No High-Speed Rail for the Southwest

Any American who has traveled in Europe or Asia is in awe of the train service there.  Train service is cheap, clean, and efficient.  It is remarkably easy to travel from country to country by train, even if traveling with small children.

If you wish to travel around the American Southwest, however, you’re obliged to go by car.  Depending on the time of year and your destination, it can take all day to cross a hot desert.  It is almost impossible to make that trip without wishing for a European-style high-speed rail system.

Well, that is not going to happen anywhere in the Southwest, except possibly in California.

While there are no hard and fast rules for predicting when rapid intercity rail transport becomes feasible, there is a set of guidelines, and using those guidelines, the American Southwest doesn’t even come close to making such infrastructure profitable.  Let’s look at the possible routes, step by step.

The first requirement for building high-speed rail is corridor distance—the number of miles between the starting and ending points of the line.  Using the existing, successful high-speed rail lines as a guide, the sweet spot for profitable lines is more than 150 miles and less than 600 miles.  For shorter routes, it is hard for a railroad to compete with cars, and for longer routes, it is generally cheaper and faster to go by air. 

Possible routes that are far too long for high-speed rail include those from any city in Texas or New Mexico to any city in California.  Routes that are too short to be feasible include Tucson to Phoenix, Las Cruces to El Paso, and Albuquerque to Santa Fe.   With the exception of California, the distances between many towns in the Southwest are multiples of 35-50 miles—the distance a steam locomotive could travel before needing to stop and take on water.  Longer stops—at roughly 150 miles apart—accommodated crew changes and maintenance needs.  For most cities in the desert Southwest, neighboring cities in the same state are simply too close together to make high speed rail feasible.

The next criterion is terminus to terminus population.  As a general rule, each end of the route should have a population between one and three million people, with a total population along the route between 8-10 million people.  If we follow this rule strictly, we eliminate any high-speed rail in New Mexico, Utah, or Nevada.  Even the Los Angeles to Las Vegas route does not meet this guideline because the population of Las Vegas is too low.  The only remaining possible routes are Phoenix to Los Angeles and the already-proposed California High-Speed Rail (CAHSR) system that links Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Both of the remaining possible routes meet the next guideline hurdle: Competitive travel time.  High-speed rail should be at least 20–30% faster, door-to-door, than driving and should be competitive with flying (including airport delays).  This usually means train speeds of 150–220 mph with minimal intermediate stops.  The Phoenix to Los Angeles route meets this easily, while the proposed California route only passes because California freeway traffic could only be slower if every car were driving in reverse.  As it is, on just the Los Angeles to San Francisco route, California is estimating a time of 3 hours, give or take 15 minutes (depending on whether the train is an express or stops at any of the ten intermediate stations).  The same trip by car would take twice as long, even if the train were to stop at every intermediate stop. 

The next guideline is load capacity.  For a high-speed rail project to operate profitably—ignoring initial construction costs—the train needs an average daytime load above 70% (not just at peak hours).  Even the most generous estimate eliminates the Phoenix to Los Angeles route.  (Nationwide, existing passenger rail lines average only 40%)

The last guideline is estimated ridership.  The break even on operating costs is approximately 35 million riders per year.  According to the State of California, that number of riders for the future CAHSR is absolutely assured.  On the other hand, if you listen to several independent analysts (by such entities as the California High-Speed Rail Authority or third-party analysts) the proposed California system will be lucky to have half that number of riders. 

There are a few other minor considerations.  If the town to be served by high-speed rail is also served by existing slower rail facilities, that is a plus.  In the case of the American Southwest, Amtrak connects to Albuquerque, Tucson, El Paso, and Los Angeles.  Amtrak does not go to San Francisco, Las Vegas, or Phoenix.  It may surprise you to learn that the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad was started without a connection to Santa Fe.  Eventually, there was a connecting spur line, but Amtrak does not connect to Santa Fe.  None of above make the success of high-speed rail in the Southwest any more likely.

There is a theory that building a commuter railroad will foster development, and that ridership will gradually increase until the new railroad is profitable.  This was exactly the reasoning behind New Mexico’s building the Railrunner Express that links Albuquerque and Santa Fe.  Setting up the line cost the state $635 million.  Since the line opened in 2006, ridership has actually decreased to approximately 1,900 riders a week.  Fares currently account for almost 4% of the annual operating costs, which do not include interest on the debt.  Another 4% of the operating cost is donated by the federal government.  At the current level of ridership, the New Mexico taxpayers would save approximately $40 million a year if the state paid for each of the riders to take an Uber instead of the train.  The riders would also arrive at their destinations faster.

