as every half hour. Continue reading →

Maglev to Destroy Habitat & Climate

By | | Transportation
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A proposed maglev line between Washington and Baltimore will disrupt 1,000 acres of “parks, recreational facilities and wetlands,” according to a recently released draft environmental impact statement (DEIS) for the project. That’s a lot of land considering that all but nine miles of the project would be underground. While 180 acres are for a maintenance facility, the remaining acres represent a right-of-way that is an average of 750 feet wide.

This potential disruption has raised the ire of the local chapter of the Audubon Society, which is opposing the plan. As the Antiplanner recently noted, such land disruptions will be an issue for all high-speed rail lines, and in that analysis I was clearly being conservative in assuming a mere 80-foot right-of-way. By contrast, airlines don’t need any right-of-way once they leave the airports.

Bird watchers are not the only opponents of the maglev plan. NASA has facilities that “require minimal disturbances from vibration, artificial lighting and electromagnetic interference,” it says, and it opposes the location of the maglev because it will disturb those facilities. City of Washington planners warn that a proposed station near Mount Vernon Square would destroy the character of that neighborhood. Continue reading →

Closing the Gap

By | | Transportation
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China is building a magnetically levitated (maglev) train that will “fill the gap between high-speed rail and air transportation,” says CNN. This new train may have a top speed of 370 miles per hour, which “could narrow the gap between high-speed rail and air travel,” says Republic World.

What is this preoccupation with gaps? The only gap I see is between the ears of those who think maglev makes sense either in the United States or anywhere else in the world.

Here’s the gap: high-speed rail costs a lot more and goes a lot slower than flying. Maglev will cost even more and still go slower than flying. How does that fix the gap? Wake me up when someone comes up with a technology that costs less and goes faster than jet aircraft. Continue reading →