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Comment by lysol | Hacker News Reader

Would a more extensive rail infrastructure eliminate the need for so many trucks? Does rail fail to scale at the distances and route complexities involved in traversing the US to all the major population centers? I promised I didn't intend to rhyme in the previous sentence.

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The US has the largest railway network in the world, in terms of total length of tracks and in tonnage of cargo. The US does not have a very extensive passenger rail network.

dmm is right. Citation: http://www.economist.com/node/16636101 There's a reason Berkshire Hathaway spent 34 billion to buy Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation.

Seems like this is an unavoidable issue with the land area of the United States, then. The pain-in-the-ass has to be relocated to someone, so it ends up with the truck drivers and/or product costs.

I doubt it. The United States already has the best rail infrastructure in the world for cargo. The problem is that rail is relatively slow and you still need to get your goods from the rail station to whatever store or factory they're needed at.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl

Problem is there's a lot in between all your major population centers, and you can't run a rail line to (or in many cases, even close to) every mom-and-pop store. Also, many of these trucks will haul cargo for multiple locations - custom windows for three different stores and two construction sites for instance. No rail line is efficient at delivering small loads.

But, you can have depots and these things called "Train Stations" to drop off goods and have a trucking company move the goods the last 10 miles.

As for small loads, this is where combined shipping comes in handy. I believe many of the shipping companies like UPS and FedEx used to do a lot of ground shipping via rail for their 5-7 day deliveries. I don't know about this anymore.

To get from the Chinese ships to the rail station... you must have trucks.

To get from the rail station to Walmart... you must have trucks.

No way around it.

I'd imagine (on the basis of common sense, rather than evidence, so I may well be wrong), that there should be rail facilities fairly close to any major port.

Trucking from the railhead is probably unavoidable, but the article talks about a 1000mi trip, whereas according to wikipedia at least, greatest distance across the 48 states is 2800mi. Surely the nearest freight depot should be less than 1/3 of the country away?

You're right about the port. Here's a link to the Harbor Island map (in Seattle, WA where we get lots of shipments from Asia), note proximity of rail lines:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Harbor+island,+Seattle,+WA&...

I don't know much about it, but the machinery at the port looks really impressive. It seems to lift cargo from the ships onto the trains.

The issue isn't so much the distance from the train, so much as once you take it off the train, you split it up into much smaller loads....with different owners and destinations, and those loads probably change hands, and are pretty hard to put -back- onto trains.

It sounds like we need an RFC for automated packet-switched transport of physical goods. Surely the existing algorithms used for physical logistics and IP network routing could be used to create a highly-reliable automatic package delivery system.

The closest I can think of is Personal Rapid Transport[1], which is a light-rail/monorail network of individually powered (small; 3-person or so) vehicles. Various schemes for routing have been proposed, many of which are conceptually similar to packet-routing of the carriages.

[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Personal_rapi...

The article specifically addresses the plight of long-haul truckers. I don't think anybody has said freight could be delivered effectively without any trucks at all.

Well arguably it makes sense to run rail lines to ports (and from what I've seen of ports this is not uncommon), since multi-modal transport is pretty common.

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