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Saturday, December 4, 2010

The US Core Competency: Social Networking -- Not a Bakken Story

It is 753 miles from Shanghai, China, to Beijing, China. Ten hours by conventional rail; five hours by high-speed rail.

It is 700 miles from Washinton, DC, to Chicago, Illinois. Eighteen hours (at least) with Amtrak.

China recently set a passenger train speed record, 300 mph for a bullet train between Shanghai to Beijing.
The Beijing to Shanghai route has 24 stations and runs from Beijing's South railway station to a state-of-the-art facility beside Hongqiao airport in downtown Shanghai. The project costs £21bn and the high-speed link between Beijing and Shanghai is expected to double the capacity of the current line to 80 million passengers a year and halve travel time to five hours.

By 2013, China will have the world's most comprehensive high-speed railway network and 800 bullet trains. So far, China has 4,706 miles of high-speed railway, more than any other country, and by 2020 it expects to have 75,000 miles of railway, of which 10,000 miles will be high-speed rail.
Amtrak's advertised time from Washington, DC, to Chicago is 18 hours (including sixty stops), but generally takes longer because cargo trains have priority. Amtrak leases routes on private rail and must sit on sidings to allow cargo trains to pass. 

In 2020, when China will have 10,000 miles of high-speed rail, the US will still be filing environmental impact statements for high-speed rail.

However, in the advertising and social networking arenas, the US outpaces everyone. Google is trying to buy a Groupon, a new social networking start-up, for $6 billion but apparently that is not enough to seal the deal.

2 comments:

  1. i personally went form chicago to DC in feb of 2006 on Amtrak. By the time we arrived in Pittsburg, Pa. we were so far behind schedule the placed approx 35 of us on a Commerical bus carrier and buses us to DC, so we could catch the next connect from NY to florida..I think it is a crying shame the way our passanger RR service and speed of travel is in this country.. i would be will to bet the service was better in WW2 then it is today.

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  2. Last summer, I took the Boston to Chicago Amtrak and somewhere in western Pennsylvania, they off-loaded passengers going to destinations within 6 hours by bus onto buses; meanwhile, the rest of us were stopped on the tracks for about six hours while they managed a derailment of a cargo train ahead of them. Not Amtrak's fault; just the way it is.

    It is easy to find stories of average delays, etc., for airlines (I think the govt requires it) but there's no place to find similar data for Amtrak. But Amtrak riders expect that the trains will be significantly delayed.

    We missed our connections in Chicago, and were give wonderful overnight accommodations in the Windy City.

    Having said that, I love taking Amtrak for the leisurely ride; lots of time to read. With my iPad, I no longer care how delayed Amtrak is.

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