This is part 5 of a series that includes Alstom, Bombardier, Talgo and the Japanese manufacturers

It is indicative of the incredible safety record of high-speed rail that over the course of more than forty years of operation in countries around the world, there has only been one major crash. Unfortunately for Siemens, the primary producer of Germany’s fast trains, that accident was of an ICE train, and it happened in Lower Saxony.

The curse of the 1998 Eschede train disaster, which resulted in the deaths of 101 people, was a major setback for the company, damaging its credibility even though the primary blame for the catastrophe lay with German national train operator DB. But Siemens’ luck has turned around in the last few years as it has secured major contracts for new high-speed trains in places like Spain and China.

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With more than 300 million annual riders, Japan’s Shinkansen trains (better known to westerners as “bullet trains”) carry more passengers than those of any other high-speed rail system. But unlike the equivalent French or German trains, well known as the flagships of their respective rolling stock manufacturers Alstom and Siemens, Shinkansen trains are not associated as the product of any one company. Rather, over the years they have been constructed by a series of mix-and-match consortia of industrial conglomerates. In Japan, high-speed trains are a cooperative effort.

History
The success of the Shinkansen–the term literally means “new trunk line”–probably has as much to do with its age as anything else. The first high-speed corridor in the world opened for daily service in 1964 between Tokyo and Osaka. English-speakers immediately nicknamed the trains “bullets” because of their cone-shaped noses.

The first Shinkansen, now known as the Series 0 (photo at left), was built by Nippon Sharyo, Hitachi, Kawasaki, Kinki Sharyo, and Tokyu Car Corp. Each had already had decades of experience in the rail business working alone producing distinctive models of trams, metros, and commuter cars — Kawasaki, for instance, has produced more than 85,000 rail cars itself.

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See part 1 and part 2 in our ongoing series on the major players in the world’s high-speed train industry.

In 2008, Spanish manufacturer Talgo shocked the world when it announced that it was developing a train called Avril with a top speed of 236 mph. If the company fulfills that objective by next year as currently planned, it could play a major role in the world high-speed rail market, especially in the United States, where it already has a small foothold. For now, however, Talgo remains a marginal player whose fast train products operate in Spain alone.

History

Though Talgo’s involvement in high-speed vehicles is a relatively recent phenomenon, it has been constructing trains since 1942, when it was founded by Alejandro Goicoechea and José Luis Oriol. The company’s earliest products, constructed in association with the American Car and Foundry Company, served U.S. customers in the Midwest and Northeast, as well as routes in Spain and Portugal.

In the late 1960s, Talgo pioneered variable gauge axle technology that allowed its trains to run directly between Spain and France, whose tracks are of different widths. At the border, trains pass through gauge changers at slow speeds and telescope their wheels in and out automatically depending on direction of travel. The November 1968 journey between Madrid and Paris on a Talgo train was the first ever not requiring a customer transfer.

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This is part 2 of a multi-part series on the world’s high speed train makers. Part 1 — a profile of Alstom — ran on Monday.

Though it is now the world’s largest train manufacturer, Bombardier followed a haphazard route into the field. Joseph-Armand Bombardier founded the company in the 1940s, originally producing the Ski-Doo line of snowmobiles. His business’ success produced enough profit by 1971 to acquire Austria’s Lohnerwerke, which produced snowmobile engines and tram vehicles.

That acquisition was prescient as it allowed Bombardier to meet the challenges of the oil crisis by shifting much of its snowmobile manufacturing facilities over to train production. Its first major contract was a 1974 order for 423 cars for the metro in Montréal, where the company is headquartered.

Since then, in addition to building an airplane business, Bombardier has slowly built up its rail operations through acquisitions, notably with the capstone 2001 purchase of ADtranz, a German company then owned by DaimlerChrysler. Now, the expanded Bombarider Transportation is headquartered in Berlin and produces a plurality of the world’s metros, tramways, and locomotives.

