This is I think the only place where you’d need some sort of tunnel or viaduct for the HS line. when they lie on S-Bahn systems of large cities or when they are right across from cities with stations, such as Neu-Ulm to Ulm. Lack of competition and low expectations are key. My initial thoughts for the continued northward extension were 1.there’s probably a bonus to in state travel like there is in country travel. I had no idea ferries could be that fast. For DB, that means they don’t need to use their best trains on Berlin-Leipzig because there is no point going full speed between them anymore. National transport planners, their buttocks sitting in London, will naturally put London’s interest first. The era of high-speed services started when the ICE 1 was launched in 1991. The one tricky part is the Serra das Araras close to Rio, where the road drops some 500 m of elevation in 13 km full of twists and turns. Most ICE trains offer breakfast/lunch or dinner menus with many German specialties as well as snacks and a wide selection of beverages. Then one has to take a bus for the 180km to Montevideo. Argentina || Uruguay: both Standard Gauge (1435 mm) Argentina || Bolivia: both Metre Gauge (1000 mm) Then there’s no capacity problems with having a third one that toddles on and off the mainline. Argentina, Paraguay and a large chunk of Brazil are all definetly flat enough for HSR. To my later map I’ll add one proposal: moving the Hanover-Dortmund tracks so that trains can stop in Bielefeld. Some countries, like Argentina, aren’t even internally unigauged nearly well enough to string together major intercity connections between the prospective border crossings. DB says “If the seat is empty, the next person can get on” – on a Munich-Hamburg train the same seat may be occupied by three different people. I think most would choose to use a train if it was an option. Building a high speed network doesn’t mean that rail service to smaller towns will be abandoned. Also, while Luleå is probably not strong enough to justify a line, what will Sweden do after it has built a line to Gothenburg? Berlin Hbf-Halle-Frankfurt Hbf »I mean the question is do those six trains come close to paying for themselves?« This goes to confirm my frequent statement that Germans tend to not think in the category of “metro areas”. Quite a long day trip because quite a lot of time was in the travel. Not a blanket statement, because entirely dependent on **how big** a gauge break you’re covering. The Greens promised to study this option in the 2014 election. Shinkansen run on a isolated system. While there are many Standard-to-Russian gauge-changing thru freights at those big breaks, even at one-digit percentage point differences it’s still enough of a premium to sharply thin the herd on the passenger side and force transfers at the breaks on majority of international trains. I’m sure there’s support for plenty of South/West Germany-Erfurt-Leipzig-Dresden service and Berlin-Leipzig direct service. The existing road follows the valley most of the way. For a total of 47.76 mi pax/year between Rio and São Paulo alone. Though even then, do you really need to stop 15 minutes in Liège? Local trains become second-class citizens which nobody in power cares. It sucks, but Leipzig lost its ability to have ICE through-service even with a through-tunnel when DB listened to Thuringia’s tantrum and routed the Berlin-Munich line via Erfurt instead of going direct Leipzig-Nuremberg. The line from Santos to Franca is 398 km. which would be less than six if they had to change trains. Mar del Plata is not as big as Córdoba and Rosario, but it has the advantage that there’s an extremely straight existing ROW (there’s literally 125 km of straight track between Mar del Plata and Maipú), which should make the upgrade pretty cheap. Starting from the Rio-São Paulo route, Metcalfe’s law gives us 0.3*(22^0.8)*(13^0.8), or 27.68 mi pax/year; already higher than any individual city-pair in the US. Even quite promising French routes (I took Lille to Calais-Ville a couple of years ago) have erratic, low-frequency scheduling in a way that no comparable English regional rail (which is now almost all on hourly takts) does. The cheap booze on the other routes is due to technically leaving the EU VAT area by serving Åland…, Also, a reliable all weather crossing between cities in countries with similar languages will induce commuting, just look at Øresund…. BH is bigger than the sum of all the small/medium cities after Campinas. Between Helsinki and Tallinn alone, ferries carry six million pax every year. And on Amtrak there’s a kind of boarding pass above the seat showing your destination. What’s the route for Buenos Aires Montivedo? For example, the Kreise served by the Munich S-Bahn, excluding the city proper, have a total of 1.3 million people, and people in those suburbs would be connecting to the rest of Germany by train at Munich Hauptbahnhof anyway – a lower-intensity, higher-coverage network would do nothing for them. I genuinely don’t know. Assuming that Germany had a real 320kph+ HSR system as Alon envisaged, it would be actually good for Erfurt-Leipzig-Dresden and Erfurt-Berlin being totally separate. In my opinion those people have it exactly backwards. It’s far too big a leap to justify the kludges. Yeah of course – but takts are less relevant on long-distance, high-capacity, few-connection routes like TGV (and small, cheap, nimble trains are actively harmful for longer-distance services) and I think this mindset has at least contributed to France’s poor uptake of best practice for regional rail. Let’s take railroads for example. Transit didn’t need to be that good to have a high number of passengers. For SNCF it’s really a shame that the network works so badly for trips not involving Paris. The honest answer though is DB should run a cost benefit analysis on your model and if it comes close to breaking it even it should try running it for a couple of years, and if it get patronage great keep it, if not cut it. There’s going to have to be some brutally-tough decisions made on unigauging or “semi”-gauging to deliver a continental canvas that can take the crayon-draw networks. Here is the link: Colombia, despite the cost, seems like it could be worth it. And the Stockholm-Helsinki route is also very popular. Stopping only at the ‘stroke’ (that would the airport which lost its last passenger flights this week) is not possible, because Leipzig Messe is missing the north↔west curve (and you lose your whole catchment). Examples from the Tokaido Shinkansen are useless in Germany, since the former is arguably the best HSR market in the world. Project Unigauge has been a program to convert all narrow gauge railways in India to 1676mm, not to convert 1676mm to standard gauge. The Lund tram being extended to Malmö or “Øresundmetro”? The second generation made its debut in 1996. ex- Eastern Bloc borders being the big Standard vs. Russian dividing line, France-Spain + Pyrenees being the Standard vs. Iberian division, newly Standard-ized India vs. Russian clumping at the ex- Soviet influenced borders, and so on). The dining car with the "hump" makes it easy to recognise. The question is, what population is served by those maps? But Covid hastened the end of franchising and towards management contracts and is likely to prove the death knell of the season ticket, if home working takes off. Malmö has Citytunneln, but I don’t know if it’s used as a real S-Bahn or not. On a plane you wouldn’t sell the same seat twice on a single trip. The idea is that the fastest trains go Südkreuz-Erfurt nonstop. The ICE 3 set a new standard in 2000 by reaching a top speed of 300 km/h. Have you thought of making similar HSR-crayons for other continents such as South America? So its population should be added to the 18.3 million.