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The current version of the plans feature one intermediate stop at Brazos Valley. I understand that stop will be served by a highway connection with parking facilities and that the proposal includes operating a shuttle bus to the nearby college. I do not think the rail line will come near many...

Texas HSR is planning to build everything from scratch. I do not think they will be crossing through any built up areas (except at the two ends). Thus conflicts with urban fabric will be at a minimum. Most of the alignment will be built on what is presently farmland. I do not think there will be...

I don't know how Texas HSR went about approaching landowners, but I understand that in France and Spain they did a lot of land-swapping deals. So they listened to farmers for example to understand why cutting up this field was going to damage the economic prospects of the entire farm, and then...

I understand local manufacturing is defined not by how or where stuff is assembled, but by the percentage of the total value that is created locally. This can mean that some of the sub-suppliers need to be local as well. Preferably the high value ones. Assembly is only a small part of the total...

The cynic in me says Amtrak may be good at the operating side of running a railroad, but doesn't have much of a track record when it comes to delivering major projects from scratch or pushing for service expansion. Such projects tend to take forever, and Amtrak, being directly answerable to...

Often this is a chicken and egg question. Car-centric cities tend to be spread out as they have no incentive to place things close together. Transit-centric cities often build around the transit stations with real estate closer to a station being more desirable and this reinforces the virtuous...

other factors might include status of airline competition, as well as speed, quality and reliability of the train service. Also of importance are the passengers generated by intermediate stations, connections to commuter lines and indeed local bus lines that could funnel in passengers. Not to...

from that point of view, yes. I thought you were implying that market share should necessarily be higher for places with lower population.

I would have thought it is inherently more rational to use infrastructure counter-cyclically. So if maintenance shops for example are working night shifts to turn around day trains for the next day, having a night train serviced during daytime hours is merely creaming off otherwise unused capacity.

shouldn't that be the other way round?

On airliners seats (typically/mostly) face forwards, and in cars they do as well. So that is what people are accustomed to. And in the US those are the two dominant modes of transportation.

So basically doing what the current shipping route via the Suez Canal does, but cutting out Suez and inserting a rail segment into the middle instead? Trains might be faster (if the various countries concerned can work together and streamline border formalities) but depending on the details...

I wonder how they envisage the onward movement of trains into Europe? I guess they would have to trace up the Gulf coast of Saudi, where a railroad is proposed but, apart from some shorter bits shared with other projects, not yet built. There are proposals to eventually extend this coastal route...

That is, if there will still be any Superliners in 15 years.

I understand there is also a tendency among especially smaller operations to de skill and and contract out maintenance to specialist contractors (who are often identical to the manufacturers, but need not necessarily be). This is often a necessity in view of the increasing difficulty of hiring...

That's quite an impressive learning curve for Brightline staff. Going from being a new facility just a few years ago and hiring people, many of who had presumably never done train maintenance before, and thus having to hit the ground running, to now having sufficient proficiency and reputation...

I am not sure if it would be possible to get a new railroad anywhere near to Houston downtown without either extremely costly eminent domain of huge numbers of properties or sharing tracks with an unwilling freight railroad.

I rode these in Denmark several times, including once on the train to Hamburg via the Rodby - Puttgarden train ferry. I understand this train ferry has since been discontinued in favor of a bus bridge feeding the ferry. The ferry will eventually be replaced by a combined highway and rail tunnel...

Spain used to have some as well. They later got rebuilt with more conventional front ends. Israel had some too, and possibly still does today.

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