Four ways to speed up trains on the New Silk Road (2020)
railfreight.com
railfreight.com
Single-stack container trains with one car per 40 foot container (2 TEU) seem to be the standard for Belt and Road shipments. That covers most of what needs to be shipped.
China, like the US, uses the AAR coupler on freight cars. The US standardized on that, by an act of Congress, in 1893. Russia uses the SA-3 coupler, which is incompatible but a good automatic coupler. Most of Europe is way behind on freight cars, still using small freight cars with buffers and couplers that require manual attachment. There was an EU plan to standardize railroad coupling across the EU, from 2008, but they gave up.
Not sure what the train length limit is. That's set by the length of sidings.
Those are the physical limits. Paperwork at borders remains a problem.
Paperwork, for transit at least, doesn't seem to be a big headache along the new silk road. If you use specialist services to handle customs. And that should be the norm nowadays for international shippers and consignees anyway.
So it changes in France? Or it changes where Italy and France meet? Or wher eFrance and Spain meet? Because Italy doesn't touch Spain.
Sounds like the "better use the guy that knows a guy" system.
If you try to do it yourself, suddenly every rule starts to apply.
As a famous soccer player once put it:
Madrid or Mailand doesn't matter as long as it's Italy.
The gauge actually changes on the Spanish side at dedicated transit terminals. One line coming down from the north, one meeting it, and running parallel, from the south.
For someone who lives in the US, this seems not-state-of-the-art. Most long-distance train traffic in the US has shifted to double-stack container trains.
> Not sure what the train length limit is. That's set by the length of sidings.
From what I can tell, Europe tends to prefer far smaller trains than the US does. The typical train length in the US is >100 cars (I want to say 120-ish is the current average, but I don't have firm statistics), but in Europe, it seems to be more like 40 cars.
The old-style couplers used in Europe are too weak for longer trains. "The buffers and chain coupling system has a maximum load much less than that of the Janney coupler. They allow around 3,000-4,000 (metric) tonnes total train weight depending on the how they are constructed. The Janney coupler sometimes is built for 32,000 tonnes (31,000 long tons; 35,000 short tons)."
The EU attempt to standardize on an automatic freight coupler across the entire EU was a flop. There's a new project under way to test a new generation of freight coupler, one that connects the mechanical, air, and electrical connections.[1] But it's just getting started.
[1] https://uic.org/com/enews/article/germany-rail-freight-trans...
So for container trains at least, a programme of loops and sidings lengthening would be the more pressing requirement, before actually and absolutely having to upgrade the couplers, but that kind of infrastructure modification doesn't come cheap or necessarily easy, either.
Another difference to consider is that in Europe, passenger traffic is much more widespread and common than on North American railways, and also commonly has priority over freight trains.
While in principle, longer trains are indeed more efficient than an equivalent larger number of shorter trains, past a certain point they'll eventually become too unwieldy to fit inside the schedule demands of passenger traffic. There's certainly scope for moving beyond the current 750 m maximum, but the multi-kilometre range would probably be pushing things a little too far without completely dedicated infrastructure.
a) even ignoring electrification and only at a guess, there are probably on average more overbridges and tunnels per route mile than on the major North American freight corridors, therefore making any attempt to implement the loading gauge necessary for double-stacking much more expensive
b) this I know for certain – electrification is much more widespread than in the US (especially if you're only looking at trunk lines), and that poses a continuous obstacle to implementing double-stacking without expensive modifications.
Probably the big differences are that a) the US already had a comparatively roomy loading gauge compared to Europe before conversion was necessary and b) the West Coast-to-Midwest routes were probably more likely to be double-stack-compatible before the projects started and provided a seed route to develop the concept before the expensive loading gauge conversions in the east had to take place.
Electrification doesn't affect double-stacked routes other than needing (I think) an extra ~2 ft of height compared to non-electrified track. The cost of relaying catenary cables isn't going to be all that high: electrifying track from scratch in the first place appears to cost about $1 million per km, and a lot of that cost will include the substations which don't need to be replaced; actual costs of replacing the gantries is likely to be less than half that. That's of course assuming that there is actually room above the track to support the new height.
