On the Fast Track
With its soaring, arched ceilings, 20-story bell tower, and gilded frescoes, the Gare de Lyon rail station in Paris feels like a kind of church. This cathedral of transport was built for the World Exposition of 1900, a Belle Époque celebration of the achievements in science and technology that had given birth to the Industrial Revolution a century earlier. Coal soot and dark halos of steam billowed in the rafters, symbols of the original builders' faith in eternal progress.
Today, sunlight streams through the roof, layers of caked-on coal grime having long since been scrubbed from the latticework of glass and steel. Gleaming silver-and-blue trains glide noiselessly in and out of the station, pushed and pulled at both ends by electrical "power units" that nuzzle the concrete platforms with aerodynamic, space-shuttle-like noses. These supertrains, which shoot through the countryside at almost 200 miles an hour, have transformed the Gare de Lyon from a sooty monument of the revolution that brought us global warming into something quite different. Now it's a temple to high-speed rail, a technology that some experts say is essential to helping us get out of our climate fix.
One day last fall, I stood next to a 30-foot-tall palm tree in the Gare de Lyon waiting to board a TGV -- train à grande vitesse, or high-speed train -- to Avignon. Fifteen minutes before my train was scheduled to leave, its platform number flashed up on the station's black-and-yellow departures board. I ambled to my assigned car and found my seat -- no waiting in line for check-in, security, or boarding. The train, a double-decker with a capacity of 545 passengers, was about two-thirds full. Even then, it was carrying as many people as a Boeing 747, yet with far greater comfort and freedom of movement than any commercial airplane in my experience as a frequent flier.
The doors whooshed shut at the appointed minute and the train started moving -- slowly at first, then gathering speed as it approached the southern outskirts of Paris. At some point during the transition from city to country, I looked out the window and realized that the train had accelerated to a speed roughly twice as fast as I had ever moved before at ground level. Trees, bridges, and electric poles appeared and disappeared before my eyes could focus on them. Trains rushed by in the opposite direction, producing a violent sonic jolt that would have been annoying had it not lasted less than two seconds. Inside the brightly decorated cars, however, the only sensation of movement was a gentle swaying. The train pulled into the Avignon TGV station exactly on schedule, having covered 463 miles in 2 hours and 40 minutes (average speed: 174 miles per hour, including slowdowns for several miles at each end of the trip). My ticket cost $75 -- about the same as the cheapest available airfare from Paris to Marseille (the major airport nearest to my destination), yet sans the hassle of getting to and from distant airports, not to mention the possibility of maddening air-traffic delays.
An hour after arriving in Avignon, I relaxed in the medieval quaintness of the village that was my final destination and reflected on my journey. It was not only as fast as air travel, but incomparably more pleasant. It is also safer than any other form of transportation. France's TGV service has carried 1.5 billion passengers since it started in 1981, without a single fatality during high-speed operations. (There have been fatal accidents in urban areas, where the TGV shares the track with conventional trains and moves at the same speed.) And, while the TGV runs on steel rails just like its slower-moving predecessors, my trip that day was as different from conventional train travel (average speed: 40 mph, charitably reckoned) as driving a car is from taking a horse-drawn buggy. With its speed and convenience, high-speed rail could revolutionize travel in the United States by offering an attractive alternative to cars and airplanes for regional trips.
Several states are improving existing rail lines with the goal of offering "medium-fast" (around 110 mph) service within the decade (see "Slow, Slow, Quick-Quick, Slow," this issue), but California has pulled into the lead as the probable site of America's first true high-speed (top operating speed: 220 mph) system. Supporters hope it will be whizzing passengers between Los Angeles and San Francisco by 2020. Once the technology has a foothold in the United States, its rapid spread will become more and more likely as the economic, environmental, and practical benefits sink in. State-of-the-art high-speed rail systems don't come cheap, but the price of not building them will be astronomical, in both economic and environmental terms. As far as the planet's climate is concerned, high-speed rail can't come fast enough.
Trains, even painfully slow ones powered by diesel engines, are inherently efficient compared with other ways of moving people and cargo. The reasons have to do with basic physics. Steel wheels on steel tracks have much lower rolling resistance than rubber tires on pavement. One train uses less energy to overcome wind resistance than the number of trucks or cars that would be needed to haul an equal load the same distance. A single freight train can take as many as 280 trucks off the highway and uses a quarter as much fuel as an average truck to move a ton one mile. Amtrak passenger trains, hardly paragons of up-to-date technology, consume on average 18 percent less energy per passenger mile than airplanes and 27 percent less than cars. So policies that encourage and expand rail transport will yield net reductions in both oil dependence and greenhouse gas emissions.