In the United States, the Trains Remain Slow

The train, in the country of grand spaces, trails. The only high-speed line in the United States, the Acela Express, travels between New York and Washington in 3 hours while it takes less than one hour for the Eurostar to travel from Paris to London, a similar distance.

A symbol of the conquest of the West of the 19th century, the American rail system cuts the figure of a relic today, compared to the trains in countries like Japan, France, Germany or China with which together have 6000 km of track for high-speed trains.

A dozen other countries have plans to commission such trains, like Iran, which will buy from Germany a 448 km/h mag-lev.

Last year, in France, a TGV attained during a test the record speed of 571 km/h. Most American trains could reach a top speed of 127 km/h with difficulty, with a much lower cruising speed.

“It’s really slow!”, complains Elanor Herman, a retired speech therapist, as she prepares to board the “Northeast Regional” at Union Station in Washington, a train managed, like the Acela, by Amtrak. “I took a high-speed train in Italy, it’s another world!”

The advances of Europe and Asia, where the trains usually run around 320km/h, make increasingly apparent the enormous shortfalls of the richest country in the world in this area, airplanes and automobiles remain the pillars of transportation in the United States.

But, with rising gas prices, the recurrent delays in airports and the environmental preoccupations gaining ground, the necessity to offer rail services will become more obvious.

“We are the only developed country in the world which does not have a high-speed train,” presidential candidate Barack Obama recently stated.

“With the price of fuel today, we should expand our rail service. One of the things that I’ve talked about for a long time has been to connect all of the cities in the Midwest with high-speed trains”, continued the senator from Illinois.

Only California is considering to construct a high-speed train network, 1,100 km for a line from Sacramento to San Diego, via San Francisco and Los Angeles. The 40 million dollar project could begin in 2009.

The Acela express, has briefly attained 240km/h, on average it runs at 138 km/h

“Too many turns” on the old line from Washington to Boston, to accelerate and “to get the rights would be a monumental task”, explains the spokesperson for Amtrak, Cliff Black.

Nevertheless, a republican congressman, John Mica, is trying to push the modernization of this line. The project he’s considering costs about 20 million dollars. “We don’t really have propositions for funding from the federal government, or the states, or local government, or from private investors”, recognizes John Mica.

Cliff Black explains that without political will, and with the sacrosanct right to property in the US, “it is very difficult to acquire land for the construction of rail lines.”

Amtrak has no project of this kind, “we don’t have the means for them”, asserts the spokesperson for the enterprise that is accused of a loss of 475 million dollars last year, in spite of a 5 year record number of passengers. The number of passengers has already increased 12% this year.