Texas could get a 205-mph bullet train zipping between Houston and Dallas

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 287 points – Texas could get a 205-mph bullet train zipping between Houston and Dallas
popsci.com

Texas could get a 205-mph bullet train zipping between Houston and Dallas::The proposed electric railway line could travel 240 miles in under 90 minutes for over 6 million passengers per year.

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I doubt it ... first, it's electric, and second, you cannot install a lift kit on it.

But you could add some truck nuts behind every train car and some bull horns on the front.

It's electric, but a diesel engine strictly for "rolling coal" at cyclists will also be installed.

It could, but it won't.

I dunno, they do like bullets

On the other hand, one of the reasons they like bullets is because they can be used to kill minorities. A bullet train designed in a certain way can kill both a lot of minorities and public interest in mass transportation.

Been talking about this for years, wake me up when they actually start doing something.

Seriously. It comes up every couple of years. Then the residents of Grimes county get all up in arms, put signs all along highway 6, vote against it, and then it dies a silent death.

I live in Texas and this is unlikely to happen. It was more likely to happen a few years back. I doubt they will build a eletric train between two liberal cities. The only thing that would make it less likely is if you said it was a gay eletric train. Even if they did, Texas cities are sprawled out and require a car. It would only work if you could load your car on the train. It would be useful for students going back and forth to their universities. However, university students are almost as despised as poor people or minorities to most of the voters in Texas.

What if they promised to put guns on the front of the train? Would that help?

I love the way you think.

Put gunner's nests on the train, B-52 style.

Advertise the shit out of that job.

We'll have republicans building trains between neighborhoods by the end of the year.

Yes exactly that. You can't start a high speed train and expect for it to work.

Each train can handle the same amount of passengers as a couple large planes if not more. When they arrive at the destination something is needed for them to reach their destination..

The biggest obstacle, besides politics and oil/gas money, is neither of these cities are non-car friendly. Both cities are so sprawling you end up spending significantly more time using public transportation than driving. That's even if public transportation goes to the part of the city you need.

They'll each need an intermodal stop. That would be so much easier on passengers than the traditional airport stop and, given projected volume, would be essential.

DART is pretty alright if you're near a stop.

“Could” being the operative word. People have been trying to build this since the 1990s.

You've gotta laugh... It is the same everywhere I think: Is a high-speed rail possible in Australia

Sydney to Melbourne looks ridiculous in comparison with like three times the distance.

Not sure if it's going to happen in Texas, but the Bright line high speed rail between Miami and Orlando is going to be finished by the end of the month hopefully!

That shit has been a battle for the best part of two decades .... Can't believe it finally happened

For what it's worth, Brightline Florida isn't quite considered high speed by most metrics. It will have a short 125 mph section, which is kinda the minimum design speed to be considered high speed. The state of rail in the US is so bad though that Brightline Florida might actually have a higher average speed than the Acela...

Brightline West between southern CA and Las Vegas will be designed as a deticated high speed line though.

“But how we gonna roll coal in that thing?!”

At least it's called a bullet train

Elorn will find a way to get it scrapped like he did in california.

This. We'd have a high speed rail going between San Diego and Seattle by now if Mush hadn't gotten everyone exploring hyperloop (a concept we've known to be terrible for over a century now).

As fun as it is to watch Musk do dumb stuff, giving him credit for killing HSR is a reach. There’s a really great article about it here — even Epstein was involved for some reason!

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/09/us/california-high-speed-rail-politics.html

And at this point, who is going to listen to anything he says and think that they'd want him having any kind of control over something he talks about even if it does sound like a good idea?

I love how people listened to Elon when he doesn't even have an engineering degree. Proof that the media can spin anyone into a celebrity "genius."

God the memes of Elon hate are reaching unbearable proportions. Where was any work about to be done before Elon put a stop to it?

You'll need to a get a new hobby that isn't meming musk.

So that's where they export the outdated European first generation trains from the 80s to.

I tried to find the existing Houston rail station on foot one time. It took an hour. There were few helpful signs and sidewalks only some of the time.

I'm seeing a lot of commenters shitting on Texas here, and while it's not completely undeserved, I'd like to point out that Texas is 1st in the nation in wind power generation. Texas will implement things -- even "Blue" things -- if the economics make sense.

They may generate the most wind power, but that's just because they're so big. They're not even in the top 10 if you look at what percentage of their power generation is from wind power

Republicans like Abbott went on Fox News and blamed windmills for the storm outage. The party is very different than they were when these projects started, when economics mattered. Texas politics may still accidentally allow a select few progressive things to happen, but the builders and owners must be extremely "friendly" and perfectly thread the needle. Oil and gas owns this state, including the windmills, probably.

I feel so sorry for anyone whos gonna live near that thing

At full speed those trains sound like a formula 1 track during a race. (And thats before they went from V8s to V6s

Rubbish. With around 75-80 dB at 25 meters, high speed trains at 300 kph are about as loud as 6 lane highways, and unlike the highway that is for less than 6 seconds to a stationary observer. A V8 formula one car was ear damagingly loud at more than 130 dB.

https://www.static.tu.berlin/fileadmin/www/10002264/ews/2023-sose/2023-05-22_RTRI_Uda_Seminar.pdf

https://www.hitachi.com/rev/archive/2021/r2021_06/06a02/index.html

edit: Here's a German ICE train going 300 kph through a station if anyone wants to get a rough idea of how a modern high speed train sounds relatively up close.