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Comment by rch | Hacker News Reader

Long term thinking, but would more rail capacity help?

It does seem like long haul trucking is overrepresented in our logistics chain.

The truckers that work out of ports (drayage truckers) are distinct from long-haul truckers. They're different people with different tractors and different trailers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drayage

There was a substack/medium post from a trucker I read that said this is unlikely to get better. The ports get to charge priority and demurrage fees when they're backed up and consequently may not have any reason to clear blockages. The issue is generally with the ports.

It would take either another port opening, or logistics companies suing the ports to force them to hire more workers.

From what I understand, the bottleneck isn't the port, it's that there isn't enough capacity to remove goods from the port at the moment.

There's trucks backed up at the ports, waiting their turn. Part of it is old design and part of it is a lack of need to actually speed things up to still make money as the port authority.

Not really. Rail works great where it exists but there is still a pretty huge last mile problem so it generally gets transhipped onto trucks at some point.

Long haul trucking is grossly inefficient compared to rail.

As for the last mile:

1. train rolls into freight yard

2. crane lifts container off of rail car

3. crane puts container onto last mile truck

4. truck drives last mile

It can be even simpler:

1. truck drives onto flat car

2. train goes long haul

3. truck drives off flat car

4. truck drives last mile

That ties up the truck for several days while it's being shipped across the country, though. That's a very unproductive use of the truck. It's overall more efficient to do it the way you said the first time.

I know that. But it's a way to get started without needing expensive cranes and crane operators. It also works for intermediate low traffic dropoffs of freight. All you need is a platform level with the flatcar.

> All you need is a platform level with the flatcar.

Do you?

You can't drive a truck sideways (from the side of a parked train); you can't drive a truck across multiple rail platforms (from the end of a parked train); and you can't efficiently split up the train in individual cars, bring them to a rail-end where they can be driven to/from and reconnect them, that would be much more expensive in terms of machinery (locomotive) and operator use than a crane; train cars can be reshuffled but it adds significant time and effort compared to just lifting a container from a truck onto a train, which is how it's usually done. You would also need specialty (longer) flatcars to fit not only the length of the container but the truck as well.

There used to be TOFC (trailer on flat car) cars that had little flaps that you could lower so that you could drive between cars. They don't have those any more, for the most part. They found they could make them less heavy with a "spine" kind of design, which you can't drive across.

Also most intermodals these days use well cars which allow containers to be double stacked.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e5/DTTX_724...

Think of it like parallel parking. Not much room is needed, and the flatcar + the gap between cars can be longer than the truck by just enough to make it work.

> you can't drive a truck across multiple rail platforms (from the end of a parked train)

This is how we loaded our vehicles onto train when I was in the US Army. Everything from small vehicles to large trucks. There were removable pieces connecting the cars so they could be driven over.

Beyond wasting the truck and wasting energy (fuel) transporting the weight of the truck, the height of the truck and trailer on top of the train car would likely exceed bridge and tunnel heights.

1a. semi-skilled labor individually secures each and every truck to its flat car for safety. Figure 8+ hand-tightened heavy chains or freight straps per truck.

2a. if any mistakes were made during step 1a, then this train, flat car, and truck may enjoy 15 minutes of fame on the evening news.

2b. semi-skilled labor individually removes the heavy chains or freight straps from 1a, and stows them away.

America's railroads looked very seriously at doing this, back in the day. The economics really didn't work out. There is a sorta-similar concept that's still used - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadrailer

If it's grossly inefficient compared to rail, does it mean it is grossly more expensive than rail + last mile truck? If yes, why does anyone still use it? If no, in what sense is it inefficient?

Trucks drive on roads paid for by taxpayers and gas taxes paid by car drivers.

Rail is paid for by the rail traffic.

Hence the gross distortion of financial incentives.

As for why it is inefficient:

1. one truck driver per load vs one train driver per 50 (or whatever) loads

2. one engine per load vs one engine per 50 loads

3. steel wheels are far more efficient than tires

4. no rubber dust pollution from steel wheels

5. truck damage to freeways is enormous, but is not paid by trucks. rail is built to handle heavy loads, and is much easier/cheaper to maintain

6. trains are far more fuel efficient per load than trucks

Trucks pay "Heavy Vehicle Use Tax" or HVUT

That's 100-550$. Peanuts compared to the actual cost.

