Houston Chronicle "Gray Matters," 2/2:
Don't railroad our neighborhoods
High-speed rail shouldn't destroy thriving parts of town
High-speed rail (such as Japan's Shinkansen bullet train, shown here) requires right-of-ways 50 to 80 feet wide, and in urban areas, a platform 20 feet tall. That's fine along a freeway. But it would devastate neighborhoods. (Photo: OpenCage.info, edited by Lisa Gray. CC BY-SA license.)
A high-speed rail line linking Houston and Dallas sounds like a good idea. But as they say, the devil is in the details.
Texas Central Railroad, a recently-formed private company, is proposing to build such a link with funding obtained largely from Japanese banks, and has applied to the Federal Railroad Administration for permission to do so. The nine candidate routes examined so far have been winnowed down to two. Unfortunately, the last stretches of these routes run directly through Houston residential neighborhoods.
In order to fully appreciate what this means, consider that the Shinkansen bullet trains, with a top speed of 205 miles per hour, cannot run on conventional rails. Instead, the line is built as a closed, fenced-in system, on special tracks, which in urban areas are typically set on a platform some 20 feet high, with catenary-system superstructure adding another 20 feet or so of height. For bidirectional service, total right of way of 50 to 80 feet is required. Installation of this massive infrastructure would be devastating to a residential neighborhood.
Continue here.