A Persian traveller’s (Shushtari) description of Calcutta and the English (~1750s):

The Englishmen shave their beards and moustaches, and twist hair into pig-tails. They scatter a white powder to make their hair look white, both men and women do this, to lessen the difference between old and young. Neither men nor women remove pubic hair, accounting comely to leave it in its natural state. And indeed, most European women have no body-hair, and even if it does occur, it is wine-coloured, soft and extremely fine.

By reason of women going unveiled, and the mixed education of boys and girls in one school-house, it is quite the thing to fall in love, and both men and women have a passion for poetry and compose love poems. I have heard that well-born girls sometimes fall in love with low-born youths and are covered in scandal which neither threats nor punishment can control, so their fathers are obliged to drive them out of the house. The streets are full of innumerable such once-well-bred girls sitting on the pavements.

Brothels are advertised with pictures of prostitutes hung at the door, the price of one night written up with the furnishings required for revelry … As a result of the number of prostitutes, atashak [gonorrhoea] – a severe venereal disease causing a swelling of the scrotum and testicles – affects people of all classes. It spreads from one to another, healthy and infected mixed together, no one holding back – and this is the state of even the Muslims in these parts!

On the prospects of survival:

For Calcutta was a city where great wealth could be accumulated in a matter of months, then lost in minutes in a wager or at the whist table. Death, from disease or excess, was a commonplace, and two-thirds of the Company servants who came out never made it back – fewer still in the Company’s army, where 25 per cent of European soldiers died each year.

A description of the Patna massacre:

…As soon as the dinner was over, and the plates had been cleared away and the servants had withdrawn, Sumru told his troops to take aim. Then he ordered them to begin firing. He had the marksmen bring them down with musket shots, then descended to finish off with their bayonets those who had run to escape; one man who had hidden in the lavatory trench was executed three days later: ‘It is said that the English prisoners, while they had life, did not lose their spirits, but rather fought off their executioners, even with wine-bottles and stones’, their knives and forks having been taken from them after dinner. Their ‘cut up and mangled’ corpses were then thrown into a well in the courtyard. Wherever else there were Company servants imprisoned, they were also killed…

On “too big to fail”:

…for the first time a writer grappled, for example, with the question of how to deal with a multinational whose tentacles extended well beyond national frontiers. It also asked important questions about containing an over-powerful and unusually wealthy proprietor: what would happen, asked Bolts, if one very rich magnate were to become too wealthy and powerful for a nation state to control? What would happen if someone could buy the legislature and use his wealth to corrupt MPs for his own business ends?…The Company may be compared to a stupendous edifice,’ he wrote, ‘suddenly built upon a foundation not previously well examined or secured, inhabited by momentary proprietors and governors, divided by different interests opposed to each other; and who, while one set of them is overloading the superstructure, another is undermining the foundations….too many MPs owned EIC stock, and the EIC’s taxes contributed too much to the economy – customs duties alone generated £886,922* annually – for it to be possible for any government to even consider letting the Company sink. Ultimately, it was saved by its size: the Company now came close to generating nearly half of Britain’s trade and was, genuinely, too big to fail…..

On the Boston tea party:

…To the West it shipped Chinese tea to Massachusetts, where its dumping in Boston harbour triggered the American War of Independence. Indeed, one of the principal fears of the American Patriots in the run-up to the war was that Parliament would unleash the East India Company in the Americas to loot there as it had done in India….

Ahmad Shah Durrani returns to his mountain home to die:

…He was suffering the last stages of an illness that had long debilitated him, as his face was eaten away by what the Afghan sources call a ‘gangrenous ulcer’, possibly leprosy or some form of tumour. Soon after winning his greatest victory at Panipat, Ahmad Shah’s disease began consuming his nose, and a diamond-studded substitute was attached in its place. By 1772, maggots were dropping from the upper part of his putrefying nose into his mouth and his food as he ate…

On the companies inability to keep up with its enemies:

…every Company officer travelled with at least six servants, a complete set of camp furniture, ‘his stock of linens (at least 24 suits); some dozens of wine, brandy and gin; tea, sugar and biscuits; a hamper of live poultry and his milch goat…

On Tipu Sultan’s loyalty to the French:

…they took a solemn oath to support the Republican constitution, ‘or die at arms … to live free or die!…

Much musing about capitalsim in the epilogue:

…Companies and corporations now occupy the time and energy of more Indians than any institution other than the family. This should come as no surprise: as Ira Jackson, the former director of Harvard’s Center for Business and Government, recently noted, corporations and their leaders have today ‘displaced politics and politicians as … the new high priests and oligarchs of our system’. Covertly, companies still govern the lives of a significant proportion of the human race…

…Corporate influence, with its fatal blend of power, money and unaccountability, is particularly potent and dangerous in frail states where corporations are insufficiently or ineffectually regulated, and where the purchasing power of a large company can outbid or overwhelm an underfunded government.