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Americans know a lot about car and airplane manufacturers–but very few are familiar with the train making industry and it’s biggest players. That may change over the coming years, if the US gets serious about improving and expanding passenger rail service and the $180 billion global rail industry continues to boom. For the next two weeks, the Infrastructurist will be running a six-part series introducing the companies that are building the 21st century fast trains that may one day be running between major US cities.

Meet Alstom

France’s TGV was the first high-speed rail network in the Western world. Because of that, many people in the North America and even Europe have thought of it as emblematic of fast trains generally. This fact has benefitted the TGV’s primary train manufacturer, Alstom, whose engineers played the primary role in developing the TGV equipment. Today, the company is the number one producer of high-speed trains in the world, and holds the record for fastest-ever wheel-on-rail train trip.

History
Formed in 1928, Alstom was the product of the merger of two industrial groups. With the 1932 acquisition of Constructions Electriques de France, it became involved in train manufacturing, but it made few advances in high-speed rail until the 1960s.

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Britain is years behind most mainland European countries in building a high speed rail network — but still many years ahead of the US. They have a spiffy new system up and running called the Javelin that you will certainly be hearing a lot about during the 2012 Olympics (NBC correspondents doing goofy “local flavor” segments about it, etc…) There’s also a plan afoot to build out the backbone of a nationwide network, linking London in the south to Edinburgh and Glasgow in the north.

Now a national undertaking this big creates great opportunity, of course. Birmingham — the place where intercity rail travel was born in 1837 — is now stepping forward to seize that it, attempting to become the national hub for the nascent domestic high speed rail industry:

The Leader of the city council Mike Whitby told a fringe meeting at the Conservative Party Conference that the city’s engineering heritage, central location and readily available skills-base meant it was ‘the only logical choice’. He explained: ‘Birmingham’s experience, capacity and engineering skills-base is unparalleled by  any other city sitting on the network, making us the only logical choice to host the large scale engineering and train valeting facilities which will be required to operate the network. Not only would locating these services in Birmingham make sense for the train operators, but it would also reap great benefits for the city.”

You know, benefits like lots of good jobs in the rail industry. And lots of good jobs in supporting industries. And a new atmosphere of economic vitality. And a magnet for attracting talent to the city. And likely carry-on effects in local investment and real estate values. And so on.

With US investment in passenger rail infrastructure likely to grow robustly for many years to come, American cities might want to take notes. Because there hasn’t been much activity here to date. The little burg of Racine, Wisconsin, is an exception, smartly trying to court Spanish train-maker to locate a manufacturing facility in town–which makes a lot of sense given that Wisconsin has already ordered two Talgo train sets (required by contract to be build in WI), and the Midwest generally will likely be spending a lot on rail over the next two or three decades. In 2040, this could look like a genius move for Racine (or Kenosha, also courting Talgo).

On a larger scale, Detroit is a compelling candidate for both sentimental and practical reasons. Like Birmingham, there’s a great skills base already extant in the city. Not to mention plenty of spare manufacturing capacity. Bombardier, a leading global rail equipment maker, also happens to have a major presence in Ontario, just on the other side of that big lake. With a smart partnership or two, there could be some great neighborly synergies developed (it’s always a good thing when America and America’s Hat can help each other out).

Given that the passenger rail equipment industry has essentially died in this country, the foreign partnership route is probably the way to go. Since rail is going to be a government financed endeavor, there will be regional and state-level favoritism involved, meaning lots of little rail industry hubs scattered across the country. Places like Racine. But now’s the time to start staking out that territory, Local Leaders Of America.

According to a press release from the Federal Rail Authority that just hit our inbox, states have put in $57 billion worth of applications for the $8 billion pot stimulus money for high speed rail. Which is to say, your average Ivy League hopeful probably has better odds than your average HSR application.

But as we all know, some applicants are more equal than others. And on that subject we went back and forth yesterday with the Economist’s Gulliver blog. The matter at hand was the merit of investing federal funds to upgrade existing freight lines between New Orleans and Baton Rouge to handle higher speed passenger service. Gulliver argues, essentially, we ought to be spending the stimulus money on the most prudent and viable projects in a national context (i.e. California, the Northeast corridor, and the Upper Midwest.) And that’s a perfectly reasonable point to make. From a national perspective, a LA-to-SF link is certainly more important than a New Orleans to Baton Rouge link.

