> what I heard back then - anything involving any kind rail
> passing through San Mateo county was DOA due to visceral
> resident opposition over "property values."
It's a little twisted. The politicians involved would like to make the project be a part of their legacy, so the only way to get it done is for it to be a true "downtown-downtown" (LA-SF) project, no matter if that's practical or even useful. There's the fear that if it didn't actually go to San Francisco that it would be ridiculed. In the mean time, there already exists a decent rail link from San Jose to San Francisco. Could it be better? Sure. For a lot cheaper/faster than adding a new HSR link. Recently, despite strong opposition from the tony cities along the peninsula, they have upgraded the line and introduced express runs (5-stop) that cut the SJ-SF time to 0:59, a "limited" run (9 or 12 stops) to 1:07 and the full all-local-stops runs (20 stops) at 1:31. They ran a test non-stop a while back in 0:36 ... CA/HSR has just recently changed their projection of SJ-SF to 30 minutes.
Most of the upgrades involve better signalling to decrease headways; and the removal of the final historical at-grade crossings, so you don't have to slow down going through towns that don't have a stop. Relatively inexpensive and easy to get EIR'd.
Given the politics, I'm surprised that a San Jose -based politician hasn't seized the day and demanded that it stop at San Jose for *his* legacy reasons. Afterall, San Jose is now the largest city in the Bay Area.
Geographically, San Jose also sits at the bottom of the Bay, equally accessible to the peninsula up to San Francisco and the east side of the Bay to reach Oakland and Berkeley. Soon (2020?) BART will reach San Jose -- certainly long before HSR would -- so it really seems to be a no-brainer to link HSR to BART/Caltrain rather than to one particular city without a significant rail hub.
> A more realistic scenario involved rail alignment on the eastern side
> of the Bay, connecting San Jose and Oakland. I would imagine this
> would work with high speed rail as well, especially if it was extended
> to Sacramento.
Yes, the current rail link between San Jose - Oakland - Sacramento is one of the most popular in the Amtrak system, and would benefit greatly from upgrades similar to what Caltrain has done on the other side of the bay. Caltrain gets used by a lot of commuters into San Francisco and so has more political support than the Amtrak service on the east side. It's possible that once the BART link finally gets to San Jose that taking BART from San Jose to the end of the line in Richmond (which is co-located with an Amtrak stop) would be faster than that leg of the train. Presently Amtrak does it in 1:32 and BART goes from Fremont to Richmond in just about 1 hour depite making a LOT of stops and going through downtown sections of both Oakland and Berkeley. The extension from Fremont to San Jose will probably add 10 minutes to the trip.
[...]
> Why not talk about project from the point of view of what is
> good for the humanity and environment?
Usually, it's because humanity and the environment don't have lobbyists
:~/
> From that pov, high speed rail is far more beneficial than short
> distance flying, so it does deserve deployment of resources.
HSR in California is really a replacement for driving, not flying. HSR will never beat flying (except for a very few, special situations, none of which are at work in the CA/HSR scenario), and really shouldn't try.
Joanna writes:
> European trains seem to do ok with the Alps and the Pyrenees.
Well ... there's a trick to the Perpignan-Barcelona TGV link (still not complete, by the way): there's a short, flat pass at Le Perthus that is key to the whole project. The main tunnel is about 8km long and 110m deep. Doable. Actually, that tunnel is done' the big holdup on the line has been Barcelona's idea to tunnel the final 3km under the city rather than come in via the existing right-of-way. Slick, but very expensive and has taken years to do.
There's no "HSR" over/through the Alps; the high speed trains that make the trip travel on conventional rail, at greatly reduced speeds. As an example, the TGV goes from Chambery to Turin (about 90 miles as the crow flies) in just under 2.5 hours. That's about 36 mph ... and is longer than the projected time for the total SF-LA trip. The most recent CA/HSR trip planner shows Palmdale to Los Angeles as being about 60 miles and predicts 27 minutes (good luck, I say!).
> So, the grapevine is a problem?
Yes: that section of the mountains is steep and long. Oh, and traverses several very active fault lines. The engineering challenges of putting HSR over/through the Grapevine -- or through the Antelope Valley -- are not at all trivial, and many are unique in the world.
If you can stomach it, here's the gold-standard of research on the subject:
http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/assets/0/152/83bdddc3-89c0-4fd4-a94c-b6ba8a487d05.pdf
Wojtek writes:
> Mountains are a bigger problem for freight rail where the grade
> cannot exceed 4% if memory serves. For passenger rail it can be
> higher.
The CA/HSR models presume 2.5% and 3.5% grade maximum options. Maximum grades can be higher for traditional rail, but not for HSR which typically is spec'd with lower power-to-weight ratios to increase speed. There's a 4% grade line in Germany that has special, heavier trainsets, but TGV for instance has it's trickiest parts limited to 3.5% (and most are 2.5% and lower). The German line is only 110 miles long, so it doesn't impact the total end-to-end performance much by having the heavier trainset; increasing the CA HSR power-to-weight to handle a steeper grade would have a huge ripple effect on the 800+ mile system.
/jordan