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Texas high speed rail route3/11/2023 ![]() The Acela can hit 150 mph but averages about half that speed due to various design and right-of-way constraints. Higher speed usually refers to trains with top speeds of 80 to 120 mph. ![]() There are several “higher-speed” projects in planning or service, including the Northeast Corridor’s Acela Express. Others are on the drawing board in Las Vegas, Texas and the Pacific Northwest. high-speed rail plans have been proposed, planned and studied - but not actually built.Īt present, the country has one high speed rail line under construction, in California, and it has endured delays. First proposed in the early 1960s, at about the time Japan was introducing its Shinkansen “bullet train,” U.S. Though more than two dozen countries have high speed rail systems - virtually all of Europe, China, Japan, Korea and even developing countries such as Morocco and Uzbekistan - the movement for high-speed rail in this country has not progressed at anything resembling high speed. It is highly unusual for a such a complex rail plan to come from the private sector, which raises the question: Can Yaro, Bergstrom and other civic and business leaders who’ve joined with them - Hartford Mayor Luke Bronin just became co-chairman of the initiative - convince Congress and the states to make this happen? Mega-regions They estimate the project would cost $105 billion over 20 years. The North Atlantic Rail plan would put Hartford an hour from New York - and Boston. Both saw the downtown boom, in no small part because of a one-hour rail connection to New York City. Yaro and Bergstrom, friends since they were in graduate school at Harvard in the 1970s, have both worked in Stamford - Bergstrom as development director and Yaro as a consulting planner. It would reduce pollution and carbon production (the trains would be electrified, powered by renewable energy) and highway congestion, he said. He believes that connecting the region’s population centers by high-speed rail would create a “new economic geography.” It would mean more employment and housing options, especially for city residents. The new rail network will provide “transformational mobility, economic development and climate resilience benefits for the entire seven-state region,” Bergstrom said. That would mean massive improvement to the Metro North New Haven line, through Stamford, Norwalk and Bridgeport. In addition, the plan would incorporate each state’s top rail priorities - Connecticut’s are the New Haven to New York and Hartford to Springfield lines - with the goal of connecting the regional cities in New England and southern New York State with each other and with Boston and New York City. Yaro said in an interview the high speed trains could travel between Manhattan and Boston in 100 minutes, shaving two hours or more off current schedules. From there it would travel east on a new and yet to be determined right of way, make a UConn stop in Tolland, and then move on to Providence and Boston. But instead of following the existing shoreline right-of-way like the last doomed plan, the proposed new route would track to Long Island, cross Long Island Sound via a 16-mile tunnel to the New Haven area, then go north to Hartford. The centerpiece is a high-speed trunk line from New York City to Boston. Called North Atlantic Rail, the plan originated at University of Pennsylvania planning studios directed by highly regarded planner Robert Yaro, former president of the Regional Plan Association and advised by, among others, Christopher “Kip” Bergstrom, former deputy commissioner of the state Department of Economic and Community Development, and Emil Frankel, former commissioner of the state Department of Transportation.
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