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Bobby Jindal thinks volcano monitoring and railroad travel are for sissies. We know that because he chuckled at them while delivering the worst speech in the entire history of American politics. But the man does put his money where his mouth is — or rather, starves his state of needed investment because of where his mouth went. Specifically, he has allowed the deadline to pass for applying for $300 million in federal funds for a high speed rail link between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. You might say: “But it’s $300 million and Americans need jobs and that rail project would be really useful to a lot of people and…”

No, no. Don’t embarrass yourself by begging. Bobby Jindal doesn’t need your stinkin’ socialist charity. Even when a fellow state Republican publicly asked him to stop the madness and pointed out that it would be a huge win for the state, he answers with weird partisan boilerplate nonsense about how states can’t print dollars. Because Jindal is worried about operating costs. You might object that those are very very minor compared to the value of the project and then, even so, communities along the line have offered to bear some of them. But Bobby Jindal will not be swayed. Even if his position makes no sense. So maybe he’s really thinking about his own personal political fortunes and doesn’t want to be accused of flip-flopping on the silliness of choo-choo trains when he debates Sarah Palin in 2012.

Run, Bobby. Run. (Even if you are eerily reminiscent of Kenneth the Page.)

PS: We like the Gulliver blog over at the Economist, but they really mucked up today when writing about this. They say that the New Orleans-Baton Rouge high speed rail link must not be very worthwhile to build because it doesn’t even figure in the top 50 city pairs of America 2050’s recent study (we wrote about it here). But all the city pairs America 2050 looked at are least 100 miles apart. Baton Rouge and New Orleans are less than that.

Without getting lost in the weeds on this, we think it can stand on common sense that building a decent 80 mile rail link between a state’s economic center and largest city and its capital is not such a crazy idea.

If high speed rail is ever going to have a chance of taking root in the US, we’re going need to need a working example that makes everybody jealous.

Specifically, we’re thinking here of a world-class high speed link here in the US, that will make the media machine whir and tourists talk, that looks pretty on tv and execerbates regional rivalries. Since human beings are monkeys and all, generally the quickest way to get us to care about anything is to turn it into a status game and provoking indignation and insecurity. It would be our version of Madrid-to-Seville.

So, let’s say New York out of nowhere decides to roll big and fast-tracks a 250-mph link between NYC and Albany. State pols like Hiram Monserrate–better known as the fellow who’ll take a busted bottle to his girlfriend’s face if she displeases him–can make the journey in half an hour. Seriously: half an hour to Albany. That’s quicker than a lot of subway trips to Brooklyn. Plus, no walking around in sock feet at LaGuardia or creeping along the Major Deegan expressway. It’s a crazy-world proposition, of course, except that if China were running the US–as it someday might–that shit would already be in works. Why? It just makes sense.

Across the rest of the country, this link would serve as both a model and a gauntlet thrown down. In Texas, state legislators might see the quick, easy and civilized trip Hiram was taking to work and say, “Damn, maybe we should think seriously about getting this T-Bone thing built sometime this century.” And so on.

It could happen! Maybe. Ever since we saw Jay Yarrow make an argument along these lines over at Business Insider–giving all the stimulus money to California’s HSR project, to create a national model–we’ve been noodling about the possibilities.

But our problem with Jay’s case is that California is such a massive project that by the time it’s built out enough to convince anybody of anything, another decade or more will have passed. We need something of more modest scope, and we need it now. Ideally, of course, this would be Washington DC-to-New York. But given all the chefs that would have to be involved in cooking that stew, we’re not optimistic on that front (short of the magical emergence of a Robert Moses-style “infrastructure czar” emerges who can just punch it through).

But it’s looking more and more like Florida might be the answer. From today’s Tampa Tribune:

As key political factors fall in place, Tampa, Lakeland and Orlando are leading contenders to launch the nation’s first true high-speed rail corridor, with 150 mph trains running by 2014.