…Even as our democracy and our economy have become more vibrant,’ he said, ‘an important issue in the recent election was whether we had substituted the crony socialism of the past with crony capitalism, where the rich and the influential are alleged to have received land, natural resources and spectrum in return for payoffs to venal politicians.

On globalism: “… It denies and destroys other cultures and civilisations, specifically those that threaten the universalist values said to be ‘Western’, that in reality exist simply for the benefit of globalising markets and ‘democracy’, summed up in the triptych: fun, sex, and money.[4] It is clear to us, of course, that this globalist pretention rallies the resistance against itself, and even the revolt of peoples who refuse it.”

p15 This universalist belief is also dangerous for those of us in Europe. It stunts our ability to comprehend that other men do not feel, think, or live the same way we do. It is dangerous because it acts destructively upon our own identity. After having colonised other peoples in the name of universalism, Europeans are now in the process of being colonised in the name of the very same principle against which they do not know how to defend themselves: if all men are brothers, nothing can stop the arrival of others on our doorstep.

On the local escorts:

“The Congolese girls of Leopoldville of the “Parisienne” type are exceptional in every respect. They are completely westernised in their dress and manners and altogether charming. They are well turned out, polite and well acquainted with the social graces. In fact, they are the exact equivalent of the courtesan of Marie Antoinette’s day. They fill a much needed want in this respect. Many of the Congolese politicians have advanced so speedily that their wives are still in the mud-hut stage and are totally incapable of behaving in public according to western standards, and the sight of a table laid with an array of knives and forks is known to send them into panic. Not so the courtesan. She has studied this situation. I was not surprised then to learn that these girls are greatly in demand by the recently arrived and that formal invitations to official functions even made provision for this fact, by acknowledging that they will be welcome as guests in default of a wife.”

On comforts in the congo:

“The food,” said one such disappointed warrior, “was terrible.”
“There was,” pointed out a second would-be saviour of the Congo, “no beer.”
“We were,” declared yet another intrepid irregular, “getting hacked to pieces.”

Concerning the spoils of war:

A white soldier (not my unit) tried the handle of an upstairs bedroom. It was locked. He shot out the lock and bashed in the door with his boot. Inside he found a young Congolese girl, hiding in the shower cubicle. He stripped off her clothes till she was naked. He liked what he saw. “Shower,” he ordered her, “then lie on that bed.” Without a word she obeyed. He raped her. Then he ordered her downstairs with the other prisoners and marched her to the river’s edge some sixty yards away. A small pier ran out ten yards into the fast flowing water. “Walk down that,” he commanded. She knew she was going to die. With the impulse of revenge, tinged with a spark of genius, she turned and screamed at the sadist, words which would last him the rest of his life … “You don’t know how to make love … you’re too small!” With a derisory laugh she faced her death. It came a second later. Two shots rang out and with a pitiful “Oh!” in sad contrast to her brave speech, her body disappeared into the Congo for ever.

On the barbarism of the natives:

The Provincial President, a man known to be loyal to Mr. Tshombe’s Government, was executed in front of hundreds of jeering rebels with ritual bestiality, as a warning to all others. The ritual followed the age-old custom. First his tongue was cut out. Then his ears, his hands and his feet were hacked off with razor-sharp pangas. Finally, a bamboo stake was driven into his rectum. He lasted fifteen minutes, watched by the insane mob of hooligans. The savages had not moved one inch towards civilisation in the last eighty years, despite the noble self-sacrifice of hundreds of missionaries.

Trial by “acclamation”:

On a flood-lit platform a tribunal was in session. It was a “trial by acclamation.” As I watched it, I realised the clock had been put back two thousand years. A rebel was paraded on the dais and his name announced over the public address system. If he was cheered, he was released. If he was hissed, he was taken out and shot.

A typical Christmas (1964) celebration amongst mercenaries in the Congo:

During the course of the dinner, however, a shot rang out in the dining-hall. He could contain his curiosity no longer. “It is perhaps a normal occurrence?” he said, without raising his voice a semitone. Alastair investigated. It was nothing, he said, just a little good-natured buffoonery. One man had shot another by mistake. The wounded volunteer was removed and the happy meal went on.