Regarding electrification, yes, it's not rocket science, and the cost of raising bridges and tunnel clearances will usually dominate, but because electrification on the main lines covers basically every metre, I'd think that the costs would still add up significantly.
[1] https://www.bathnes.gov.uk/sites/default/files/sitedocuments...
Electrification is an aspect also, though I don't know if EU mixes passenger and freight as much as the US does (and also, more of the EU is relatively easy accessed by ocean going ships).
That's a list of projects that are undergoing expansion from single-stack to double-stack, although that's not the main purpose of CREATE, and the Cross-Harbor Rail Tunnel is a perennially-proposed project to link NJ with Long Island that's unlikely to come to fruition. Furthermore, my understanding is that most of those projects are already completed; Wikipedia isn't always timely on updating these kinds of topics.
It isn’t the only issue; apparently double stack has issues with third rail electrification, which is the norm on New York City area commuter rail, so even if you built the tunnel, a double stack train may not be able to go much further.
1) Loading/unloading. Double stack requires cranes of some sort and is inherently dangerous when lifting large heavy mass into the air. Single stack could be more loaded/unloaded cheaper, faster, safer with less equipment, and keep trains moving and making money rather than sitting around being loaded/unloaded.
2) Maintenance cost and wear/tear on rail infrastructure. Wear and tear on rails (and roads) is proportional to the axle load to the power of 4 based on AASHTO testing [0]. Double stacking containers will roughly double axle loads, so damage and maintenance cost increases by ~16x. Keeping axle loads down keeps costs down. As an aside for roads, that means a fully loaded semi trailer (80000 lbs) is about 9600 passenger cars (4000 lbs) worth of road wear [1].
Re Longer trains: they are generally better, but there are practical limits. Trains have to be assembled and disassembled in rail yards. If the train is extra long it makes things more complicated and time consuming. If there are grade crossings on the route (there usually are), extra long trains result in long gate down time (5-10 mins) which can constitute a public safety risk (emergency vehicles not being able to cross tracks), and generally frustrates all other road users including pedestrians and cyclists.
Older railway axle counters used for train control and signalling systems in Europe and elsewhere had 8 bit integer logic controllers. That's 256 axles per train, or 64 rail vehicles assuming 4 axles per vehicle. Any longer and it will overflow, and the train might not be detected. So that is a hard limit without upgrading those systems or risking a catastrophic failure on a safety-critical system, that prevents 2 trains from occupying the same section of track at the same time [2].
[0] https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/IPWEA/c7e19de0-...
If the differences aren't too large, some sort of compromise wheel set might be possible – if that's not the case, then you'd still need to swap the wheels.
Doesn’t sound technically complicated though, so I wonder if the extra expense is lack of volume.
>It is widely and incorrectly believed that Imperial Russia chose a gauge broader than standard gauge for military reasons, namely to prevent potential invaders from using the rail system. In 1841 a Russian army engineer wrote a paper stating that such a danger did not exist since railways could be made dysfunctional by retreating or diverting forces.
>[...]
>When a railway has wooden sleepers, it is fairly easy to make the gauge narrower by removing the nails and placing them back at a narrower position, something Germany did during WWII. Destroying river bridges had a larger effect.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_ft_and_1520_mm_gauge_railway...
This doesn’t sound like it stymied the Germans much. Also look at the answer here: https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/23616/what-did-g...
Do you need anyhing else to get convinced?
I have a reference for that around here somewhere…
I am starting to feel like a baby boomer studying for some WWII test.
You are confusing the boomers with thw Greatest Generation.
You might wanted to have those turned around: "Fascinating, Today I learned" instead of "Today I learned: Fascinating" as otherwise you're giving the impression that you learned the word "fascinating" today while the rest of the facts were already learned knowledge to you.
1. The article mentions that the average freight train speed is ~28 miles per hour. From what I can find, the average freight train speed in the US is ~26 miles per hour. I’m not sure that these numbers are actually apples-vs-apples though.
2. From what I can see on that map, it looks like Moscow is the central hub for freight rail regardless of which China-Europe route you take. Smart move by Russia. Chicago is kind of the North American equivalent and it has really benefited Chicago quite a lot.
