George Harris
Engineer
Taiwan IS NOT China. Regardless of political pretenses, it is a country in its own right with more people than Australia and New Zealand combined.I was more thinking of the typical issue in the United States where it's undesireable to clear buildings out of the way (which I understand isn't a political problem the Chinese engineers run into), and so the traditional railroad right of way with whatever curvature it has is used.
There was much done in Taiwan in the way of environmental remediation and concern for adjancent landowners and residents such as noise barriers, shallow tunnels instead of open cuts, bridges instead of fills to avoid splitting farms and villages, etc., etc.
There were plans that could improve the situation significantly. In the end, my understanding is that the problem was no money.The tracks at the New London, CT station are roughly north-south, I think, and the bridge across the Thames River, less than a mile away, is roughly east-west, for example. Given the desire to not step on the toes of existing land owners, it's hard for me to imagine how you'd ever get the land to be able to get from the Thames River bridge to the Niantic River bridge with curves gentle enough for even 100 MPH operation. (That area comes to mind in part because I used to live less than a mile from the Niantic River.)
Most of what can be done to speed up things within the existing alignment or close - there were a few curve shifts in the past - has been done. In addition to New London, there is the whole New York to New Haven section owned by Conn DOT that need wider track centers at the least plus any curve straightening you can sneak in. Then there are the 30 mph sections Philadelphia and Baltimore. These sections would cost a lot of money to improve.
About all that can be done to speed up the northeast main line without getting way into the zone of diminishing returns has been done. Let's call the basic job done and move on to other parts of the country. The entire northeast, geographically defined as north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River has relatively closely spaced medium and large cities that cry out for multiple trains per day on a number of routes that would link them like beads on a string, or several intersecting strings. Then let's look south, along the gulf to Texas and on the west coast. Again, large and medium sized cities spaced for multiple trains per day.
Wellington's book on the Economic Theory of Railway Location written in the late 1800's pointed out that the New York Central, with its main line running multiple major cities would always be a higher cost operation than the Pennsylvania that had a shorter route to Chicago and much less populated territory. Yet, he also said that the NYC was the better route and would always have a greater income. Why? Because it went where the traffic was, and even if it ended up with a smaller share of New York to Chicago traffic, the traffic to from and between intermediate points would always more than make up for it.
An outstanding example of this in our pathetic one train a day long distance train system is the Empire Builder. Even though it serves a relatively lightly populated area, the people in this lightly populated area use the service because it connects the points they need to travel between. It would be interesting to find out what percentage of the EB's ridership use it more or less regularly but have never traveled to either Chicago or Seattle/Portland.
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