…The African, generally, has not the makings of a good soldier and lacks the necessary self-discipline and courage essential to the task… in the long term I see no probability of vast African armies rampaging up and down the continent, if only for the basic reason that the average African at heart is not a soldier. Economically, one imagines, it will not be possible for many African countries to maintain large standing armies, but in any case the idea of taking arms to redress their wrongs is not one which is likely to prove attractive to many Africans…

…During my campaigning I came to meet a large number of Congolese officers and civilians with whom I was able to discuss intimate matters of this nature quite objectively. One of the favourite subjects for debate was the difference which exists between the European and African character. The Congolese conceded that they did not understand the meaning of chivalry, in fact there is no word for it in Swahili or Lingala, and the concept of sportsmanship, the son of chivalry, was completely unknown to them. These were distinctly European attributes for which they could see little use in the African context. Gratitude was another, but I agreed readily that their sense of loyalty and devotion to their family unit far surpassed anything of which we were capable…

…my Congolese friends came to understand how shocked the European mind can be at cruelty, although this is something which is accepted as quite normal up and down the African Continent. I recall seeing a soldier of the A.N.C. pluck the feathers from a living dove and then throw the naked bird, still alive, on to a bed of red-hot coals to cook it. He was genuinely unable to understand my rancour…On the other hand I was genuinely unable to understand their attitude to ritual torture, something which had been handed down to them through the centuries. A prisoner of war must be killed after ritual torture, it was always thus, and nobody expected anything different…

Politics in the Congo is very similar to that in the U.S. today:

The Army was fortunate in that it had an efficient administration, free from political interference. Its clear-cut methods had been handed down to it by the old Force Publique and a chain of command, good system of communications, and a reasonable standard of discipline obtained throughout. The Army represented, in effect, the only system of administration which had shown itself capable of government, the civilian system having broken down under the strain of events and the junketings of unscrupulous politicians. To make matters worse, the civilian machine had been fraught with office seekers, opportunists, financial mendicants, and politicians whose sole aim in life was not service, but personal aggrandisement….In fairness to the politicians, it could be said that no pattern of behaviour existed for them to copy, they had received literally no training for executive positions or administrative matters at the higher levels, and to them political appointment represented the ultimate in African sophistication, coupled, as it was seen to be, with instant acclaim, great wealth, and fantastic power.

We (U.S.) need Belgian type retribution applied to corrupt politicians:

As part of his general overhaul of the Army during the last fourteen months, the Commander-in-Chief had introduced a Judge Advocate General’s Department and placed it under a distinguished Belgian Officer, Colonel Van Hallowen. It was a brilliant move. In the first few months of its existence the J.A.G.’s Department tightened up control throughout the Army and court martialled several highly placed officers and Military Governors for defalcations of large sums of money, many of whom were sentenced to terms of imprisonment exceeding eight years.

…The salvation of the Congo, as I see it, will be the reintroduction of as many Europeans as are prepared to emigrate to the country to become part of the fabric of the Congo, to help the Congolese on the road to political maturity and to teach them the skills of commerce and administration. These immigrants must come with a new mind—not as “agents sous contrats”, the iniquitous Belgian system1—but as settlers, as white Congolese, who will take a pride in their adopted country and who will come not with any superior colonialistic ideas, but with the genuine desire to help the Congolese help themselves…

On brotherhood: --Why, the isolation that prevails everywhere, above all in our age- it has not fully developed, it has not reached its limit yet. For everyone strives to keep his individuality as apart as possible, wishes to secure the greatest possible fullness of life for himself; but meantime all his efforts result not in attaining fullness of life but self-destruction, for instead of self-realisation he ends by arriving at complete solitude. All mankind in our age have split up into units, they all keep apart, each in his own groove; each one holds aloof, hides himself and hides what he has, from the rest, and he ends by being repelled by others and repelling them. He heaps up riches by himself and thinks, 'How strong I am now and how secure,' and in his madness he does not understand that the more he heaps up, the more he sinks into self-destructive impotence. For he is accustomed to rely upon himself alone and to cut himself off from the whole; he has trained himself not to believe in the help of others, in men and in humanity, and only trembles for fear he should lose his money and the privileges that he has won for himself. Everywhere in these days men have, in their mockery, ceased to understand that the true security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated individual effort. But this terrible individualism must inevitably have an end, and all will suddenly understand how unnaturally they are separated from one another. It will be the spirit of the time, and people will marvel that they have sat so long in darkness without seeing the light. And then the sign of the Son of Man will be seen in the heavens.... But, until then, we must keep the banner flying. Sometimes even if he has to do it alone, and his conduct seems to be crazy, a man must set an example, and so draw men's souls out of their solitude, and spur them to some act of brotherly love, that the great idea may not die.

2022-11-22

Charlieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!