It's about as centrally located to the US as you can get from the Great Lakes, and once a canal opened (in this case, the Eerie, but shorter canals could have existed, it was just in NYC's interests to have that particular canal), then that's about as far as a boat can go, and water traffic is more efficient than rail.
So you would have trains leaving 'Chicago' to go everywhere, and someone would have thought to build a canal to get to the Illinois river and hence the Mississippi.
I'm not so sure that "St Louis" had to be exactly where it is, but Chicago is virtually a foregone geographical conclusion.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2007-09-27-070926...
When France ceded the lands of the Illinois Country (east of the Mississippi) to Great Britain in the 1700s, all the French had to GTFO. St Louis was the highest land along the Mississippi anywhere close to the confluences of the Missouri, Ohio and Illinois rivers. Since the Mississippi flooded almost every spring, this was the best place to put a city and it allowed the French to maintain more control over the area than they were supposed to have.
The railroads were built by men, however, and could have gone anywhere. The negotiations and influencing that got them all built through Chicago has had a huge ROI for the last 150+ years.
That explains it. I kept thinking there must be better spots to put it. It does appear though that it’s surrounded by wide flood plains on several sides and certain spots would be harder to ford than the narrows that bracket the city on two sides.
Unfortunately they don’t integrate that well together to form a cohesive network. CP is attempting to buy KCS/KCSM to create something of a NAFTA/USMCA railroad, but it’s not clear it would deliver those benefits without harming competition in the existing setup. Ideally the rail infrastructure would be publicly owned and invested in, and any train operator could transport from any location to any location on the North American rail network.
The terrain is much nicer going to the north of the Caspian and Black Seas, because its mostly steppe or forest, not a lot of mountainous terrain.
it seems the longest US train ever had ~700 containers
I don't think that this comparison is the best way of looking at it, but FWIW, the largest container ships can haul just shy of 24k containers.
I see it kind of like a station wagon full of tapes, versus a fast internet pipe. The station wagon can possibly move more, but has much, much more latency. (and that analogy doesn't account for the time to load/unload the tapes onto the computer systems)
Denver to LA will never be viable by ship. Shenzhen to LA will never be viable by train.
Probably, but a certain breed of politician (across nationalities) keeps the dream alive:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bering_Strait_crossing#21st_ce...
Also pollution wise you can (at least in theory) electrify the whole route and run electric trains on it, which should make the whole thing quite clean (as long as the energy sources are reasonably clean).
For ships that's more involved - IIRC some can run on LNG but otherwise you would basically have to make them nuclear powered if you wanted zero emissions. At least until you have carbon capture & fuel synthesization running.
Generally shipping cost functions like this gradient.
Ships < Trains < Trucks < Aircraft
Obvious considerations other than cost:
Ships can only come to port. Trains likewise can only go to rail stations. This makes trains slightly more expensive land ships from a logistics perspective.
Trucks can go anywhere over land, but are quite a step up in expense. They are still necessary for something last 10 miles shipping in nearly all cases.
Airplanes are special. They are probably best thought of as very fast very expensive trains. Their main drawback being that they need an airport to land and load.
Other aircraft (helicopters/bush-pilots). Also a special case. These are quite expensive and generally only used when the landscape precludes the building of necessary infrastructure. Areas where this makes sense are remote by definition; generally landlocked with no nearby airport or roads to/from the nearest airport. Often companies that provide these services like to take passengers as humans who want to travel to remote regions are cost effective in terms of freight ($$$).
Blimps (not currently used commercially). Renewed development into using blimps to transport freight is being researched by several governments including the USG. Blimps are quite efficient at moving freight around as they utilize the same physical properties that ships use (buoyancy). They require very little infrastructure to take-off and land; comparable to that of helicopters. Added bonus! Blimps are more difficult to raid by organize crime elements and move slowly enough to make autonomous piloting a possibility. Both factors are expected to be huge cost savers for logistics in the coming decades.
For example, one of the reasons trucking is more expensive than trains is the number of humans required to operate the vehicles. Shipping lanes are expected to become more contested as NAFTA begins to contend with a multi-polar global powers dynamic (China, Russia, India (,perhaps even SEA will get their shit together!)).