Of course, this is contingent on getting $2.5 billion in federal funds from the stimulus sweepstakes. But there’s plenty of reason to think that might happen. The state owns the right of way, and the project is essentially designed and shovel-ready. The link would also be meaningful first step toward a larger system–targeted for 2017 completion–connecting Tampa and Orlando to Miami (and Jacksonville, via Amtrak.)

Now, this sounds almost perfect — so naturally there’s a problem. In this case, it’s that the train to Orlando doesn’t actually go to Orlando. It goes to the airport. Now, Orlando has a very busy airport so this proposed route would certainly be of interest to many Floridians and tourists. But this also means it’s a glorified airport shuttle rather than a real intercity rail link, of the sort that civilized people elsewhere in the would want and demand.

At The Transport Politic, Yonah offers a fine suggestion: “In Orlando, trains could continue up I-4 into downtown after the Convention Center stop, and then head back towards the airport, from which trains south to Miami would eventually extend.

The downside of that routing change would be slowing the project down and interfering with this whole “showpiece” business. The upside would be, you know, doing it right. Jeez, Marsha, why does everything always have to be so complicated!

While the Daily Dig was on mandated mental health leave for 10 days or so prior to Labor Day, NPR produced a six-part series on high speed rail. Since we neglected to mention it at the time, and since it was a fairly good primer on the subject, and since one of our official mottos at this site is “Better late than never,” we thought we’d take a look back at it now.

States Pitch For HSR Money: After decades of a transportation policy focused overwhelmingly on highways and air travel, Obama’s $8 billion commitment to HSR rail in the stimulus package was a seachange–the “most that’s ever been put in one single shot for any rail system in America.” Since then, the president has spoken compellingly of HSR’s ability to reduce travel times, alleviate freeway and airport congestion, reduce pollution and oil dependence, “all while creating tens of thousands of jobs.” States have lept at the opportunity, putting in $100 billion in applications for the $8 billion in funds.

The term “high speed rail” has become a bit bastardized in the US, of course–here tending to refer to 90+ mph projects, while in an international context it connotes a more impressive 150 mph and up. Only California is seriously pursuing a true HSR project at this point.

After a libertarian skeptic pops up to scoff, the piece wraps with a good point: Even a well-functioning 110-mph line between, say, Chicago and St Louis, would be a good proof of concept for US passenger rail travel and would likely inspire imitation around the country.

Midwest is All Aboard for HSR - A Midwest regional network would have Chicago as a hub and connect to 11 other cities in the region, including Milwaukee, Detroit and St Louis. The logic is sound with 1/3 of the US population living within a 500-mile radius of Chicago. The plan is to upgrade the current network, which now tops out at 79 mph, to 110 mph. An ambitious vision for decades ahead is a parallel 220 mph network.

But just upgrading to 110 would cost an estimate $12 billion, and skeptics even question whether those speeds are possible on lines that are also heavily used by freight and commuter trains.

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Over the past month, economist Ed Glaeser has explored the benefits of high-speed rail in an occasional series over at the New York Times website. To put it mildly, his reception in the blogosphere has been wretched. Ryan Avent at Streetsblog has been a particularly devastating critic, picking apart Glaeser’s analysis strand by and strand and characterizing the overall effort as “daft and indefensible.”

But what’s been missing thus far is a numbers-based rebuttal of Glaeser’s “back-of-envelope calculations.” He figures three categories of benefits from high speed rail: travel (for example, fewer car accidents and reduced highway congestion), environmental (lower carbon emissions than car or plane travel, etc.), and improved land use (the rail project encouraging denser, more walkable cities, etc.). Through this combination of factors, Gleaser examines a hypothetical HSR link between Dallas and Houston and calculates annual benefits of $158 million. Not bad perhaps, but they pale in comparison to annual costs of $648 million. The gap between costs and benefits–an annual loss to society of $500 million–would seem to be so huge as to kill the prospect of US high speed rail in its cradle.

