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More High Speed Rail: Alfred Twu's U.S. High Speed Rail Map. (It's Just a Concept, Folks)

By Rain Noe - February 6, 2013

in Cars

I love trains, and I've ridden some of slowest and fastest trains in the world. On the Hanoi-to-Hue it seemed dogs were loping past us, and on the lightning-fast Kyoto-to-Tokyo bullet train my brain couldn't reconcile the stillness of the car with the speed of the scenery whipping past the window.

The best train trip I ever took was a New York-to-Seattle. It's a nice way to see the country (from a remove) and meet some people on board, but it requires you have time to kill—it took three days.

I've accepted the fact that the U.S. will never get their high-speed rail act together, but it doesn't stop me from staring longingly at the map above. That's artist Alfred Twu's rendition of what this country ought to have. It's pure concept work and he's selling prints of it, as well as offering a downloadable PDF that you can modify. It's currently making the rounds on Facebook—amusingly, propagated by folks who can't read the fine print and think that it's real. If only.

Amtrak's real-life paltry offerings, below, can be seen larger here.

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Frank K

11 years ago

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Right through the heart of wind country. The system could be powered by wind generated electricity. Eliminates the need to build a power grid to transmit to eastern cities. Maybe it would need to price gas and fuel to their actual cost when adding in the cost to defend the cheap sources through out the world. Then watch how the impossible changes to the possible in a big hurry.
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Gregory Campbell

11 years ago

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I think its about time the government gets it's head out of it's ass
and starts putting americans back to work why give away unemployment benifits when you can hire all those people and get somthing for your money
OH THATS RIGHT , I FORGOT, THERE'S NO MONEY IN IT
FOR ANY OF THEIR CONSTITUANTS
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Ken J

11 years ago

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First and foremost, federal regulations regarding rail car construction would have to be revised and brought up to at least late 20th century standards. Current regulation require rail cars to be overbuilt to such an extent that makes them incapable of achieving high speed or economy.

The Acela is a perfect example of how these regulations cripple our ability to implement HST's.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acela_Express#Engineering
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archie4oz

11 years ago

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A couple of problems with your assertion. "Europe" is not tiny. It's larger (3,930,000 sq mi) than the US (3,794,101 sq mi).

Secondly, HSR routes are optimal in the 200-1000mi ranges. So while LA and NYC could (and should) be linked, the purpose of that line (and bulk of routes) would be to provide services to those cities from locations in between.
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supagold

11 years ago

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Bullet trains make no sense in the US. It's one of those ideas that sounds good because "Europe does it, so we should to". But Europe is tiny.
Let's do an example:
The Shinkansen tops out at around 190MPH, but let's be nice and give it 200MPH, with no stops and no acceleration time. The straight line distance, which of course we couldn't use IRL, from NYC to LA is about 2550 miles. So in our fantastic, completely idealized conception, we're looking at 12.5 hours from NYC to LA.
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Mackey

11 years ago

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Make it so.
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