The reach of high-speed rail (HSR) is increasing rapidly, with ambitious projects popping up all over – even in North America. High-tech rolling stock well might be hurtling down the track toward your destination. Problem is, the ability to book it – consistently and under most circumstances – still resembles the rambling little red caboose, clickty-clacking to keep up.
By last year the respected Worldwatch Institute said HSR would be up and running in almost 24 different counties – China, France, Italy, Japan and the United States among them. The independent research group says that growth is pegged “largely to [HSR’s] reliability and ability to cover vast geographic distances in a short time, to investments aimed at connecting once-isolated regions and to the diminishing appeal of air travel, which is becoming more cumbersome because of security concerns.”
“The rise in HSR has been very rapid,” concludes Worldwatch senior researcher Michael Renner. Consider: over a three-year period alone, spanning 2008 – 2011, the operational fleet jumped from 1,737 HSR trainsets worldwide to 2,517. By last year the global girth was projected to be upwards of 3,700 trainsets.
What’s Hot
When it comes to flat-out fast, China seems to be setting the pace for expansion. Last December alone the country launched 32 high-speed rail routes, perhaps the most prominent of which was a 1,106-mile run ‘twixt Shanghai and Guangzhou, two of the country’s burgeoning megalopolises. Rail travel time on the route has been slashed in half, plummeting from some 16 hours to just under seven.
Growth in Europe is far more measured. Over the coming five years the European Rail Congress projects the rate of growth to be a moderate 2.7 percent per year. Still, you’ve got to put that number in context. Between 2020 and 2035 projections are HSR will be the fastest-growing mode of transport, terrestrial or otherwise.
Even as large European legacy airlines cut back on short-haul flying, pressured by the likes of low-fare easyJet and Ryanair, cut-rate rail is emerging on the Continent. In 2013 SNCF, France’s state-owned rail system, jumped into the competitive marketplace with OuiGo.
All the while, Japan keeps refining its pioneering Shinkansen “bullet train” network. Since the system debuted back in 1964 with 320 miles of track, it’s grown to an almost 2,616-mile structure whose routes connect prime population points on the islands of Honshu and Kyushu. Eventually, Hokkaido will be part of the Shinkansen mix. Another new rail line to the northern Japanese island is now under construction.
Not only have the Japanese pioneered HSR technology, they know how to make the trains get there on time. Worldwatch Institute reports, “the average delay per high-speed train throughout the year is just half a minute.” This translates into bodacious passenger loyalty. Worldwatch concludes, “On all routes in Japan where both air and high-speed rail connections are available, rail has captured a 75 percent market share.”
North American Nibbling
All of the above are concrete projects, completed or well underway. The outlook for North America is a little bit more nebulous, as isolated systems nibble away at intercity air routes rather than swallowing them whole.
Ever-popular Acela Express is billed by Amtrak as “the fastest train in the Western Hemisphere” – although it hits its maximum speed of 150 mph for just one short stretch between Boston and New Haven. In FY 2013, the last reporting period available as of this writing, Amtrak says the rapier-like conveyance carried 3.3 million riders and generated nearly $531 million worth of revenue.
That’s not a bad start. But to really make a difference say proponents, HSR can’t be relegated merely to the BOSWASH corridor. It’s gotta go west.
Enter, sort of, CHSR – the California High-Speed Rail project. By 2029 plans are for the line to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles at speeds up to 220 mph. California voters OK’d a measure issuing just under $10 billion in bonds for the line back in 2008. Ground was broken in January 2015.
Where there are big bucks involved there’s controversy – especially when it comes to the politically-contentious Golden State. Last year The World Bank pegged the price of the mega-project at $56 million per kilometer. That’s significantly more than twice the amount it costs the Chinese to build such an increment, and well over the average of what it costs Europeans per kilometer.
If CHSR sounds ambitious, the plan pales in comparison to Elon Musk’s futuristic formula of propelling passengers in a tube ‘twixt San Fran and LA and at 700 mph, rendering it a 35-minute journey. Musk contends his Hyperloop set-up would cost about $7.5 billion. That’s a bargain; the far more conventional CHSR would run $68 billion.
