On the Fast Track

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High-speed trains take the environmental advantages of conventional passenger rail and supercharge them. All of today's high-speed rail systems run on electricity drawn from overhead wires, which powers motors in the trains' locomotives. Electric motors are roughly three times more efficient than internal combustion engines in converting energy into mechanical force. Recent generations of high-speed trains use superefficient motors; regenerative braking (which captures energy that would otherwise be lost as heat, then converts it back into electricity and returns it to the grid); and advanced, lightweight materials to boost their comparative efficiency even further.

Independent research commissioned by Eurostar, which operates high-speed trains between London and Europe through the Channel Tunnel, has shown that a passenger who flies from London to Paris (214 miles) or Brussels (199 miles) generates 10 times more carbon dioxide than one who rides on a high-speed train.

High-speed trains are most competitive with airplanes on trips that last up to three hours or cover distances of up to 500 miles. "Those short-haul flights are the most energy intensive," says Anthony Perl, director of urban studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, and author of two books on passenger rail. "Getting all those tons of metal five miles up in the air going 500 mph -- the amount of energy required to do that is roughly the same whether the plane is going from Chicago to Detroit or Chicago to Europe. When jet fuel prices are high, airlines lose more money on the short flights.

"High-speed train travel has, in some places, completely displaced air travel," Perl continues. "For example, you cannot fly between Paris and Brussels anymore. There's a train every 20 minutes, and it takes an hour and a half to travel the 190 miles between the two city centers. The airlines couldn't compete with the convenience and price, so they cancelled their flights on that route." By the same logic, he says, high-speed rail has the potential to take over about one-third of all air travel in the United States -- including, for example, the majority of short-haul flights between heavily traveled city pairs such as New York and Washington, D.C., or San Francisco and Los Angeles.

It's little wonder that high-speed rail services have spread rapidly across the developed world. Japan started the trend in 1964 with the opening of a 340-mile Shinkansen ("new trunk line") from Tokyo to Osaka. France launched its first TGV service, between Paris and Lyon, in 1981. Next came Germany, with its InterCityExpress network. The list of countries with trains that routinely run at 125 mph or faster -- the most broadly accepted definition of "high-speed"-now includes Belgium, China, Finland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Russia, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, and the U.K. Projects are under way in Argentina, India, Morocco, and Turkey. In all these countries but Turkey, which is not a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol, high-speed rail systems are an important part of the effort to meet greenhouse-gas reduction goals under the agreement. More broadly, countries that aspire to participate fully in the twenty-first-century economy are coming to see that a high-speed rail network is as essential as a robust Internet or mobile-phone infrastructure.

So what's holding back the United States? I posed this question to more than a dozen authorities around the country -- transportation officials, energy experts, rail advocates, historians, urban planners, and politicians. Their answers varied. Some said that the car culture is too entrenched here and that passenger trains bear the stigma of the past. Others pointed out that the rail infrastructure in the United States is almost entirely owned by private freight companies. "In Europe and Japan, they built their high-speed rail systems based on a passenger-rail legacy," says Scott Witt, director of the rail and marine office at the Washington State Department of Transportation. "In this country, we're working on top of a legacy of freight railroads. That makes building separate, dedicated tracks for high-speed passenger rail more of a challenge."

Passenger and freight trains that share the same tracks -- which is to say, nearly all intercity and long-distance trains in the United States -- are generally limited by the Federal Railroad Administration to speeds no greater than 79 mph. The speed limit goes up to 110 mph for those few passenger trains equipped with special signaling systems that engineers can read in their locomotive cabs. Without these, train operators must watch for stationary signals located beside the tracks, just as they've done since the early nineteenth century. To go faster than 110 mph, a train equipped with signals in its cab must run on tracks that have no level crossings with roads. That is, all road intersections have to be "grade-separated" from the tracks by means of bridges or underpasses. The Amtrak Acela Express, which runs between Boston and Washington, D.C., via New York, is the only train in the United States authorized to exceed the 110-mph limit. For short portions of its route, where track and traffic conditions allow, the Acela can go up to 150 mph, although it averages less than 80 mph.

By international standards, the Acela does not qualify as true high-speed rail. Amtrak's Acela service and the track it runs on -- the 363-mile-long Northeast Corridor, the busiest passenger route in the country -- represent what's known as incremental high-speed rail. With this approach, existing rail lines are gradually upgraded to allow trains to operate safely at progressively higher speeds. The result is a patchwork, with some track sections fully grade-separated and modernized and other sections peppered with tight curves and grade crossings, which require trains to slow down. Freight trains also use some portions of the Northeast Corridor. Generally longer and slower than passenger trains, these can gum up the works, reducing the average speed, on-time performance, and safety of passenger rail lines, whether the Acela Express or the regional commuter trains that also ply the corridor.

Amtrak owns most of the track in the Northeast Corridor, so dispatchers give its passenger trains higher priority than freights in case of track conflicts. With most other proposed incremental high-speed rail projects in the United States, the reverse is true: freight carriers own the tracks, and passenger trains are second-class citizens. This goes a long way toward explaining Amtrak's chronically low on-time performance. It's not entirely Amtrak's fault; it's at the mercy of the Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, CSX, and other freight companies to dispatch its trains on schedule.

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