Sir, a second train has hit the Pentagon

Just give me 300kph trains from Windsor to Montreal. Get that stretch, then we can talk about everywhere else. Most of the infrastructure, and population is on that corridor. It would literally transform the country… But it would require government with vision

Well we can’t make trains affordable and convenient how else would we make local domestics flights cost more than international flights across a damn ocean?

Such capitalist efficiency!

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies—in the final sense—a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone.

It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than thirty cities.

It is: two electric power plants, each serving a town of sixty thousand population.

It is: two fine, fully equipped hospitals.

It is: some fifty miles of concrete highway.

We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.

We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than eight thousand people.

This—I repeat—is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.

This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

Eisenhower

Would be such a good speech over all of he didn’t spend the bit right before this blaming the mistrustful Soviets for not just like taking their word that “the free nations” 🙄 are not aggressive

Japanese anti semites believe that the reason Jews controlled the world was because they invested in infrastructure and transportation. And they wanted to usurp this supposed Jewish cabal with a Japanese cabal. I don’t know if this ideology influenced their decision to go ham on trains and other tech, but lmao

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China can have some gadgetbahn, as a treat.

People have been blinded by a level of understandable Elon hate until China started working on it.

Nah it’s been kicking around since maybe 1904: https://web.archive.org/web/20140630081422/https://black-cat-studios.com/goddardstory.pdf

Gerard K. O’Neill really popularised the idea in the 1970s

Bit idea: build political power by infiltrating boomer foamer groups and get them to be loudly pro-CPC

Put down your physics textbook and turn your civil engineering textbook to page 420.

I am talking acceleration - specifically, accelerating from a station, and decelerating as you arrive at a station. Those two activities create G-forces, and there is a maximum number of G’s you can subject general passengers to, and when stations are close to each other - or the path between them isn’t a straight shot - then your passenger G tolerance limits how high of a top speed you can reach before you have to start braking. Going faster requires your stations to be further apart, it requires the grade to be more gradual, and it requires the route to be more direct.

Subways stop every couple of blocks. It doesn’t matter how big of an engine you put on a subway car, they will never go faster than they do now. Regional rail can be a little faster, but it still has to stop every couple of miles, which means even if you put a bullet train on those tracks it simply can’t get up to speed. Rail between cities is pretty much the only place you can put HSR, and the currently-existing HSR track isn’t a candidate for maglev track because it’s not precise enough, straight enough, and in many cases long enough for a maglev train to get up to its top speed and actually save time over the HSR that already exists.