Climate Change: Rail Companies Sign Up to Flight Shame Movement

A passenger rail car is more like a house or very large caravan. In addition to all the engineering below the body (wheels, suspension, vacuum brakes, coupling), you've got a large superstructure with windows, plumbing, electrics, HVAC, power-operated doors, and design considerations of accesability and crash safety as well as comfort.

They generally need a special site to be built on (unless you want to ship them by road, which can be done but is inconvenient) and some heavy capital equipment.

The UK built bus-on-rail conversions to cover a period of national poverty; the notorious "Pacers". They were uncomfortable and unpopular.

There are only a few companies making rolling stock. Some of them have better designs than others. All have only so much space in their factories to produce more. All have looked at demand to in some way and made decisions about what sort of capacity to build cars they should invest in. (I don't know which have done a good job here). There are a bunch of different standards that rolling stock has to meet - wheels, safety: not all factories can deliver cars that will work, but they have several choices that will work. Sometimes local laws limit what factories you can buy from (buy American has increased costs in the US - but that obviously doesn't apply here)

It comes down to this: they order some rail stock today and in 5 years have some cars. They might be able to get the cars sooner by selecting a different factory to order from (cost and quality are both in play here).

Selling boxes to the organizations that buy them is different depending on the box. It seems to me that the process for rail cars is much longer and involves more public meetings.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EN_15227 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telescoping_(rail_cars)

It only lists raw energy use and not greenhouse gas emissions though. I'm a bit surprised since the tables I've seen have train emission at the very bottom, but most of what I have seen is from Europe but we run diesel trains here in Norway too (in the north) and the tracks are not straight at all!

But they will still put out a lot of pollution, it's the nature of shipping right now. And then you look at what would happen in aggregate, and you realize that there would still be a pollution problem.

Will they put out as much pollution as the airline industry?

Open question.

I know there are about 39 to 40 million flights a year, carrying roughly 4 billion passengers. Assuming all of that would switch to, let's say, rail and shipping, what does that do to your pollution profile?

My own suspicion is that it could be made much better with rail over time. (After taking an initial hit, that would be admittedly enormous, in building out the necessary infrastructure.)

For shipping, hard to say. We don't have anywhere close to the number of ships necessary for that kind of passenger scale, so we'd take an even larger hit in the build out phase. Secondarily ships, even the new ones, would still be enormously dirty for the environment. Much moreso than trains. At passenger scale in the billions? I'd bet that the pollution profile would be somewhat lower than planes, but still a significant contributor. We'd have to go back to sail ships to make it pollution free. (Even then you would have a little pollution here and there.)

Can't think of many other modes of transport that aren't scifi or in research phases right now. I mean there are airships for instance, but that build out would take a long time because I'm not convinced we've even settled on a utilitarian design there.

Tough problems all around really. Just stopping trans-oceanic travel, or drawing it down in a draconian fashion, really does seem one of the best solutions. But it's completely unworkable in today's world. No one would cooperate with that.

Cargo ships have thousands of containers on them (massive scale) and they move relatively slowly. This is not a reasonable comparison. You can't just pluck weight per-mile cost out of the air and apply it to passenger travel.

Price and pollution are wildly different beasts. Even the types of fuel are different.

> Intuitively it makes sense that moving things through air requires more fuel than moving it by sea, since the airplane has to use fuel to offset its lack of buoyancy, while a ship only has to expend energy to actually move.

However ships have to push their way through water rather than air. It's a lot harder to walk to the end of the swimming pool through the water than it is to walk 25 metres regularly.

I don't think there's an intuitive answer to this.

I'm not saying that private firms in USA don't suffer the authority of TPTB, but they suffer it much less directly than most state-owned enterprises.