Hyperloop passengers would be propelled down the coast in capsules, capsules cushioned by air. Before you consider this so much hot air remember that Musk’s track record as transportation entrepreneur (Tesla, SpaceX, etc.) isn’t too shabby.More down to earth, perhaps, is a plan by a company called Texas Central Railway to construct an HSR route employing Japanese Shinkansen N700 bullet train technology linking Dallas and Houston. Time en route: about 90 minutes. Unlike the California High-Speed Rail gambit, this one – insist supporters – would use neither state nor federal subsidies. One potential backer: Japan’s export bank. Remember, the N700 bullet train is Japanese-built.
Texas Central Railway is making progress in its efforts to be up and running by 2021. It recently recommended to regulators a specific corridor for the Dallas-Houston route, one paralleling utility lines along the path.
In one of the reddest, most conservative states in the nation, what might make this work is the eschewing of taxpayer money. Back in 2009, President Obama tried to spark interest in HSR via grants. Eventually three states – Wisconsin, Ohio and Florida – nixed the projects. The issue: taxpayer funding.
This doesn’t mean the Sunshine State isn’t making passenger rail news – just not the true high-speed variety. Construction has begun on a $2.5 billion “fast train” link between Orlando and Miami. Billed as “All Aboard Florida,” speed on the 235-mile run would average a tad over 78 mph – far short of the clip of a commercial airliner, but decidedly preferable to that of a car navigating the Interstate. The Miami-West Palm Beach leg of the project is expected to come on line in 2016; the remaining West Palm – Orlando piece a year later.
Tickets, Please
All these new routes – real and imagined – are terrific. But depending on where you book and where you’re headed, the process of reserving rail can be a pain. “The main challenge is ticketing,” says European rail observer Alex McWhirter, consumer editor of the UK’s Business Traveller magazine. “In mainland Europe…the European railway operators are old-fashioned and are slow to adopt modern marketing/ticketing systems.” McWhirter contends, “They don’t have to try hard because they’re all state-funded so their jobs are secure.” He says “once booked, business travelers find it more tricky to make changes [to] rail tickets compared to an airline equivalent.”
“Consumers are used to being able – in a timely, convenient fashion – book any kind of travel product anywhere in the world. But when you look at rail, that’s not the case,” says Cameron Jones, chief commercial officer for UK-based SilverRail, a company who’s aim it is to render rail booking more customer-friendly.
Jones maintains the problem is – at least compared to airlines – “there are no standards in the rail space.” One such case in point: train station codes. The International Air Transport Association standardizes airport codes. London Heathrow is ‘LHR,’ no matter whether your flying in on British Airways or Bulgaria Air; New York Kennedy is JFK, be your carrier of choice Air China or Alitalia; it’s a universal language.
Not so for many rail stations. “Often, in the rail space, you’ll have a single station like St. Pancras in London (home of Eurostar) that will have multiple station codes for that single station. Eurostar’s designation for St. Pancras and Deutsche Bahn, for example, differ.” Confusion can be the byproduct. Travelers, or the people who book their trip, would need to know who calls what by what code to be able to effectively book passage.
That’s among the ways SilverRail cuts through the clutter. It provides a single, unique code for “each station on the route and all the rail carriers that we work with,” says Jones.
SilverRail’s end game, he says, “is to connect up every rail carrier in the world.” After six years of operation, the company has managed to link to its web-based platform Via Rail in Canada, Amtrak in the US, all the Swedish rail carriers in Sweden, all UK passenger railroads in the UK, Renfe in Spain and Deutsche Bahn in Germany. Jones says Italy’s Trenitalia is set to come on board late this year.
Jones believes former intercity fliers are migrating more and more to rail. Here’s the break point: three-and-a-half hours. On an origin and destination basis he says it’s that point at which “rail takes a majority share over air” – at least in the United Kingdom.
Over that mark, air reigns. There’s no replacing it for long-hauls. No one’s seriously pretending otherwise. To that end, one of SilverRail’s partners, the online travel management solutions company KDS, has a product dubbed Neo that books the entirety of the journey – air, rail and hotel. Through its partnership with Carlson Wagonlit Travel, that door-to-door tool is being rolled out in the US.
It’s this sort of approach that takes the loosely-used term ‘intermodality’ and invigorates it, straightening out the track up ahead to your final destination.