Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by masklinn | Hacker News Reader

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I think that's misplaced, freight is the one area where NA in general and US in particular absolutely blows every other region out the water. Circa 2010 Rail was ~40% of US freight by ton-mile, whereas for the EU it was ~17%, and the US had 10x more tonne-kilometer freight rail than the EU (beyond China and Russia, with India a very distant third) (nb: China carried more tonnes total but shorter distances)

Of course a major reason for that is that the US have (literally) tons of commodities, a significant plurality of the tonnage is coal. I expect roughly the same of Russia, China, Australia and India (the other members of the tonnage top 5, Australia notably haults extremely heavy stuff for very short distances as it's about on par with the EU for tkm but waaay ahead in total tonnage).

Hell one of the reasons passenger trains is shit in the US is that passenger rail does not get priority over freight and thus you get the country's lone "high-speed train" giving way to slow freight leading to an average speed of 130km/h, slower than some non-high-speed intercity service in Europe.

> Hell one of the reasons passenger trains is shit in the US is that passenger rail does not get priority over freight

They do have priority:

> (c) Preference over freight transportation. -- Except in an emergency, intercity and commuter rail passenger transportation provided by or for Amtrak has preference over freight transportation in using a rail line, junction, or crossing...

http://codes.findlaw.com/us/title-49-transportation/49-usc-s...

Passenger rail is supposed to have priority by law, but in practice they don't always get it. Freight carriers don't always yield, enough so that there are ongoing legal battles. You can check Amtrak's historical On-Time Performance and causes of delay here: https://www.amtrak.com/about-amtrak/on-time-performance/

My quick sampling of ~10 trains came up with an average around 65% on-time during the last year. The only one I've ridden, the California Zephyr, is less than 50%.

http://blog.amtrak.com/2015/02/message-amtrak-regarding-time...

http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2017/03/24-judge-sides-...

http://www.jconline.com/story/money/2017/08/24/csx-digs-its-...

Yeah I've ridden the Zephyr from Chicago to Colorado (and back) a few times, and it was off-schedule about half the time, one of them was at least 4 hours of just sitting there in the train in the middle of nowhere.

One hour I can understand, four is ridiculous. The trip is pleasant and the views are great but for me to take it again they're going to have to do better than 50% on-time.

I used to live on a small town on the Empire Builder line a few hours west of Chicago. It was once a day each way, and we'd get one direction in the morning, and the opposite direction in the afternoon. Or that was the theory. Often the morning train was so late that when you heard them sound the horn you wouldn't know if it was the afternoon train or the "morning" train.

The "Late Shore Limited" I've taken has on-time performance of ~50% and train interference as 50% of delays. That sounds about right.

Sounds like something that could be enforced by giving the passenger trains the ability to lock out switches further ahead of them. Like, say, an hour ahead of them. (Though, without signalling the particular switches that lower at-grade crossing guards. It’d be a rather fraught thing to engineer, all-told.)

Sure, you couldn’t run densely-packed passenger trains very well on such a system... but they’re not densely-packed. If they were, the system would have been a success and could then be turned off. ;)

This is starting to sound like distributed systems ... how do you prevent deadlock? https://wiki.openttd.org/Deadlock :-)

Apparently, according to your 2nd cite, that law was determined to be unconstitutional.

I read "priority" from the GP as "commercial/investment priority".

What happens is that the freight trains gives Amtrak a window for its timetable. In that window, Amtrak gets priority. Miss the window, and Amtrak has to wait for freight trains. There's a separate issue that some freight operators will decide to screw Amtrak over (even within their nominal window) and just eat the fines instead.

In Tucson AZ it was a constant problem that freight trains would either blow through town at full speed or crawl through level crossings blocking traffic rather than obeying speed laws. It was always cheaper for them to pay the fines than to comply.

I'd be curious to know if freight travels shorter distances on average in Europe though.

The data mostly looks like population data then, if US, India, and China are the leaders. What would it look like for ton-mile per capita (if that's actually a statistic)?

> The data mostly looks like population data then

The US has a smaller population than the EU (~300m to ~500m). So does Russia (150m). Australia has a significantly smaller population than the EU (15^H^H25m as golemiprague noted).

It's not population data it's mineral commodities.

> What would it look like for ton-mile per capita (if that's actually a statistic)?

The US would climb to ~15x the tonnes-kilometers per capita of the EU, and australia would shoot up to about the same ratio over the EU (owing to close tonne-kilometer but 1/20th the population). Russia would shoot up as well. Only China and India would get a lower rank overall, and not enough that the EU would come close to edging them for China at least (a bit under 3x the population, but a bit under 10x the tonner-kilometer of rail freight).

Australia has close to 25m

Indeed typo'd in the first paragraph. Fixed. Note the ratio is correct in the second one.

Europe’s population is ~750m.

But the EU is not Europe.

The numbers I have are specifically for EU27, not for the entire continent, and EU27's population is about 500 million people.

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