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Comment by antoinebalaine | Hacker News Reader

This. This right here is the voice of common sense. With fossil fuel-supply contracting in the coming decades and over-spread cities' infrastructures being impossible to navigate without transportation, the US will have no choice but to turn to rail. It's just a matter of "when", not "if".

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Isn't the problem with rail that it's nearly impossible to build new rail lines? Especially in a way that isn't destructive to the environment? I'm all for rail in general, but it feels like the same environmentalist push that wants to get away from trucks is also the force that's going to block putting fairly environmentally damaging train lines all over the American west.

Yeah, you won’t get animals randomly wandering on the tracks if you lay them over concrete bridge structures, costs a tad more also in terms of concrete production emissions but you can offset that by running the trains on renewables throughout their lifetime

Sure - there's answers to a lot of it, but you're still talking about having to acquire a ton of land that's likely in the middle of nowhere and putting in a big construction project. It's not too dissimilar to the sort of work that's required, and the risks associated with, adding new oil pipelines, and those have been a complete mess of corruption and environmental and land-rights protests.

Really? I don't think you'd have the same problems.

Sure, randomly contrarian NIMBYs will fight to their last breath over anything, but one thing is an overhead train track, another is an oil pipeline with all the environmental hazards of an oil spill.

Of course, corruption and garden variety incompetence are a variable, but all large projects are vulnerable to that.

Sure, but it's not just the construction. The concern is the long-term damage of moving freight over the line and the potential for accidents later, just like oil spills. There's plenty of hazardous freight that could be a problem in the case of a derailment, especially with over-head tracks where a derailment would be far more catastrophic.

It's also not just contrarian NIMBY folks - there's plenty of pushback on putting lines through places for well-supported reasons. Nowhere is "the middle of nowhere." Someone lives there, often people who have been displaced to there because of bad policy elsewhere.

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