Mack
Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com
Forward to the 19th
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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