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Comment by jazzyjackson | Hacker News Reader

This is the part that drives me crazy - America HAD electric railroads all over the place. Or at least Illinois (my homestate) did. You can look up 'Illinois InterUrban' and see maps of rails connecting every rural city.

Many of the carriages were used as scrap metal for WWII, and once cars took off the demand wasn't there to rehabilitate them. But it would be so much cheaper to build out than even just replacing the signals in NYC would be. All the right of ways are still there, many of them turned into bike trails (which is great, but I'd rather have a $5 ride to the next town over)

The carriages back in the day were pretty slow, maybe 20mph, so I get why cars won, but rebuilding this infrastructure with modern equipment would be a really nice situation, and if gas was 10$/gal we would probably see the demand, but as long as gas is cheap we lack the ability to plan ahead...

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Unfortunately Illinois borrowed from future generations and horribly mismanaged the economy. Now they're struggling just to avoid bankruptcy, let alone building out huge public transit projects.

Not to mention a multibillion dollar, unnecessary tunnel linking O'Hare with downtown which will almost certainly cost multiples higher than Elon Musk and Rahm Emanuel claim. We'd rather spend money on vaporware than build something that would actually help.

>Not to mention a multibillion dollar, unnecessary tunnel linking O'Hare with downtown which will almost certainly cost multiples higher than Elon Musk and Rahm Emanuel claim. We'd rather spend money on vaporware than build something that would actually help.

That project is privately funded. The Block 37 station was the expensive vaporware.

Freight traffic dominates the utilization of the rail network in the US and is prioritized over other traffic. Freight trains travel slowly.

This is why US passenger train service is so poor compared to Europe.

> The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percent by road. (In both cases, nearly all of the rest is waterways and pipelines.)

> So, it isn’t so much that Europe decided to move people by train rather than by automobile. It is more that Europe decided to use its railroads to move people while the United States decided to use them for freight. America moves almost six times as many ton-miles (or tonne-kilometers) of freight by rail as Europe, while both move about the same number of tonne-kilometers by road. While Europe moves about twice as many tkm of freight by waterway as the U.S., we move six times as much oil by pipeline. [6]

  - area of Continental US: 3.12 million sq mi [1]
  - area of Europe: 2.306 million sq mi [1]
  - rail network length, US: 141,808 mi [2]
  - rail network length, Europe: 157,667 mi [3]
  - goods carried, US: 1.558 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year) (world rank: 1st) (2015 estimate) [4]
  - goods carried, "Europe":  0.32604 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year)

[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=continental+united+sta... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+State... [3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+Europe+%7C+r... [4] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+State... [5] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Europe+%7C+rail+transp... [6] https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847

I also wonder how much population density has to do with this. The distances that freight is moved over in the US seem far greater than in Europe. The same applies to people, rail travel is much more available/popular in the denser parts of the US, but for the west coast (for example) the useful stops are fairly far from each other, Seattle and Portland are relatively close at about 170 miles, but then its another 600 miles to Sacramento, or 680 to San Francisco. Even with (I wish) high speed rail, those are long journeys. Of course you can have long train journeys in Europe too, but there really aren't any sizable destinations between Portland and Sacramento (sorry Salem, Eugene, Redding).

I guess it feels like the distances involved in the US are more advantageous to freight, and in the EU are more advantageous to passengers

I'd argue the main difference is that the infrastructure in the US is private, while it's publicly owned in Europe. This allows some amount of subsidy towards the infrastructure, like is done for highways, allowing passenger trains to exist.

Since then railroads have to be completely self-supporting in the US, they focus on how they can achieve the highest productivity: giant, slow trains on shoddy track.

It also means the infrastructures are competing with one another, so there are redundant, shoddy, competing rail networks, rather than a network for slow and heavy freight trains, and a network for fast and light passenger trains.

Interurbans were actually very fast, they were like hybrids between trams and mainline fast trains. The 1930s "Red Devil" could do 90mph (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Devil_(interurban))

Wow, not sure where I heard 20mph, maybe it was a particular route. Thanks for the link.

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