America’s high-speed rail fail

0:14This is Explain It To Me From Vox. I'm John Glenn Hill and today we're taking the train. because trains take a route that roads can't. So you can see a lot of the terrain changes. You can see the stars at night. And it's just so peaceful. Now, I grew up out west, so I didn't get familiar with trains until I was in college. And honestly, I was wowed by the fact that I could take the Amtrak from D.C. to Philly. But a lot of you aren't nearly as impressed as I was with the state of passenger trains here in the U.S. You know, 99 % of travel, you're not going to be able to use rail in the American heartland.

0:54The U.S. is kind of lacking. There should be more stations, more train tracks, and more stops, I think. So there is no train I can take to get my kids to see their grandparents. One of our listeners wanted to know why. My name's Lara. I'm from Madison, Wisconsin. I hope that you can explain it to me and get me some answers about why the U.S. doesn't do passenger rail well and what we could do to make it better. Thanks.

1:32So today we're taking a trip to find out what went wrong with passenger rail in America and whether there's any silver linings. Our first stop, we're heading to a time when American rail dominated. I spoke with Michael Hiltzik, a columnist at the L.A. Times who wrote a book called Iron Empires, Robert Barron's Railroads and the Making of Modern America. He told me the American railroad pretty much grew alongside the nation. The railroads were dominant in America in a region that was very heavily populated and also was the industrial heart of the country. and that was the Northeast and into the Midwest.

2:11There was a lot of business to be done. There were a lot of passengers going on. And as a result, those regions were heavily crosshatched by rail lines starting in the mid-1800s. So we all probably remember learning about the Transcontinental Railroad back in history class. That was a huge deal at the time, right? That's true. The Transcontinental Railroad, the first Transcontinental Railroad, which is the one we think about most often, that was completed with the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869. That was a massive undertaking, and it really was transformative for the United States of America.

2:55It was an enormous event in San Francisco when the Golden Spike was driven. Even the church bells rang, city hall bells rang all over the state. At the time of the driving of the Golden Spike, there was a great ceremony at Pramontari Summit. And the Wire News Services actually dispatched telegraphers to the site so that they could type out that the spike had been driven in real time. So you could see how much interest there was, certainly in California and throughout the West, for the building of this great line. How transformative were trains to the American landscape and the American economy as they took over all corners of the country?

3:41Yeah, the American economy could simply not have developed as fast or as powerfully as it did without the railroads. And that's not just in the Northeast and in Chicago, but out to the West Coast. So it began to be very inexpensive, at least relatively inexpensive, to go from the East or from the Midwest to the West. And that really was a spur to the Western economy.

4:17In your book, you talk about how robber barons impacted the railroad industry. You know, Vanderbilt, J.P. Morgan. I imagine there was lots of drama and corruption in those early days. Well, corruption was their middle name. There was a vigorous trade on the stock market for stocks and bonds of the railroads. These securities drew a lot of investors from Europe. In fact, Pierpont Morgan, the House of Morgan, really made its – it was really built on the business of brokering investments in American railroads for European clients. This sounds like something out of that show The Gilded Age. Well, The Gilded Age, the money that was made in The Gilded Age was based on the railroad business.

5:09I want to connect all the major cities of America to create a continuous line from New York to Chicago and then from Chicago to California without 10 stops along the way. So it almost sounds like railroads were kind of like the big tech of the time. Oh, I think they were the big tech of the time. They were drivers of technology. And I think if you look at the big businesses of today, banking, investment banking, high tech out of Silicon Valley, those are the sorts of industries that the railroad played that role in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was the biggest business in the United States by far.

5:52How did we start to lose our grip on passenger rail compared to our counterparts in Europe and other places? Well, in the United States, it didn't really happen until we were, you know, a decade or two into the 20th century and World War I. The railroads were nationalized during World War I because the government needed their services to transport troops. so they didn't actually have a commercial presence in that period but while they were still building we began to see truck transport and and sooner or later we began to see air transport these were all heavily competitive to the railroad so we began to see competition really showing its effects early in the 20th century And that's when things started to go off the rails.

6:48So the railroads began to run into financial problems. Infrastructures began to crumble. People stopped really seeing them as convenient and suitable means of transport. And so business was declining. So Amtrak and Conrail, which was the Amtrak for freight, basically, basically were necessary to consolidate what was left of the American railroad system into something that could operate profitably.

7:23Okay, so a lot of our listeners have talked about trains they've taken abroad. The Shinkansen in Japan is amazing, and they have many other small trains that are wonderful to ride. Same thing in Europe. I was traveling in Europe and I got to take a train under the ocean from London to Amsterdam. I'm wondering if you have any memorable stories about trains you've taken abroad. When I lived and worked in Russia, I took the train from Moscow to Petersburg. That was a little weird. In fact, we were told that we should carry cables and padlocks with us to secure the doors of our cabin while we were making that trip.