Thus a low cost, low infrastructure, piracy-resistant solution is being searched for. Blimps do have an obvious downside of limited volume and several high profile catastrophes, though these are now a century old. All that being said, we could see blimps beginning to fill in the gaps as early as the end of this decade.
for now...
perhaps if blimp shipping becomes common we will see the development of pirate blimps. one can hope anyway :)
Maybe loads of lithium batteries? Autos? Some foodstuffs good for 7 days but not 21? Trains can make lots of stops, but that can make a lot of sense for global goods.
>Trucks can go anywhere over land, but are quite a step up in expense. They are still necessary for something last 10 miles shipping in nearly all cases.
Trains and trucks can effectively go to the same places for what it's worth. The infrastructure is roughly the same cost. For fairly standard rail it is $1-2 million per mile, road is $1-5 million per mile for a typical two lane road.
You don't need a rail station either, businesses can just use forklifts, pallet jacks, cranes, etc to unload rail cars in a very similar way to how trucks are unloaded.
Around here in the midwest if you look at google maps you can see that a lot of older businesses had or have rail going to them, but since trucks got massive subsidies over the last 60-70 years trains haven't seen as much use in this way.
This is true by approximate order of cost, but it does not show how large the differences are. Trucking can be up to 10X, an order of magnitude, more expensive than train by unit of mass. Air freight can be another similar jump in costs. The cost difference between maritime and rail is marginal by comparison, 10s of percent. Maybe.
This also doesn’t take into account that rail can be easily electrified and even fully automated with limited labor needed, which would radically alter the operating cost structure. The technology to do this has existed for a long time (over a century in the case of electrification), it is a solved problem, but it requires prioritizing and making public investments just like the other forms of transportation.
There are also big differences in the average speed of the different modes. Ships are the slowest by far, taking about a month to cross oceans. Aircraft are the fastest on long distances. Trains and trucks are in between, but are inherently land-based so generally aren’t comparable to the others for intercontinental shipping, except for this Eurasian shipping case. Rail can occupy a unique Goldilocks sweet spot in mechanized transport, with costs competitive to maritime, yet offering performance competitive to roads and air.
Re Airships: I agree this is an area where government and industry has sorely neglected. After the crashes of the Hindenburg, USS Macon, and USS Akron in the 1930s, govt/industry just gave up on it despite our understanding of aeronautics and materials science being far more advanced. There is the Airlander airship project in Britain, but I’d like to see a lot more research and investment in this area.
It seems theoretically possible to create a Lighter Than Air (LTA) aircraft with helium (possibly hydrogen), cover it with flexible lightweight solar panels, battery pack, and distributed electric thrusters. It could have all electric power and propulsion systems with extreme endurance and range, theoretically unlimited minus scheduled maintenance, if the performance curves of those core technologies continue to improve. In addition to cargo, it could be a platform for telecom (cell tower in the sky), air cruises, various defense/security use cases, various atmospheric/oceanic and climate/metrological and earth observation/remote sensing use cases, etc.
I'll see if I can still edit my comment to account for the much greater steps up in cost as you are correct.
You see, with a train or ship, it will just exert less ground pressure or float higher in the water when you remove they payload. With an airship it will shoot straight up unless mitigated when you suddenly remove tens of tons of its weight.
Unless you want to release the precious lifting gas (usually helium) you need to address this in ways that make airships quite a bit less flexible for aerial cargo transport, such as pre-arranging return cargo of similar weight or arranging for water to be taken into ballast tanks to compensate for cargo being unloaded.
Not only can container ships carry a fuckton of containers, but investments have also been made in ports throughout the world to load/unload the cargo in these ships.
Freight trains might perhaps cater to a niche where they’re faster than ships but slower than airplanes. Or serve as a backup for essential commodities when there are snags with the global trade routes.
But ocean shipping is absolutely bonkers at the scale at which it currently operates. The ships are only getting more massive.
But where boats and barges can operate, they usually win.
Their infrastructure buildout will enable them to economically benefit from/dominate Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Pacific at a minimum.