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2022-11-22

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2022-04-30

On the Comanches at their peak (early 19th century):
…warriors and women, lived a short, perilous, brutish existence, full of pain and sorrow, but also filled with marvelous exhilaration and exultation. The patterns of their life, with the male population kept low by hunting and warfare and the females kept barren by constant riding and heavy labors, assured that they would never overpopulate the plains. The Comanches could not have destroyed the buffalo, their staff of life, in a million years of this closed cycle. They lived, or seemed to live, in a world without end, and it was the only world they knew or wanted to know…

On Anglo-American children captured during Camanche raids:
…Such children quickly forgot their native language and old associations and strove to become accepted Comanches. The girls looked forward to becoming the wives of great warriors. The boys dreamed of the day when they would become an honored member of the warriors’ circle, or lead their own war band. The children absorbed the beliefs and drives of the People, and many who returned or were rescued admitted candidly that they had learned to love the wild life on the plains, with its thrills, raw dangers, exaltations, and leisure that no civilized existence could match. Once children adjusted to Comanche life they were almost never able to readjust again to civilization. They became as culturally wild and stubborn as born Comanches. The process seemingly could not be reversed…

On the chasm of world views:
…But the Amerindians were isolated from all Europeans by world-views and cultural divergences that had been widening for at least four thousand years. To become “civilized” like Anglo-Americans (or Spaniards), the truly primitive tribesman had to do more than learn a new language and pick up a few new techniques. He had to betray his whole concept of the world and man’s role in it, and destroy all his cultural instincts and laws and beliefs—everything that to him seemed natural or sacred. The Amerindian spirit world and the European universe of cause and effect did not just exist on higher and lower technical planes. They were utterly disparate and innately hostile; the freedoms of one were the abject tyrannies of the other, and vice versa. The Amerindian adjusted and attuned to nature, gaining an enormous spiritual intoxication but little power over the real or physical world. The Indo-Europeans who reached America eschewed spiritual intoxication and even spiritual peace while mastering the physical world—even if they had to destroy it—by appalling, incessant labor. Even in the hungriest bands, no Amerindian warrior accepted such crushing tyranny. The Indian, as an Indian, could not go very far down any white man’s road to civilization…

On conflicts of interest:
…the British had had no experience with a primeval wilderness. The first settlers could not have survived had they not learned agronomy and woods lore from the tribes that received them with the hospitality reserved for distant travelers. Once ensconced, the planters and Pilgrims were compelled to attack and destroy the wilderness in order to create civilization as they knew it. They felled trees, made roads, put up fences, and erected permanent structures; they carved out fields and made smoke rise from a thousand raw clearings. A mere handful of industrious white men in a region soon utterly changed the face and nature of the land forever, ruining it for the ancient uses of the Amerindians…

On history repeating itself:
“All men from Washington are liars” –Spotted Tail, Dakota war chief

…First contacts between the strangers were usually peaceful. The Indians lacked hatred for strangers; their energies were engaged in enmities with neighboring tribes. …

…The bloodiest Indian wars were actually fought along the Atlantic seaboard in the seventeenth century, never on the western plains. Here, the whites suffered their greatest losses in proportion to total numbers. Thousands of English colonists were killed from the Virginia tidewater to New England when at last the various eastern confederacies took the war trail in despair, to throw the encroaching newcomers back into the ocean….

On feminism:
…The individual family groups were ruled by a tyranny of biology and circumstance. Only males had the power to hunt and fight, the two roles that ensured immediate survival. All other work logically fell to females, with one symbolic exception—men made weapons. The males being stronger, though not necessarily more aggressive, they could enforce their dominion over females and family. The male-female roles had long been set in hardening custom-cement. Females had become inferior and subordinate. Among the Nermernuh as among most other Amerindians, women had become almost chattels, as the ancient practice of wife-immolation revealed…

Original: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/10/11/why-high-speed-rail-hasnt-caught-on/

High Speed Rail (HSR) has been in the news, with a recent New York Times article listing some of the reasons that the California HSR project seems unlikely to ever be completed. Quite aside from California’s development quagmire and the article’s author’s unstated involvement in the story, there are a series of much deeper, physical reasons why HSR hasn’t really caught on. I haven’t seen these developed in accessible blog form so I thought I would write this brief note on the topic.

[Edit: This blog generated more controversy than usual, and a thread on HN. I was surprised to see how readily some of the core ideas were misunderstood, though it is true that I haven’t written as much recently as I used to, and I’m almost certainly less sharp as a result. This blog contains generalizations and inaccuracies – it’s intended as a jumping off point for the interested reader. One of them (Ashton) wrote a rebuttal! The bottom line is that California high speed rail won’t work for dozens of reasons, and I wrote about a few relatively obscure but quite fundamental ones.]

