That would be great if they did extend it to Eugene was well. There is also a proposal to link Fort Collins, CO to Pueblo, which would be very convenient.
As a Eugenian, I was looking for this in the article. I guess it’s a potential future extension.
It would be awesome to have high speed rail to Eugene, and I think it’d be the cheapest part to build given the terrain. But I’m not sure a metro population around half a million could serve as a terminal stop.
The current rolling stock for Portland to Eugene through cascades is a Siemens Charger, which can achieve a top speed of 200km/h. So it’s surprising that the 177km route takes over 2h30, which is ~70km/h. Perhaps it’s due to the frequent stops between each station, but I feel that it might simply make sense to add supplementary tracks (portland-canby and salem-albany) so it would have a straighter line (allowing sustained speed) and fewer stops. This would be significantly faster to build and leverage existing stock.
Yeah. that’s often the problem with buses and trains. Along populated routes it takes twice as long as the actual drive because they stop at each city along the way.
Which is why in such populated areas there should be at least 4 tracks on a major route: 1 in each direction for local and regional trains (like S bahn in Germany, RER around Paris etc) and 1 in each direction for higher speed intercity or better (like ICE in Germany, TGV in France)… They don’t necessarily have to follow the exact same route, the idea just being there should be fast non-stop options between big agglomerations AND slower stops a lot options to fill the gaps the fast trains leave.
Or at the very least 4 tracks at certain points to make it possible to combine local and long distance on the same tracks but with the option of the long distance one overtaking the local one…
