The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
All aboard for a high-speed American rail trip
Its love affair with the car is legendary, but the US has announced a swathe of new fast-track networks linking holiday states, says Chris Leadbeater
The noise of a train in motion is closely embedded in the American story – but rarely in ways suggestive of speed. The stately rumble of an Amtrak service, plodding through dramatic scenery, has long been part of the soundscape in the United States. So too the workhorse clank of a mile-long freight train, holding up a queue of irritated drivers at a busy Midwest level-crossing. But the wind-whistle of a Japanese-style shinkansen, zooming between cities? That is a different matter.
“Slow and steady” tends to be the defining ethos of rail travel in the US, where trains sit behind cars and planes as the nation’s favoured method of transport. However, if you were paying attention to the minutiae of Washington DC policy announcements just before Christmas, you may have noticed something significant: the birth of a fledgling American highspeed train system.
OK, that is an exaggeration – or, at least, an overplaying of the White House press release published on December 8. Nonetheless, the weighty document headlined “President Biden Announces Billions to Deliver WorldClass High-Speed Rail, and Launch New Passenger Rail Corridors Across the Country” makes for fascinating reading – despite its challenging title.
The meat of the announcement is the $8.2 billion (£6.5 billion) pledged towards 10 passenger rail projects – including, to quote it directly, “the first world-class high-speed rail projects in our country’s history”.
The most high-profile of these has already received a fair amount of publicity – even though, as yet, little of the groundwork has begun. Brightline West is a scheme of considerable ambition; a 218-mile privately built link between Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
While the line will not run to the centre of LA – it will terminate on the edge of the conurbation at Rancho Cucamonga, 25 miles east of downtown, where passengers will switch onto suburban trains – it will knock a large chunk of time off the journey. It takes about five hours to drive between Sin City and Sunset Strip, tracing Interstate-15 across the Mojave Desert. Brightline West says it will cut this to two hours, 10 minutes.
To do so, services will need to operate at shinkansen pace. Again, Brightline West claims that this will happen; the promised 186mph is comparable to the 150-200mph delivered by Japan’s famous bullet trains.
At present, the timeline is as ambitious as the project – the plan is to have everything ready in time for the Los Angeles Olympics, just over four years from now (July 14-30 2028). The estimated total cost is a purported $12bn (£9.5bn), of which $3bn (£2.4bn) will be a sugar-lump from the Oval Office.
Of course, none of this is entirely new. If the word “Brightline” sounds familiar, you may have visited Florida in the last six months. That “West” suffix distinguishes the Vegas-LA project from the existing “Brightline”, which has been cutting a dash in the Sunshine State since September.
Although it has been promoted as such, you cannot really describe this 235-mile route between Miami and Orlando, via Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach, as “high-speed”. Even the most optimistic train-spotter would struggle to declare a line that only reaches a top velocity of 125mph – and only then, on the track immediately east of Orlando – to be truly fast. In the largely residential areas along the Atlantic shoreline, it slows to 79mph.
Nonetheless, the Florida Brightline is a game-changer; the first privately funded passenger railway in the US for more than a century. The wait for another will be shorter.
It is perhaps no surprise that these developments are taking place on Joe Biden’s watch. The 46th president is a firm advocate of rail travel. He earned the nickname “Amtrak Joe” during his time as a senator for Delaware; notably in the early Seventies when, having been widowed (his first wife and one-year-old daughter were killed in a car crash in December 1972), he rode the rails between Washington DC and Wilmington twice a day – determined to be at home in the evenings to take care of his two surviving children.
An empathetic observer might glimpse the affection for train travel, born of those years, in December’s far-reaching funding announcement.
And the funding will reach further. The plan also speaks of the “California Inaugural High-Speed Rail Service Project” – the working title for a planned train corridor up the middle of the Golden State. Construction began in 2015 on what will ultimately be a network connecting San Francisco to Los Angeles via Silicon Valley hub San Jose – with likely extensions up to the state capital Sacramento, and down to San Diego.
Again, this should be shinkansen-level infrastructure; purportedly the world’s first fully solar-powered bullet train, with locomotives hitting speeds of 220mph. For now, though, work – and the $3.1bn (£2.4bn) sum promised by the White House – is focused on the core of the project; the 171 miles of track currently being laid between Bakersfield (110 miles north of LA) and Merced (100 miles east of San Jose), via Fresno. The completion date for this section is pencilled in as “2030 to 2033”.
The White House statement also mentions the “Cascadia High-Speed Rail” line; a possible joint initiative with Canada that could link the three key cities of the region.
The blueprint imagines track forging south from Vancouver (in British Columbia) to Seattle (in Washington), and on to Portland – with the potential for further southbound construction into Oregon (and its second biggest city Eugene). A total distance of 413 miles.
At this stage, this is little more than a drawing-board outline, with vague murmurs of services by 2040. But the news that the US section has been earmarked for federal cash has been welcomed on the other side of the border.
“It’s a very exciting development,” said Laura Jones, president and chief executive officer of the Business Council of British Columbia, on hearing the announcement. “This obviously changes the maths for British Columbia. It will make sense for this to be a priority for the province as well.”
Elsewhere, reference is made to a fast line between Atlanta in Georgia and Charlotte in North Carolina – a 250-mile segment of a wider proposed “Southeast High-Speed Rail Corridor” that has been under discussion since the turn of the century. Should this come into existence, it would pass through five states, reaching as far north as Washington DC and as far south as Jacksonville (at the top end of Florida). It would also include stations in Columbia (the South Carolina capital) and Richmond (the capital of Virginia).
The December 8 statement neglects to mention a fifth American high-speed rail project, which bears another president’s fingerprints. The Texas Central Railway has been in the offing since 2009, and was listed as a national transportation “infrastructure priority” by the Trump administration in January 2017. The project has become mired in legal troubles – not least right-of-way issues and opposition from landowners along the route. Nonetheless, there is bullish talk of a launch between 2026 and 2029, and of journeys of little more than an hour between Dallas and Houston; trains racing 240 miles at 205mph.
Whether these advancements will entice Americans onto the platform is another thing. The US fell in love with the car the moment Henry Ford put the Model T on the market in 1908, and has maintained its devotion ever since. In a normal year, 245 million American drivers make 229 billion trips along American roads, adding up to 2.92 trillion miles covered, and 91 billion hours behind the wheel. There are several reasons why the Amtrak network, now approaching its 53rd birthday, does not hold a warmer place in the nation’s heart. One of them is that, although it passes through 46 of the 50 states (Wyoming and South Dakota, as well as, more obviously, Hawaii and Alaska, are the forgotten four), it does not – with the exception of the key routes around New York, Boston, Washington DC and the general north-east – offer a reliable and realistic service for daily commuters.
Brightline West is a case in point. While it is unlikely ever to be a commuter route, its arrival will plug a gap which, some would argue, should never have existed. Las Vegas first appeared on the map in 1905 as a stop on the Union Pacific Railroad, but has not welcomed passenger trains since 1997, when the final Desert Wind – the Amtrak service which tied it to Los Angeles in one direction, Chicago in the other – trundled out of town.
A cynic would point out that each of the projects discussed here is a separate entity, rather than a connecting piece of a joined-up shinkansen network. But at a time when Britain has scaled back its own commitments to high-speed rail amid the shambles of HS2, it will be intriguing to see what sort of system the US – a great industrial innovator, when it wishes to be – will create in the coming decades. New York to Las Vegas by blink-and-youmiss-them bullet trains before this century is out? Don’t bet against it.
The planned rail corridor will purportedly make use of the world’s first fully solar-powered bullet train