My personal background on trains is that I love them! I’ve taken hundreds of trains across multiple timezones, in China, Japan, Mongolia, Russia, all over Europe, Vietnam, Cuba, Australia, New Zealand, and the US. I also worked on track-based transport as a levitation engineer at Hyperloop between 2015 and 2018, so I have some appreciation for the art. I also spent a bunch of time on transport economics at Hyperloop, which taught me a lot about why my frustrations with rail’s failure to take over actually occurred, as well as some of the deeper reasons why Hyperloop is a rather challenged idea. For those who want more depth, parts of this blog derive from academic studies on wheel-rail dynamic vibration and rail spalling, more rolling contact fatigue, and Japanese shinkansen maintenance analysis.

Despite my ongoing enthusiasm for HSR, I have to concede that it is not a universal panacea. It remains relatively niche and relatively undeveloped. It is possible that its failure to be deployed everywhere since it was first developed 50 years ago is due to short-sighted governments and cost disease (the tendency for modern construction within developed cities to cost much much more than the original project did historically), but other factors also contribute to its lack of competitiveness.

To illustrate this, let’s examine past and current HSR development.

Despite decades of development, only a handful of routes in Europe operate at anything like airplane-competitive speeds, which for all but the shortest routes, require > 300 km/h or > 185 mph.

Even turboprop aircraft, which are relatively slow, cruise at > 500 km/h, while jets cruise at > 800 km/h. Over longer routes, the relative hassle of getting to and from an airport instead of an HSR rail terminal is eroded by the higher speed of aircraft, even in places where the rail terminal is in a densely populated city center and the airport is way outside. Comfort and convenience are other important factors, but there aircraft are also quite competitive.

In general, the number of >300 km/h HSR networks on Earth can be counted on one hand, and the total track length is a minuscule and mostly static fraction of global rail network length, which itself is shrinking at a reasonably rapid pace.

Japan, a linear archipelago, famously developed the high speed Shinkansen but like recent Chinese development, it must be seen in the context of very heavy-handed government subsidies and a response to geographic and structural factors that inhibited the development of airports. For example, while the US has more than 15,000 airports (most of which are untowered paved strips), Japan and much of China is relatively mountainous, historically relatively poor, and historically beset by relatively poor transport networks. Add to that various Japanese prohibitions on certain weapons technology in the post war period and high speed rail served as a government imposed solution to mass transportation.

It did not come without cost, however. Japan’s ostensibly private rail companies have gone bankrupt and been bailed out so many times I’ve lost count, racking up billion dollar yearly deficits year after year. Indeed, as far as I know there isn’t a single HSR route anywhere on Earth that operates profitably on ticketing revenue, and so operation always requires substantial subsidies. I should probably mention here that actual ridership and thus fare revenue is, as a rule of thumb, typically around a third of the projections used to justify initial development.

One can argue that aviation and any other kind of transport also benefits from various subsidies, such as expenditure on the US Navy guaranteeing freedom of navigation, without which the global oil trade wouldn’t work. Or that CO2 emissions from aircraft are an unpriced externality that HSR partly alleviates. But if we care about HSR and its ability to enable people to travel with fewer emissions or lower costs, we need to understand why it’s so expensive, no matter who is building it or where.

Why is HSR so expensive?

I will discuss three main groups of reasons: rail is suboptimal, HSR grading requirements are really tough, and steel-on-steel rolling is less perfect than you might think.

Rail is kind of obsolete

The first set of reasons are common to all kinds of rail. As mentioned in my post on traffic congestion:

There are a few reasons. Some are similar to car economic problems, with peak and average demand variation, particularly for commuter services. But I think the fundamental reason is that compact diesel engines got, if not good, then acceptable, in the 1930s. After that, shippers could move freight in almost any form factor between any two points directly. Even in 2022, freight by rail is much slower as rail cars must wait in yards for trains to be assembled.

There is another direct issue with trains, which is that rail systems are, by their nature, one dimensional. Any disruption on a rail line shuts down the entire line, imposing high maintenance costs on an entire network to ensure reliable uptime. To add a destination to a network, an entire line must be graded and constructed from the existing network, and even then it will be direct to almost nowhere.

Contrast this with aircraft. There are 15,000 airports in the US. Any but the largest aircraft can fly to any of these airports. If I build another airport, I have added 15,000 potential connections to the network. If I build another rail terminal and branch line, at significantly greater cost than an airstrip, I have added only one additional connection to the network.

Roads and trucks are somewhere between rail and aircraft. The road network largely already exists everywhere, and there aren’t any strict gauge restrictions, mandatory union labor requirements, obscure signaling standards, or weird 19th century incompatible ownership structures. Damage or obstruction isn’t a showstopper, as trucks have two dimensions of freedom of movement, and can drive around an obstacle. In Los Angeles during the age of streetcars, a fire anywhere in the city would result in water hoses crossing the street from hydrant to firetruck, and then the network ground to a halt because steel wheels can’t cross a hose or surmount a temporary hump!

