Forward to the 19th Century

Mack Hall, HSG

Mhall46184@aol.com

Forward to the 19^th Century

Governor Brown and the California assembly have just discovered railways, and are anxious to introduce them to the Golden West.

Next thing you know, California’s democratically-elected government will hear about electric lights and the wireless.

Specifically, the California Coven proposes to spend some ten billion dollars of state and federal money – your money - to build a high-speed rail line from Los Angeles to San Francisco.  They ignore four salient facts:

1.   There is already an excellent, heavy-gauge, well-maintained railway line between LA and SF now.  Hundreds of freight and passenger trains follow it daily.

2.   Not many people take the train anyway.

3.   High-speed rail is as efficient and as necessary as the SST, the last specimen of which decays in a museum somewhere.

4.   California is a debtor state, and ought to be taking care of the budget, not experimenting with dangerous and expensive toys.

The California coast is indeed crowded, and the existing highways are jammed.  If more folks could be persuaded to ride trains, both long-distance and for commuting, life for travelers could be better.

But instead of assisting private and public railroad companies in placing light, efficient, modern trains onto the grid of existing rails, the Magic Circle in Sacramento propose to tax, borrow, and loot billions for a bullet train, its special trackage, and the attendant seizure of folks’ houses under the odious doctrine of eminent domain.

Further, the Budget-Crusher Express would benefit only the Axis of Preciousness.  The world is not centered on San Francisco and Los Angeles;   why should all Californians and all Americans suffer having their already threadbare pockets picked so that a privileged few can be sped from Hollywood and Vine to Fisherperson’s wharf and back again?

The first stretch will connect Bakersfield and Madera through farmlands, but not even the first day of construction has been scheduled.  Thus, if you are middle-aged and waiting in Bakersfield for the bullet-train to Madera (and have you ever heard of Madera?), you won’t make it to the heaven-reaching spires of that fabled Xanadu in your lifetime.  Further, those 130 miles of speeding bullet train will not carry farmworkers or even the first crate of lettuce anywhere, and when the line is completed, Bakersfield and Madera will no longer be stops but only rustic blurs glimpsed thought the train windows.

Finally, the strongest argument against bullet trains anywhere, not just between rows of cabbages in California, is that these trains are killers.

China has had bullet trains for years, which are said to run at 124 miles per hour.  Japan’s bullet trains zip through that island at 186 mph.  France is the speed champion – French trains average 218 miles per hour.  Cool, huh?

Cool until one breaks.

You can’t survive the structural failure of anything at 218 mph.

Over 150 years of railway history show us that trains are fast, efficient, essential, and extremely vulnerable.  The establishment of roadbed, crossties, and rails requires precision engineering, construction, and maintenance.   If there is a failure at any point – a careless x-ray of a meter of rail, an inadequate weld joint, a shifting of the sub-soil – then that bullet train is not going to roll to a stop among Farmer Brown’s carrots; it’s going to launch into the surrounding  soil, rocks, road, culverts, water, and trees at 218 mph.  The impact alone will kill you, but for lagniappe add shards of glass, fragments of steel and aluminum, and, for lighting effects, mega-volts of electricity from the electrical lines.

The designers and craftsmen will have built into that train and its infrastructure layers of redundancies – an extra driver, multiple-computer backups of everything, continuously monitored tracks, the finest steels and alloys – and yet the bullet train will crash, and everyone aboard will die.

The Titanic, the Hindenburg, the Cannonball Express, an Air France Airbus, an Anglo-French Concorde, the tires on your car – every gadget fails.  You just don’t need to be in a needless train at 218 mph when it goes to glory.

Finally, our national government can’t even keep the lights on in its capital city, a failure which pretty much defines a third-world nation.  Why, then, should anyone have to sit in the dark and think about paying for Star Trek-y golly-gee-whiz trains?

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