110
Americans are getting new trains
(media.amtrak.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
110 points (100.0% liked)
Fuck Cars
13064 readers
535 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
tracks in the US usually have freight heavy rail on them, anyways, so you'll probably get 4 minutes at that speed before travelling 40mph for the rest of the trip. :/
The trains in article are the new high speed Acela trains that run on the northeast corridor. The northeast corridor is an electrified high speed rail corridor owned jointly by Amtrak and various state DOTs.
What you describe is the case for over 90% of Amtrak's network, but these trains are specifically made for the one section where that doesn't happen.
NEC corridor is not high-speed. The end-end average speed is only 70mph, which is pretty middling even for conventional rail.
Every source that I have found calls it a high speed rail. From checking openrailwaymap, the track speeds for most of the corridor are well above 100 mph. It is high speed rail. It's one of the worst high speed rail corridors in need of improvement, but it's still high speed rail.
According to the bog-standard UIC definition, HSR requires dedicated HSL running generally at 155+mph. UIC has a second definition that does allow for upgraded conventional lines running generally at 125mph in corridors without air competition. Acela meets neither of these metrics.
Even aside from the air competition issue, Acela's general overall speed is not over 125mph or even 100mph due to all the slow sections. For example:
Cool graph, where did you take it from? I wonder if there is a place with this type of graph for every line out there
aaahhh, okay; thank you! i am on the west cost where all trains go as fast as heavy freight, heh.