Building a metro system in an existing dense city is also great (if we can avoid cost disease) but for most of the cities in the US, the suburbs are already not walkable enough to enable non-vehicle transport to a neighborhood station. The suburbs of LA will never be able to depend on a Manhattan or Vienna-style underground railway.

To make this concrete in the context of the ill-fated California HSR project, the NYT article quotes the rail authority chair Tom Richards saying “The key to high-speed rail is to connect as many people as possible.” There are a couple of unstated assumptions here, but it also reveals a fundamental problem with California HSR as it was conceived, which is that in order to get enough political buy in it had to promise too many things to too many stakeholders.

If we want to reduce CO2-generating air traffic between San Francisco and Los Angeles (a worthy goal!) then the HSR route must be, above all, fast. The oft-stated goal time of 2 hours and 40 minutes is both unachievably rapid with finite money and current technology, and also too slow to compete with aircraft, but for insane TSA security delays that will probably also affect HSR. It prompted the Hyperloop experiment, which sidestepped some of the problems and generated others.

Routing HSR on the east side of the central valley via Bakersfield and Modesto means those cities can have a station, but frequent services means that most trains have to stop there, and each stop adds 20 minutes to the travel time just to slow down and speed back up. Alternatively, the stations and their railway corridors are extremely expensive city decorations that help no-one because the trains, dedicated to a high speed SF-LA shuttle, never stop. Because they are trains, we can’t have both. If it was aircraft, we could have smaller, more frequent commercial aircraft offering direct flights to dozens of destinations from both cities. But rail has relatively narrow limits in terms of train size and frequency meaning that any route will be both congested at peak times and under-utilized for much of the rest.

Serving peripheral population centers in California is a nice thing to do, but aircraft pollution from Modesto is not driving global warming. Car traffic from Modesto would hardly overwhelm the Interstate 5. HSR minimizes financial losses when it is serving large population centers with high speed direct services. By failing to make the political case serving the main mission, the CA HSR project adopted numerous unnecessary marginal requirements which added so much cost that the project is unlikely to succeed. Even if the money materializes and the project is completed, the train will be so slow that it will hardly impact aircraft demand, so expensive it will be unable to operate without substantial subsidies, and so limited in throughput that it will hardly even alleviate traffic from LA’s outer dormitory suburbs.

In other words, one can build a commuter rail network, an intercity network, or a point-to-point HSR line, but forcing all three usage modes into the same system cannot succeed.

The Earth is kinda bumpy

To understand the challenges of grading HSR, we need to first examine the nature of the bumpiness of the Earth.

To ancient humans who first walked the Earth, it appeared flat enough, at least at local scales. Go far enough or watch a Lunar eclipse and it becomes clear the Earth is, at large scale, round. To a decent approximation (about 0.3%) it is spherical.

Let’s examine corrections to this approximation. First, the equatorial bulge. The shape of the Earth is an equipotential, and centrifugal forces add to gravity, which makes the middle bulge out a bit – about 20 km depending on how one measures. There’s also some triaxiality, which is to say the equatorial bulge is marginally more bulgy through Africa/Hawaii than SE Asia/Americas. Next come the geoid corrections. Local variations in the density of the crust and upper mantle cause deviations to the equipotential surface of up to 100 m. This is rather small compared to the equatorial bulge, but still rather large. Once the geoid is added, we know everything there is to know about the Earth’s gravitational field, at least at scales of 100 km or so. Excepting deviations due to weather and tides of order 1 meter, the geoid gives the altitude of the ocean.

The final layer of detail is hills, mountains, valleys, and other hard rocky stuff that pokes up on the Earth’s land surface. For essentially the entire world, this has been mapped to a resolution of 90 m by the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission, while substantial swaths of the US and other countries have been mapped to 1 m resolution or better, using airborne lidar.

Okay, the Earth has bumps. What’s the big deal?

The bumps have a really big effect on how fast people can move close to the surface of the Earth. There are two ways to understand this. The first is intuitively, and the second is by looking at the von Karman-Gabrielli diagram.

The force experienced due to bumps: F = m v^2/r. For a given curve of radius r, such as a hump in the road, the force experienced increases quadratically with velocity v. This is a big deal! The big deal, even!

Human passengers don’t like to experience high forces, especially while walking around in a train, so in practice this fundamental physical relation limits the r that can be experienced at a given v. For v = 320 km/h, r = ~8 km. This applies for both lateral and vertical deviations! For context, my children’s Brio train set has a radius of curvature of about 30 cm or 12″. 8 km is roughly the distance to the horizon.

This makes sense intuitively, too. A twisty road that is comfortable to drive at 35 mph is edgy at 45 and dangerous at 55 – where the forces are 2.5x greater! Walking through a crowded mall presents no challenge but sprinting is asking for trouble. Speed + bumps = trouble.

