We will be taking the Amtrak Crescent from Charlotte to NYC for the LUG
meeting in June. It takes exactly 12 hours from 2 in the morning until 2
in the afternoon and we'll come back the same way from 2 in the afternoon
in NYC to 2 in the morning in Charlotte. It's not cheaper than the
airlines, but it is so much more pleasant, relaxing, and enjoyable. I hate
flying these days.
Tina
On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 10:09 AM, Nathan Wajsman <photo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
> Distances between 300 and 1000 km are exactly the sweet spot for high
> speed trains, and there are plenty of important city pairs in the US within
> those distances—you mention a couple in your post, plus SF-LA, obviously
> the whole Northeast corridor, Jacksonville-Tampa-Miami etc. Precisely
> because there is not much in-between makes the high speed rail a good
> option—if there are too many stops than the average speed become too low.
> Between Alicante and Madrid, a distance of 440 km, the train stops at most
> twice, and often just once, in Albacete. It helps that Spain is relatively
> thinly populated by European standards, with a large percentage of the
> population concentrated in the big cities of Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia
> and Seville.
>
> The place where high speed trains do not make sense are precisely
> countries like the Netherlands or Denmark, small and densely populated.
> There, garden variety trains going up to 200 km/h are plenty enough for the
> distances involved.
>
> Cheers,
> Nathan
>
> Nathan Wajsman
> Alicante, Spain
> http://www.frozenlight.eu <http://www.frozenlight.eu/>
> http:// <http://www.greatpix.eu/>www.greatpix.eu
> PICTURE OF THE WEEK: http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws <
> http://www.fotocycle.dk/paws>Blog: http://nathansmusings.wordpress.com/ <
> http://nathansmusings.wordpress.com/>
> Cycling: http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/belgiangator <
> http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/belgiangator>
> YNWA
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>
>
> > On 23 Apr 2015, at 16:06, Bob Benson <bob.benson91@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> >
> > Some years ago I ran a program that brought groups of Dutch middle
> managers
> > to St Louis for a month. They were, as you might imagine, struck by the
> > lack of rail transportation compared to their expectations.
> >
> >
> >
> > But . then again . they couldn't get over the, to them, amazing
> distances
> > between cities. Realistically, the distance to the next big towns from
> St
> > Louis were in the 300 to 500 km range (e.g., Kansas City, Chicago,
> Memphis),
> > which to them would get them to Paris or Berlin etc. from Holland. In
> > between, in their view, was nothing .. Just little towns like
> Springfield
> > and Columbia, and these were the biggest by far, and still were more
> than
> > 150 km away. In northern Europe, you get to the next big city in no
> more
> > than 50 to 100 km.
> >
> >
> >
> > When I teach in Holland I give them this data: they have 17 million
> folks,
> > we (e.g., Kansas) has less than 3 million mostly concentrated along I 35
> .
> > in something like ten times the space.
> >
> >
> >
> > As one fellow put it, "I get in the car, drive for 4 hours, and still
> > haven't gotten anywhere." From Holland he'd have gone through
> countries.
> >
> >
> >
> > So . as Ken has pointed out . there's just no chance of investing in HST.
> > There's a lot more open space in places like Kansas than in Europe .
> even in
> > the East Coast except for the 95 corridor.
> >
> >
> >
> > Bob
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > --
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