8:05because otherwise marauders would invade our cabin and steal what we had and, you know, maybe commit violence. So it was a little scary, but we were told, you know, it's a trip that you should take once, and we did do that. Did you walk away unscathed? Yeah, we walked away unscathed.

8:28All right, Michael, thanks for taking this trip with us. Happy to do it. Make way, make way. The train is approaching the station. Michael Hiltzik is the author of Iron Empires, Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America. You can find a link to his book in our show notes. Next stop, high-speed rail-ish.

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11:51All aboard, all aboard the Explain It To Me Express. Please keep your arms and legs in the train. Yes, that means you, JQ. Hey, we're back talking high-speed rail. Those trains that can go as fast as around 220 miles per hour. My commute would take me about a minute at that speed. But what's the state of high-speed rail in the U.S.? Non-existent and terrible. But there's some glimmer of hope. That's Michael Kimmelman, the editor-at-large of Headway, a team housed at the New York Times that focuses on progress. And in terms of high-speed rail in the U.S., it's not really happening. High-speed rail, you know, exists all around the world, in China and in Europe and Japan, and has for decades.

12:44But the United States has consistently failed to build high-speed rail, and there's been conversation about it for a long time as well. You know, earlier in the show, we got into the history of rail in the U.S. And, you know, it used to be so innovative and so cutting edge. What happened? How did we end up falling behind like this?

13:09The story is usually told that, you know, we had a great rail system. The country was connected by the transcontinental railway in the 19th century. And we gave up that advantage. And that story is true, for sure. But it also doesn't take into account the way the country has developed. The fact is that we had a lot of land and a lot of places where people could grow. Once the automobile became something that people could afford, and it wasn't just for rich people, people wanted roads. So we invested less and less in trains, and that's part of the story. But there are a lot of other reasons why we failed, too, which is that we've become a country that's extremely regulated and that has made it very difficult to build anything big anymore.

14:02We have a million obstacles to progress and we have very few easy paths.

14:11OK, it's not here in the U.S. Then where is the best high speed rail system? Like, who's getting this right right now? Well, a bunch of people, right? I mean, I think in the time that California has said that it would build a high-speed rail between L.A. and San Francisco and done none of it, I think China has built nearly 30 ,000 miles of high-speed rail, just in these couple of decades or less. Japan, of course, has a famous high-speed bullet train called the Shinkansen and has had that for decades. And most of Europe now, Western Europe, is connected by high-speed rail. It's perfectly normal in Europe to go to your local train station and get on a train that will take you 200 miles an hour to another city.

15:02Wow. So you don't have to go to an airport. You don't have to come from an airport. You don't have to go through security. It's a much easier, more not just convenient, but more pleasant way to travel. We were supposed to have high-speed rail in the U.S. What happened to that project? There was a project that was supposed to take place in California. Yeah, there was. And technically, there still is, though I wouldn't hold your breath. Yeah, back in the 80s, actually, Governor Jerry Brown in California had this idea. that California could use high-speed rail. I make no bones about it. I like trains.

15:41I like high-speed trains even better. By the 90s, California had already begun to move ahead with this plan for a high-speed rail. By 1996, I think, California had a kind of plan in place, and it took them until 2008, I think, to approve a measure. I think it was called Prop 1A, which set aside about$10 billion to construct a high-speed rail, which was going to connect L.A. and San Francisco. It would take about two hours and 40 minutes directly from one to the other. And the cost estimate was around$33-34 billion. And the completion date was 2020. 2020 has come and gone, and there's still no high-speed rail from San Francisco to L.A.

16:29Recently, the Trump administration revoked$4 billion in federal funding for the project. Overall, it's been kind of a mess. By 2018, it was clear this was never going to happen by 2020 and may never happen at all. And the cost estimates doubled, more than doubled. They would ultimately triple. And then when Newsom, Gavin Newsom, the current governor, succeeded Brown, he spoke about the fact that This was obviously not going to be possible anytime soon. And his big promise was that possibly California might have high-speed rail between Bakersfield and Merced, two cities in the Central Valley that no one had really asked for high-speed rail to travel between.

17:24And now that's pretty unlikely, too. The estimated completion date would be sometime in the 2030s, perhaps, and at a cost of well over$110 billion. So, yeah, that didn't work out.