To a good approximation, HSR lines have to be dead straight. In Kansas or California’s central valley, this is fine, up to a constant in Eminent Domain, which is the politically fraught process of the government taking your land by force. But both LA and SF are ringed by a series of extremely geologically active, steep, and tall mountain ranges. The Interstate 5 out of LA goes through the Grapevine, passing through a point where 5 (5!!) different active fault lines intersect in one place. Maintaining a useful speed through these mountains, not to mention densely populated areas nearby, requires nearly 100 miles (!) of tunnels. Current tunneling costs are orders of magnitude too high, but even then tunnels are typically only built in places with known and acceptable geology, and much of the geology under the San Gabriel mountains is simply not known.

This is not the place to go into depth, but those mountains have seen things, geologically speaking, which should not be possible. What is known is that the entire mountain range is a gigantic pile of broken, crushed rocks that have been rotated, turned upside down, drowned, volcanically erupted, eroded, subducted, and then sheared. Just one of the dozens of tunnels required could easily cost more than $113b, the current estimated cost for the project.

From a 2015 article: “No way,” said Leon Silver, a Caltech geologist and a leading expert on the San Gabriel Mountains. “The range is far more complex than anything those people know.”

The mountains surrounding the Bay are not quite as tall but, straddling the San Andreas fault, no less challenging. Remember, at 320 km/h, anything taller than a viaduct standoff counts as a mountain that needs a cut or a tunnel – perhaps 20 meters of wiggle room if we’re being extremely generous.

The recent NYT article lists a bunch of political reasons that the project is in deep trouble but even if various CA governors and US presidents had written a Chinese-style blank check and there were no land acquisition disputes, the mountains are still there.

The second way to understand the bumpy earth limitation is the von Karman-Gabrielli diagram. This diagram plots the speed and specific power of every mode of transport on a single chart. I love this kind of data presentation.

The zeroth order truth of the vK-G diagram is that there is a limit line of vehicular performance, which is essentially determined by momentum transfer limitations for vehicles that have to displace water or air to move along. It does not apply to spacecraft!

The first order truth is that, above 100 mph, the most efficient transport mechanism shifts from ground-based to air-based. For smaller creatures than humans, the transition speed is a lot lower – most insects fly instead of walk. For insects, this is because at their scale, the world is ridiculously bumpy and hard to navigate.

The galaxy-brain detail is that, between 100 mph and 300 mph, there is a gap in the frontier, where no technology gets close to the G-K limit. Many innovators have tried to slot hovercrafts or ground effect vehicles (such as the ekranoplan) into this gap, but all have failed. Hovercrafts have not caught on for the same reason as HSR – above 100 mph, the Earth is too rough to travel close to its surface.

This is also intuitively obvious to pilots, who understand that making a habit of flying planes within 20 m (or even 200 m) of the surface, particularly in mountains, is a career-limiting move. Indeed, even at slower approach speeds, commercial airliners take half the city to turn around to line up with the runway. Translate the motion of a 737 on downwind, for example, to the surface and even a fighter pilot would not be able to track the ground within the range that HSR must be built.

As a result, HSR grades cannot be built between nearly any city pair on Earth without moving a LOT of dirt and rock and pouring a LOT of (CO2-emitting) concrete, most of which only has an actual train on it for a few seconds per hour, and thus drives incredibly high cost of construction.

Of course roads also operate with public subsidies and require expensive grading, but road traffic is slower, more diverse, and more versatile, while road materials are far cheaper and car operating costs are borne by the user. The result is that the per mile and per passenger mile costs of roads are much lower than HSR. For example, the I-70 cost an average of about $2m/mile, despite routing through remote and mountainous parts of Utah. CA HSR is currently budgeted at more than $350m/mile.

Rail wear, or steel wheels in the real world

Finally, we come to the third major challenge of HSR and another major contributor to its cost. Steel wheels and rails are hard – they’re made of steel, but they wear over time. Wheels must be remachined and rails must be reground.

A typical Japanese maintenance schedule has each segment of rail reground, to exacting tolerances, every 6 months while total replacement is required every 5 years. These grinding and replacement operations, which must be carried out continuously, degrade system up time and require, on average, a fully salaried track worker per km of track. These numbers apply only to perfectly straight track – switches, curves, and steep grades wear out substantially faster.

How does wear occur? A typical HSR wheel bears a static load of 6 T across a contact patch the size of a postage stamp, with both rail and wheel deforming about 20 microns to enable contact. The center of this patch endures a pressure high enough to plastically deform the rail’s steel! The passage of the wheel places symmetric forces (first forward, then back) but the effect is to temper the surface, which accumulates stresses and can flake off. Additionally, torque on the wheel tends to lock the wheel statically to the track as the patch is loaded, but during the unload portion as the wheel passes the accumulated stresses are released, resulting in shear and friction, particularly on parts of the track where the train is accelerating, slowing down, climbing, or descending.