That may even to have been Glaeser’s intent in writing the series. The problem is that–through a sorry mix of omission, oversimplification, distortion, and deficiency–his calculations bear no relation to the effects he is claiming to consider. So it’s important to show that “the numbers” do not at all undermine the viability of HSR in the US, even outside the northeast and California. In fact, they tend to support it.

By populating his model with a better set of assumptions, we hope to show how badly the economist missed the mark even on his handpicked example of an HSR link between Houston and Dallas. In reality, a well-designed high speed intercity rail project between the two largest cities in Lone Star State would likely produce a net economic benefit–not at all the white elephant Glaeser suggests. In this more comprehensive model that takes into account trivialities like regional population growth and a reality-based route, the annual benefits total $840 million compared with construction and maintenance costs of $810 million. Which is to say, our numbers show that HSR pays for itself rather handily.

And this would be early in the lifecycle of the system, with those benefits likely to grow in future decades.

The Basics: A Better Set of Assumptions

Rather than looking at Glaeser’s hypothetical 240-mile rail line directly and exclusively between Dallas and Houston, I’ll base my argument on a line actually under consideration called the Texas T-Bone that would run roughly 300 miles between the cities, with intermediate stops at Waco, Temple, and College Stations. For simplicity’s sake, in this piece I’ll ignore the roughly 140-mile proposed extension of the line south to Austin and San Antonio but factor in connecting slow-speed trains from those locales.

Despite the fact that an HSR system would take more than a decade to build, Glaeser calculations are all for 2008. Why? We have no idea. Unlike some other US states, Texas is projected to grow steadily in coming years. Assuming the project gets underway relatively soon, the Texas T-Bone HSR line ought to be hitting full stride around 2030. So our model focuses on that year. Texas is projected to have 33 million people (up from 24 million today) with the metropolitan areas of Houston and Dallas each growing by more than 4 million inhabitants to populations of 9.9 million and 10.6 million, respectively.

Ridership: Using Real-World Examples

Glaeser argues that a Houston-Dallas line would be roughly one-half as popular, relative to population, as the current slow Amtrak service is in the Northeastern Corridor. His reasoning is that both Dallas and Houston are less transit-friendly areas, and therefore less conducive to train travel. So, assuming a 50 percent lower per capita ridership rate, he comes up with 1.5 million annual customers for the line – this is similar to the number of people who currently fly directly between the two cities.

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There’s an old knock–frequently cited at the expense of Thomas Friedman–about the kind of journalist who quotes his cab driver.

That said: I was in Washington, DC, a few days after the recent Metro accident and my cabbie was complaining about the traffic. He explained that it had suddenly gotten much worse since the accident. All his passengers were afraid to take the train, he said. One after another, they’d sworn they were done forever with the Metro. Business was so good, in fract, he was planning to do several extra hours of work that evening.

It’s anecdotal, of course–but also believable. Something awful and scary happens and people get, well, scared. Naturally, a raft of alarmist rail safety stories followed. The San Francisco crash over the weekend brought this conversation back to mind though–no doubt there are more than a few nervous Muni riders this week and some reporters looking for a “Is Your Commute Safe?” angle.

Of course, intellectually most people know that rail travel is much safer than driving. But do they know how much safer? For instance, what would the headlines look like if rail were only on par with the safety of automobile travel?

In that case, we’d be seeing an accident on the scale of one in DC–9 deaths–about every 10 days. Or, alternatively, one on the scale of the Metrolink crash last year in southern California, which killed 25 people, every month. (This is based on rough calculations of about 5 trillion passenger miles logged in cars–with 38,000 deaths–and about 40 billion miles on our various rail networks, where similar fatality rates would yield about 300 deaths a year.)

But, in fact, such accidents are tremendously rare. The Metrolink was the worst in 15 years. And even though the last year has been been rotten where passenger rail accidents are concerned–and questions do need to be asked–fewer than 40 people have died. That’s fewer than die on the roads in an average morning in this country.