If you are interested in math, economists actually have a formula (at right) for evaluating whether a transportation project is fiscally sound.  NPV is the net present value and r is the interest rate, which is normally between 3-7% for transportation projects.  C stands for Cost and B is for benefits.  Setting T for the time period of 40 years, if the NPV is greater than 0, the proposed project is fiscally sound, but if the NPV is below 0, the project is unsound and will be a drag on the taxpayers. 

I started to work out the NPV for the New Mexico Railrunner Express, but the results were just too tragically depressing, so I decided to run the numbers for Phase I of the California High Speed Rail using 4% for the interest rate.  As you might expect, the answer was a little under 0.  Actually, it came out to a negative $65 billion.  And that was if the Federal Government continued to help fund the project at the present rate, something that seems increasingly unlikely.

What about all the other Southwestern states that, defying all logic, are still talking about building their own high speed rail systems?  Let me give you some advice:  Call Uber instead.

The Overlooked Nazis

Certain words are so overused that they lose all meaning.   No matter what I write about, somebody, somewhere writes to call me a socialist, a Nazi, a fascist, or a secular humanist.  Without exception, the writers are incapable of defining the terms they bandy about. 

If we call everybody a Nazi, this means that we don’t react when we learn there are REAL sneaky little Nazis—over two million of them—rapidly taking over Germany, spreading across borders and spilling into every bordering country.  Eighty years after the end of World War II, these menaces have invaded both Russia and France.

To properly inform you about this new menace, I’ll start at the beginning.

Hermann Göring, the flamboyant Nazi leader, fancied himself a forest expert with a flair for the dramatic.  Appointed Reich Master of the Hunt in 1933 and Master of the German Forests in 1934, he took these titles to heart, strutting through woodlands like a medieval lord.  His passion for hunting fueled his self-image as a guardian of nature, and he instituted forestry law designed to create forests that would resemble the private hunting preserves of monarchs instead of natural forests.

Göring’s beloved Schorfheide Forest, where he set aside 100,000 acres as a state park, became his personal playground. There, he built Carinhall, a lavish hunting lodge, in which he hosted grand feasts amid the trees, cementing his forest-king persona.  His aristocratic upbringing and love for pomp—think five daily uniform changes—fed his belief that he was destined to rule over nature itself.  While his expertise was more theatrical than technical, Göring’s charisma and knack for self-promotion made him genuinely popular, convincing even himself that he was a woodland sage.  In his mind, the forest wasn’t just trees—it was a stage on which his larger-than-life ego could shine.

This dream of royal hunting preserves led to Göring’s authorizing the release of raccoons in Germany, in Hesse.  Yes, that’s right:  Göring released turncoat American trash pandas into the wild in Germany, in 1934.

Ostensibly, this was to “improve the fauna” of the region.  Translated from bureaucratic nonsense, Göring wanted something else to hunt.  To be fair, the fur from raccoons was also in high demand for coats.  Fur-farmers (Yes, that is the correct term for someone who raises raccoons, minks, or chinchillas for their fur) were already raising raccoons in Germany, so Göring authorized the release of two females, both pregnant, into the forests of Hesse.  The idea was that it would be easier on the baby raccoons if they were born in the wild.

As you can imagine, Göring didn’t commission an environmental impact study before setting the little garbage gremlins loose…Not that the idea of turning critters loose on the countryside is all that strange:  I live in a state where ibex, oryx, and Barbary sheep have all been released and are happily reproducing out in the desert somewhere.  (And it would crack me up personally to see Red Kangaroo added to that list).

Since the only natural predators left in Germany at that time had shiny bumpers under the Mercedes Benz logo, these bin burglars enthusiastically multiplied.  This one release was more than enough to set off a population explosion, but in 1945, when an Allied bombing raid struck a fur-farming facility at Wolfshagen, near Strausberg, just east of Berlin, at least 25 more raccoons escaped from stalag. 