17:44The failure of California's high-speed rail has been held up as the symbol of all kinds of political problems. It was even talked about in this book called Abundance, co-written by this guy named Ezra Klein. You may have heard of him. Gentlemen, you wrote a book about an optimistic future, about reforming America's institutions. Why delve into sci-fi? To get the future we want, we need to build and invent more of the things we need. We don't build enough homes. We don't build enough clean energy. We never managed to build high-speed rail. The California high-speed rail has been held up, definitely, as a prime example of that.

18:22And that path between L.A. and San Francisco runs through a lot of properties and a lot of jurisdictions, each one of which can put up obstacles and make complaints and say what they want. So, in general, what had been seen as a great boon suddenly becomes a boondoggle. And I think that's what's happened in California. So, it's a really good example of the problem that the Abundance Agenda describes. And I think the fact that we're having this conversation may actually be an indication that the conversation is shifting now, finally, a little. So that's California. But there's another project in the U.S.

19:04that's already running. It's called Brightline, and it's a higher speed train that runs between Miami and Orlando. It's the only privately owned and operated intercity passenger rail in America. In short, they didn't have to go through a million of these approval processes. And they kind of already owned the route. And in California to Vegas, that's pretty much the plan for Brightline 2, which is to go along 15, a highway between the two cities, in the median. So there's not a lot of properties to deal with. There are not a lot of sort of obstructions. You don't have to move people out or whatever.

19:46And as a consequence, that may actually happen. And that might be, in fact, the first genuine high-speed rail in the United States. But Brightline has also been found to have a dubious safety record. An investigation from the Miami Herald and WLRN recently reported that Brightline trains have killed 182 people since they've been in operation and failed to make critical safety updates to prevent accidents. The safety record of Brightline in Florida is really troubling. Partly it's growing pains, transitioning from a freight rail to a passenger train that runs through the middle of cities. But the company bears a lot of the blame.

20:28It's clearly a crisis and a learning curve for the company and those Florida communities. Are you hopeful that one day we'll have high-speed rail that's both safe and fast? You know, even if it's pie in the sky, is it going to be like, you know, going to go see my grandkids by getting on that high-speed rail? Yeah, I have the same dream. It's going to have to happen sooner for seeing my grandkids to do that. But yes, I mean, I'm not entirely pessimistic about this. High-speed rail is something that could connect large cities. And those cities could really use it. And that will serve many, many millions of Americans.

21:11All right, Michael Kimmelman, thank you so much for explaining this to us. My pleasure.

21:21We have arrived at the station. Please remember to fetch your luggage or else it's mine. Our next stop is our final destination, where American trains are still breaking new ground.

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23:03We all get our packages from Amazon, but, you know, those goods have to have come into the country. So they come in via our ports, and then usually it's the rail system that's picking them up. So there's very few things that a rail, particularly long-haul freight, is not involved in. That's Chris Holen. She's the executive director of the B &O Railroad Museum in Baltimore, the birthplace of American railroading. We are where literally the very first stone was ever laid, the first mile of commercial track. We are a 40-acre campus with eight historic buildings. It's all original B &O grounds. And we are coming up on the 200th anniversary of the American Railroad in 2027.

23:44It was first chartered, the first commercial railroad, the B &O, was chartered on February 28, 1827. Okay, this whole entire episode, we've been talking about passenger rail. Passenger rail in the US doesn't have the best reputation. But there is one way where American railroads are still kind of reigning supreme. Can you talk about that a little bit? Absolutely. The freight rail is reigning supreme. I mean, we have 140 ,000 plus miles of rail in this country for freight. So literally one end to the other. And right now, almost 2 billion metric tons of freight cross the country each year. So when I meet people and they'll tell me, oh, I don't take the train, I always say, well, everything you own and use does.

24:37That's how prevalent it is in American life. So I think we have this real tendency to romanticize Europe. You know, the food, the health care, the trains. Like that scene in Before Sunrise where Ethan Hawke's character meets Julie Delbys. I feel like we have some kind of connection, right? Yeah, me too. Yeah, right. Well, great. So listen, here's the deal. This is what we should do. You should get off the train with me here in Vienna and come check out the town. What? Come on. It'll be fun. So do they have better modes of transportation or is it more complicated than that? I think it's an issue of priority.

25:17So, you know, in the United States, we prioritize the movement of goods. So really, there can be some government investment, but it's really the railroads themselves, the private companies who invest and maintain their lines. And those lines are used for freight. Whereas in Europe, the railroads are really more government-owned and they're prioritized for passengers. So on our lines, freight gets priority, passenger second. And it's pretty much reversed in Europe. All right. So in the U.S., we tend to move our packages by freight. And there's an advantage to that. If you're going to move goods a long distance, it is the most efficient.