For the non rail-obsessed reader: There was a meeting this week at the White House, hosted by Joe Biden, at which the governors who care a whit about rail came together to jockey for a share of $8 billion in stimulus loot.

Noteably absent: Anyone from Nevada. Which was odd, because that state wants a high speed rail link between greater LA and Las Vegas. And it’s not as if the proposal doesn’t need some aggressive lobbying and PR. One GOP senator memorably dubbed it a “fancy gambling train.” Aspersions were also cast because someone suggested a station in Anaheim and since Anaheim = Disneyland, the idea was clearly frivolous. There’s even been a little talk that it should be one of those floating, futuristic trains that they’ve been running for decades in Japan–and, again, anything that involves levitating is self-evidently wacky and wasteful.

So, then, why wasn’t a Nevadan there with representatives from other states to defend and advance the plan? They didn’t know the meeting was happening, ’cause the invitation got lost in the email or something.

Says the local paper: “The governor’s deputy chief of staff, Mendy Elliott, said Thursday the office never saw an invitation from the vice president.” Added Elliott: “Unfortunately, we weren’t aware of the meeting.”

One backer of the HSR scheme described it as “too bad” that nobody from Nevada was present, but everyone was quick to say that it wouldn’t hurt the state’s chances of getting federal funds.

That’s questionable though, because California isn’t going to be fighting for it — their overriding goal is getting the line built between LA and SF, and it doesn’t make much sense to be pushing competing proposals. Besides, how serious can a plan be if you don’t even know about the meeting where you’re supposed to be selling it?

There’s also the question of how you just *miss* an email from Joe Biden. Isn’t that illegal or something?

A group of state legislators is urging that stunning Michigan Central train station be left standing, instead of being dynamited as the Detroit city council ordered last month.

The historic depot, an encore project from the team of architects who created Grand Central Station in NYC nearly a century ago, remains structurally sound but is in rough shape in all other respects after two decades of vandalism and neglect.

“With more than 500,000 square feet of space on nearly 14 acres in proximity to critical state, regional and international infrastructure facilities, the Central Depot property has great potential to house a complimentary set of homeland security, intermodal transportation and economic development-related functions,” write the five state senators.  “The property is ideally located in an area of unique intermodal convergence that includes the Ambassador Bridge, the Detroit-Windsor Tunnel, connections to three interstate highways, the Detroit-Wayne County Port and several freight lines.” (More pics after the jump.)

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Dithering and doing things half-way are not among the national character flaws that might be pinned on the Chinese. One has the sense that if that country ever gets serious about greening up, it will do it with a rapidity and effectiveness that will make western nations look downright silly.

And, perhaps, they’re already at it with this plan to build the world’s largest high-speed rail network. As of March 31, China has committed $259 billion to the project, and plans to spend nearly a half trillion dollars more in the next three years, boosting the total investment to $730 billion by 2012.

A little context here: The US–a country with a per capita GDP about 16 times that of China–has set rail as a national priority and has committed… $13 billion. Or, about 2 percent as much in China. This, of course, is in a place where it costs a hell of a lot more to get anything done.

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Everyone knows America’s passenger train system is pathetic by international standards, so President Obama’s $13 billion commitment to build a national high-speed rail network has come as a wonderful surprise.

It also raises the question of whether a reinvigorated rail industry could, with the car industry and several airlines drifting into bankruptcy, be the next great hope for keeping people employed in this country?

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The idea of the stimulus package is to keep Americans employed. In part, this is being done by funding a massive series of construction projects. But, oddly, the bill provides only a small amount money for one of most potent and productive available means of creating new jobs.

In the $787 billion bill, only $742 million–less than a tenth of percent of the total–is being spent on new public transportation corridors. By comparison, $27.5 billion is being allocated to roads and bridges. Yet investing in transit creates nearly 20 percent more jobs than equivalent roads projects, according to the well-respected Surface Transportation Planning Project. The STPP estimates that 41,028 jobs are created for every $1 billion spent on new transit projects, compared to only 34,565 jobs for each billion dollars directed toward a new road or bridge.

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