Today, biologists have taken genetic samples and the ringtails in the northern and western areas of Germany are descended from the 1934 release, while the bandits to the south and east are descended from the later escapees.  Together, the two populations number between 1 and 2 million little Nazi bin burglars.

Over decades, these two separate populations have extended and met, and masked dumpster divers are now firmly established across much of Central Europe.  They have been recorded in France, the Low Countries, Denmark, Poland, the Czech Republic, and beyond, as spillovers from the thriving German population.

There are now areas of Europe that have as many raccoons per square mile as there are in North America. 

Germany views the little scramble squirrels as an invasive species that needs to be eradicated.  With no natural predators and with a serious knack for mischief, these sneaky garbage snackers have thrived as they crash garden ponds, loot birds’ nests, and ransack attics like it’s their day job.  Environmentalists worry they’re a disaster in a fuzzy disguise—devouring eggs, threatening endangered amphibians, and competing with native wildlife for snacks and shelter.

Meanwhile, the locals are torn:  Some want to cull them, while others post raccoon selfies online.  One pawed prowler in Berlin reportedly starred in a viral TikTok before stealing someone's currywurst.

Despite their cartoonish charm, these masked menaces are on the EU’s naughty list of invasive species.  Think of them as cute ecological chaos with opposable thumbs.  And while hunters now bag over 200,000 a year, since that number is well below the reproductive rate, the raccoons just keep coming.  After all, in Europe’s lush new buffet of backyards, being a raccoon is a five-star experience.

Europe’s only hope of stopping this new masked menace is to get NATO involved. 

London's Hydraulic Age

Late nineteenth century London was a mixture of old and new:  there were horse-drawn carriages, but also, many of the wonders of the industrial age.  The benefits of the industrial age and steam engines had changed the way that people lived, how factories were powered, and how efficiently factories worked, but there were limits to how much mechanization could be used in the city.

There were elevators in large buildings, giant mechanized printing presses, water pumps, and heavy machinery of all types…but how did they power them?  The ultimate source of power for all of these were steam engines, but many businesses didn’t want a noisy steam engine on site, with constant wagon loads of dusty coal queuing up to unload.

Take, for example, the Savoy Hotel on the Strand.  It is hard to imagine having Peach Melba prepared by Auguste Escoffier and overseen by hotel manager, César Ritz, while the entire hotel rattled from a noisy steam engine in the basement.  The Savoy needed something to operate the “lifts” and the adjacent Savoy Theatre needed something to open the massive curtains for the debut of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado.

If only there were some way of piping in power as easily as water or gas could be brought in.

Actually, there literally was a way!  Buried beneath the streets of London were cast-iron pipes that carried water under high pressure—as much as 800 psi.  In fact, there were a total of 180 miles of such pipes connecting businesses to the pumping stations operated by the London Hydraulic Power Company.   This was a for-profit utility company, chartered by Parliament, that sold shares, issued bonds, and charged customers for the service.  The rates customers paid were calculated by meters that measured the pressure and quantity of water used.

To make the system work, five pumping stations were scattered across the city, located—if possible—near a canal or the Thames River, to accommodate coal-bearing barges.  Inside the pumping stations, massive steam engines operated large, horizontal three-cylinder water pumps that sent filtered water to accumulators.  Built vertically as tall as three stories, the accumulators were pistons with 50 tons of iron weights on top to maintain and regulate the pressure.

But how exactly did that pressurized water become useful mechanical energy at the point of service?

The answer lies in the clever application of hydraulic actuators and motors—devices that converted the water’s pressure into motion.  The most common of these were hydraulic cylinders, essentially long, reinforced tubes with internal pistons.  When the 800-psi water entered the cylinder, it pushed the piston forward, creating linear motion.  This mechanism was the backbone of many installations across London.  In grand hotels like the Savoy, hydraulic cylinders smoothly lifted guests in early elevators.  In theaters, the same principle raised and lowered entire sections of the stage, including trapdoors and orchestra pits.

Other applications required rotational movement, which was achieved using hydraulic motors.  These devices allowed pressurized water to spin a rotor, generating torque and rotary motion. This kind of setup was used in more complex mechanisms—like revolving theater stages, winches, and shop display turntables.

London’s docklands and warehouses benefited particularly from hydraulic cranes, which used both linear and rotary hydraulic components to lift and swing heavy cargo with precision.  The power was reliable, consistent, and clean—an enormous advantage in the smoke-clogged industrial city.

