Page 422 - 360.revista de Alta Velocidad - Nº 6

Fort, Luis. Fort, Carmen

1. Introduction

The news in the press in December 2016: “Opening of the new Moscow-Berlin night train
service”, a few days before the announcement of the International High Speed Congress in
Ciudad Real (October 2017), motivated the proposal of this Conference with The “abstract”
sent at the end of January 2017.
The authors of this paper have pre-designed a large part of the US High Speed Network “USHSRS”
in Preprojects registered at the Colegio de Ingenieros de Caminos of Madrid, and described in
articles published in the “Vía Libre” and “Alta Velocidad” of the Fundación de los Ferrocarriles
Españoles, “Ingeniería Civil” and “Fomento” of the Ministerio de Fomento and “Revista de
Obras Públicas””ROP” of the Colegio de Ingenieros de Caminos.
At the 1st International Congress of Civil Engineering, held at the Colegio de Ingenieros de
Caminos in Madrid on March 2 and 3, 2016, under the motto “Routes joining the world”, the
authors presented a communication, based on the positioning of Spain as a world reference in
the field of High Speed Rail, so that it could serve as the starting point for a possible coordinated
collaboration between the governments of Spain and the United States. Figure 1 reproduces the
planning presented for the development of the Plan, considering eight structural units. For the
purposes of the present paper, we focus on units I, II and VI.
Unit I, “Coastal Corridors”, consists of the Pacific Coast Corridor (I1) and the Atlantic Coast
Corridor (I2). This unit is the one with the greatest profitability foreseeable in its exploitation,
when communicating large urban conglomerates: (I1: Los Angeles-San Francisco Bay) and (I2:
Washington D.C.-New York-Boston).
Unit II, “Intercoasts Way: San Francisco-Washington DC”, communicates the two corridors of
the first Unit and vertebra the network, allowing its execution a progressive advance of the
communication between the different States of the country, taking into account the difference
Time between the two coasts and the possibility of taking advantage of the night time for the
trips, favors a progressive, comfortable, flexible and efficient exchange of relations between
the most important centers of activity of the nation, in a similar way, although on a much larger
scale, to the service of the night train Moscow-Berlin, inspiring of the Conference.

420 360.revista de alta velocidad