Despite this terrifying pressure, one wheel passing might deform the surface by only a single Angstrom – the width of a single atom. The Tokaido Shinkansen sees 150 services a day, each with a 16 car train and 4 wheels per track per car, so the track endures 1.5 million wheels between 6-monthly regrindings. Linear damage would imply 0.15 mm of wear, but damage isn’t linear.

Instead, once the rails deform more than a few nanometers, the “bumpiness of the world” comes back with a vengeance. Bumps induce acoustic oscillations in the wheels and track, which ring like a gong or very angry violin. Wheels being made of hard steel, these oscillations are poorly damped and cause local variations in the position and force of the contact surface. Some of these variations cancel out the bumps and smooth out the tracks, but some of them don’t, and over time the randomness of these acoustic perturbations roughen the tracks by much more than a single layer of atoms per wheel.

Rail wheels are much lighter than the cars they support, so their suspension system drives them into the track with a force of about 700 gs. At 320 km/h, the critical r, or bump height, is just 50 microns. Less than the width of a hair, and not that different to the 20 micron (mostly) elastic deformation of the contact patch. Once acoustically grown bumps get to 5 microns or so, they begin to induce oscillations in the suspension system. This is damped better than the wheel’s acoustic modes, but damping always lags the input and the effect is to begin to drive “washboard” shapes into the rail, rapidly increasing track deformations. Once deformations exceed 50 microns, the wheel actually breaks contact with the track, hammering it on its return with almost unimaginable force and rapidly grinding out holes.

Cumulatively, these effects are at first linear over time, then quadratic, and eventually exponential. The forces are proportional to the square of velocity, so faster HSR trains damage rails faster. The Tokaido line averages around 140 mph (somewhat less than its peak of ~185 mph), but increase that speed by just 40% and rail lifetime will (at least) halve, while track maintenance costs (at least) double. Maintenance costs that were already on the order of $200,000/km/year, in 2003 dollars. That’s $400m/year just for rail maintenance for the LA-SF route, once we correct for inflation and a higher design speed.

There’s got to be an easier way

As of 2022, the CA HSR project is supposed to cost $113b. The vast majority of this is unfunded, and yet the final project will almost certainly cost at least 10x this if it ever completed, and will still be unable to compete on the LA-SF route with aircraft.

Similar stories abound the world over. There are a handful of locations where land is flat enough and property ownership protections weak enough that HSR can be built with minimal fuss, and sometimes even between cities with strong latent transport demand that can be unlocked, but even then it is a niche solution that takes decades to develop and can’t pay for itself. If this weren’t the case, we’d see HSR developed everywhere, instead of something governments talk about for decades and, usually, never actually build.

By CA HSR’s own numbers, the completed system may carry 35 million passengers per year by 2040, or 100,000 per day. This capacity could also be served by a fleet of just 40 737s (less than current LAX-SFO traffic), of which Boeing makes more than 500 per year. Bought new, this fleet would cost $3.6b, and with a lead time of, at most, a few months. Upgrades to Modesto and Bakersfield airport terminals could service the 737 for mere $10s of millions. The fleet would cost about $2.9b to operate each year, which under current airline business models can be served by fares of about $60 each way. If we operate this airline for free (no tickets!) for 40 years, the total operating costs climb to $120b, which is equivalent to CA HSR’s currently wildly unrealistic estimated construction costs.

That is, a passenger jet that first flew in 1967 can continue to profitably serve the LA-SF transportation market for less money, over multiple decades, than the rather slow HSR could be constructed much less operated, in our wildest dreams.

Where HSR has to bore tunnels through >100 miles of incredibly unforgiving hard and flakey rock for decades just to get somewhere, planes fly serenely through the unobstructed atmosphere. Where trains must slow down and speed up to serve political expediency in smaller intermediate stations, planes route freely through the three dimensional sky direct to their destination, and at 3x the speed, and at lower overall energy usage per passenger-km.

Planes emit CO2 as they fly, but CO2 emissions on routes that could be served by HSR are a tiny fraction of aviation’s total, which itself is a small fraction of the totality of humanity’s output. It can be directly offset through carbon capture and sequestration for a modest increase in the ticket price, as plane ticket prices are mostly not fuel. Alternatively, synthetic aviation fuel is under development to make aircraft carbon neutral. Indeed, at Terraform Industries we think synthetic fuel will ultimately be even cheaper than current options, expanding access to the convenience, speed, and safety of air travel.

Trains are wonderful and I love the Shinkansen, but let’s stop flogging this dead horse. HSR is not a compelling option for generic high speed intercity transport.