Unlike electrical systems, which transmit energy via electrons, hydraulic power transmitted energy via fluid force and volume.  The water—after doing its work—was usually discharged into drains, not recirculated, which made the system simple, though not especially water-efficient by modern standards.

The brilliance of this system was its modularity: a single pressure line could run an elevator in a hotel, open or close the curtain in a theater, open a heavy bank vault door, or run a printing press in Fleet Street.  All the end user needed was the right hydraulic actuator.

In short, Victorian London didn’t just rely on steam and gaslight—it ran on water that was pumped and pressurized beneath its streets.  It was a quiet force—almost invisible, yet utterly vital to the daily rhythm of the modern city.  And since the system worked so well, it was copied in other large cities:  Birmingham, Glasgow, Antwerp, Geneva, Melbourne, and Buenos Aires.  Even New York briefly experimented with such a system.

Over the years, electric motors replaced many of the functions of hydraulic power.  Electric elevators, for example, moved faster and more smoothly than hydraulic elevators.  The changeover to electric motors was slow, in part, because hydraulic systems are mechanically simple:  hydraulics had no spark risk, had fewer moving parts, and produced high torque at low speeds.  Thousands of buildings had lifts, hoists, and theatrical or industrial machinery, that was built around hydraulic actuation, that was installed from the 1880s to the 1930s. In many cases, it was cheaper to keep using hydraulic power than to replace the equipment.  Converting these systems to electric motors would have required extensive retrofitting which would have been both expensive and  structurally invasive, so most businesses held off as long as possible.

Eventually, the London Hydraulic Power Company just could not afford to maintain the heavy equipment with so few customers and so it ceased operation in 1977.  All that remains is the Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, which is the last of the pumping stations.

London’s Hydraulic Age, so brief that few even noticed it, was over.

The Collapse

By now, there has been more printer’s ink spilled about the causes for the North’s victory in the Civil War than blood was shed by the actual combatants.  If you want to write about a new theory, the opportunities are few.  Even as you read this, somewhere, some poor doctoral student is desperately trying to finish a dissertation citing as the definitive cause for the Southern defeat its lack of faith healers, bell-bottom pants, and Swedish meatballs. 

Among the well-trodden topics is the North’s superior use of railroads to move men and supplies during the war.  

When the Civil War broke out, the Union had something the Confederacy sorely lacked: a network of iron spaghetti stretching from Maine to Missouri.  The North had about 22,000 miles of track compared to the South’s paltry 9,000—and while the Confederacy was trying to figure out how to fix broken rails with chewing tobacco and hope, the North was running military-grade logistics like a 19th-century Amazon Prime.

Trains let the Union move troops faster than you could say “General Sherman’s coming.”  While Southern armies marched through swamps eating hardtack and despair, Union forces rolled into battle with fresh boots, bullets, and beans.  While the North could reinforce a front in days, the South might need weeks—assuming the rails hadn’t been torn up, stolen, or repurposed into garden trellises.

Then there was the problem of standardized gauge.  The North mostly used one track width, which meant one train could go from Pittsburgh to Atlanta without a layover. The South? A patchwork of gauges meant trainloads of supplies sometimes had to be unloaded and reloaded onto different trains, while the army prayed nothing spoiled.  Spoiler: it spoiled.

By the time General Sherman started torching Georgia, he wasn’t just burning cities—he was turning Confederate railroads into twisted sculptures called “Sherman’s neckties.”  Artful, yes.  Useful? Not anymore.

So while the South had heart, grit, and generals with glorious beards, the North had trains—and in the end, steel wheels beat steel nerves.  The Union ran a war on rails, but the Confederacy never really got out of the station.

Some of the credit for functional railroads should also go to Abraham Lincoln.  Realizing that the various railroad companies would undoubtedly put profit before patriotism, Lincoln threatened to have the military take over the railroads if the companies did not voluntarily begin cooperating.  This scared the railroad companies so thoroughly that they voluntarily cooperated through the entire war.  In the South, the few companies that existed refused to deliver even vital military cargo without payment in advance.

The American Civil War should have been a “Road to Damascus” moment for every country’s military.  The lessons were very obvious:  The days of cavalry charges were absolutely over (at best, mounted troops should ride to battle and then dismount and act as infantry).  The sword and lance were made obsolete by rifles.  Artillery turned siege lines into slaughterhouses.  And—I bet you are way ahead of me—railroads changed the way warfare was to be fought.

