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Yes. Some examples of countries that have managed to build high-speed rail: Morocco, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, and Turkey. Kazakhstan, Iran, India, and Egypt all have projects under construction. Meanwhile in North America all there is so far is CAHSR, which at present seems unlikely to be completed. The Texas HSR project shows promise though.
The California project was quite devoted to "made in America" solutions and seemed very hostile to European technologies and perspectives. One of the big boondoggles of the project was the attempted creation of their own signaling system "CBOSS", which cost over $200 million before they abandoned it in favour of the off-the-shelf European tech.
The Texas HSR project is currently held up by political opposition while being fully funded.
No really, the group building it raised the money then tried to eminent domain a bunch of rural ranch land to build a nonstop Dallas-Houston route. Good idea, except Texas’ political system gives ranch owners a lot of say, and the HSR group laughed off their demands and just generally alienated them. So they declared it part of the new world order and dragged in the Texas nationalist movement(actually an important political machine that can swing state specific issues, especially if aligned with other interests) to hold up permits for eminent domain.
If the HSR group decides to negotiate with the ranchers then they’ll call off the nationalists and everyone will be happy. Instead there’s a knock down political fight and both sides have some portion of the blame.
The original offer was to waive their rights to compensation under eminent domain law in exchange for more stops in rural areas/small towns- in other words, they want more of the economic benefit, proportionally, going to rural areas. This is, by the by, a reasonable demand- if you’re extracting resources from rural areas(in this case land), requesting that the rural areas see some benefit is the least you can do.
I’m not an expert on cattle/train interactions, but I believe the situation is considerably more complex/inconvenient for ranchers than that, btw- the track almost certainly has to be fenced off which requires designated crossing points which makes moving the herd considerably more complicated.
From some quick back of the napkin math hitting a 1300 lb Steer at 120 mph yields an impact energy on the order of 850 kJ, probably not enough to derail a train, but enough make a mess out of even a fairly substantial steel structure. Accordingly I would expect the rails to be fenced off, out of concerns about safety.
Cattle also don’t move in groups of one, so a train hitting a 1300 lb steer is probably hitting multiple 1300 lb steers, which ranchers don’t want because it’s losing money and train operators don’t want because it’s damaging the trains.
So, in effect, the ranchers were offering to let the HSR group bisect their land for free on the condition that the trains made additional stops, which wouldn’t benefit the ranchers but would benefit whatever towns the trains stopped at. This seems to me to be the kind of civic mindedness that we should laud of our community leaders.
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Separated grade HSR? Are you certain they will be allowed to cross?
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