You can make an argument that the last point was only temporary.  The war between Russia and Japan was actually started over a railroad and it didn’t play much of a role during the actual fighting.  And railroads were not pivotal in World War I.  But, for the remainder of the 19th century, it was obvious that the effective use of railroads was crucial in warfare so that every country with an intelligent military began making plans in case of war.  

Naturally, this did not include France.  The French military does best when it is led by someone who isn’t French.  Or is a schizophrenic teenage girl.   By the time the American Civil War was over, France was led by Emperor Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte.

France’s failure to study the use of railroads in the American Civil War led directly to World War I.  Let me explain.

Napoleon had declared himself emperor in 1852, after a coup in 1851.  Though this made him technically commander-in-chief, the Emperor was just smart enough to leave the military to his military leaders…at least for a while.  He had almost nothing to do with the army when England and France fought Russia during the Crimean War (where a British-built seven-kilometer railroad leading from the docks to the Sevastopol front lines was key for the Allied victory.)  

When he led France to war against Italy in 1859, he personally commanded the French army during the Second Italian War of Independence against Austria, even being present at the Battle of Solferino, where sheer dumb luck gave him an exaggerated view of his own tactical skills.  Over time, he became more hands-on with military affairs, appointing loyalists and shaping doctrine, but not overhauling the system.  By overhauling, I mean he ran off all the good men, appointed sycophants and toadies, and generally created an army that his uncle would have proud of in 1805, but was practically useless in 1870.

In 1870, Napoleon III was increasingly unpopular in France and thought the best way to boost his ratings was to engage in a little ‘wag the dog’ action:  start a small easy to win war and depend on nationalism to rally the people to the flag.  At the same time, Otto von Bismarck was trying unify the Southern German People into a united Germany and knew that if there was a war, the people in those small German states would also respond patriotically.

With each side believing the war would benefit itself, it wasn’t surprising that in July 1870, both countries eagerly went to war.  Prussia had an extensive battle plan, prepared and practiced, and began moving troops toward France.

France on the other hand—despite having a better railroad system—had no plan, had no central authority and far worse, had Napoleon III leading the army.  Gunners arrived at the front with no artillery, Infantry trains were sent in the wrong direction, cavalry arrived at the front with no horses, and train cars were loaded and unloaded several times without even leaving Paris because there were multiple people giving conflicting orders simultaneously.  When train cars did reach the front, they couldn’t be sent back because the tracks were too crowded with incoming trains.  And, despite the distance from the French capital being relatively short, some troop trains did not even arrive until days after the battle.  

Not surprisingly, the Germans advanced easily, capturing French trains and supplies as they went.  The war lasted only six months and ended with both Napoleon III being captured and the Prussian Army shelling Paris.  France lost its last emperor (so far, anyway ) and a united and stronger Germany was created.

France was humiliated by the peace treaty, having to pay billions of francs in indemnities and having to give up Alsace and parts of Lorraine.  The desire to recoup those territories was one of the main reasons France entered World War I.

Émile Zola wrote La Débâcle (The Collapse) in 1892, to capture the catastrophic unraveling of the French Second Empire during the Franco-Prussian War and to expose how corruption, incompetence, and blind nationalism led to national humiliation.  

Zola was politically engaged and deeply disturbed by France’s collapse in 1871.  Like many liberals of the time, he believed that the Second Empire under Napoleon III had decayed from within.  Its aristocratic rot, administrative bloat, and militaristic posturing had fatally hollowed the state.  Zola wanted to show that France didn’t simply lose a war—it imploded from a long buildup of arrogance and dysfunction.

In the final chapter of his book, Zola writes of a French train full of eager young troops that is speeding towards the front.  Unbeknown to the passengers, both the engineer and the fireman have fallen from the train, which is hurtling towards disaster.  

Zola’s runaway train in La Débâcle is symbolic: the French army was a machine in motion with no one in control, racing toward disaster.  The scenario is not based on a single real incident, but it’s rooted in the widespread logistical chaos of the French war effort.  

Now that summer is here, I recommend Zola’s book.  If you have a Kindle, Amazon will sell you the complete works of Zola for only $3.