To elaborate on why this doesn't bridge the gap between heavy trucking road wear and all other traffic, road wear primarily comes down to environmental causes and impact loading. Wear from impact loading scales with IIRC roughly the 4th power of axle weight. The ruts you see in asphalt aren't from wearing through the surface, it's from slowly deforming it due to cyclic loading slowly shifting the subsurface and road surface on top. That basically doesn't happen with any vehicle that doesn't require a CDL.

As a counterpoint the environmental wear is basically inevitable and in colder climates that's going to dominate the road work schedule anyways so it doesn't matter as much. Even with freeze thaw wrecking the road heavy loads still shorten the life of the road surface.

Any way you slice it though, the current taxes and fees that heavy trucks pay do not come close to covering the share of maintenance work they're responsible for. Gas taxes effectively subsidize the trucking industry.

The damage to the road is proportional to the fourth power of the axle weight.

Take a look at this chart:

https://streets.mn/2016/07/07/chart-of-the-day-vehicle-weigh...

and this article

https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-roa...

From the article:

"Or where an 80,000-pound 18-wheeler full of cargo is compared to a 4,000-pound passenger car, the truck is 20 times heavier than the car. But taking the 4th power of the relative loads, the semi would cause 160,000 times more road damage than the car. (But my simple calculation is not taking into account the effect of any weight distribution caused by the greater number of axles on the big rig.)"

Even taking into account the number of axles, say, five on the lorry and two on the car we have 2 000 pounds per axle for the car and 16 000 pounds per axle for the lorry. That is a factor of eight, 8^4 is 4096, still a large number.

> Rail is paid for by the rail traffic.

I am very skeptical of this. If this is true, it makes rail the only transit mode not subsidized by the government. Do you have a source for this?

In US, passenger rail is subsidized, but freight rail is not. Freight rail in the US is a healthy industry, with steady revenues and profits.

The original construction of the rail lines in the 19th century was heavily subsidized (free land, etc).

But ongoing maintenance is not, and the same does not hold for highway maintenance.

In fact, railroads pay property taxes in some states, so they actually bear even more cost than competing modes of transportation.

The rail lines were obliged to in return carry the mail for free. That turned out to be a darned good deal for the government.

Depends how far back you wanna go. In Canada, in exchange for building, the railways got free land in every downtown and port, and along their lines. Along with 100% royalty-free surface and mineral rights.

> 1881: Canadian Pacific Railways (CPR) began construction of the railway from Winnipeg to B.C. In exchange for building the railroad, CPR was granted 25 million acres of land. These lands included the petroleum and natural gas rights.

> 1882: CPR was able to select lands from the odd numbered sections in a belt of land 24 miles wide on each side of the CPR railway rights. This created a checkerboard pattern, still widely used in the industry today to describe the lands. Where lands were deemed unfit for settlement, CPR negotiated for other lands that were often far from railway construction.

> 1883: CPR began drilling for water in hope of improving the land’s suitability for settlement. While drilling for water, Alberta’s first natural gas was discovered, Langevin No. 1.

https://www.prairiesky.com/history/

Generally rail + last mile truck is cheaper. It takes longer however, which increases capital costs: goods stay in container for longer, so you need more of it to fill the ‘longer’ pipeline so to speak. And there is the issue of economics, the owner of the container is generally the shipping line, which will give you a relatively short time to deliver the container empty again after pick up in the port. This is called the detention time. After the detention period you pay extremely high fees per extra day the container is in use. The incentives of the shipping line are very much not aligned with that of the receiver of cargo: the shipping line wants their container back in stock asap, the receiver wants the cheapest hinterland transport.

In addition to the other replies, we haven't built new rail lines in a long time. Some of them are at capacity. Some trains leaving Seattle must go through Portland instead of heading straight east.

The Seattle metro area has eagerly ripped up and paved over every rail line it could find during my decades of living here. The area used to have an extensive network of rail - all gone, now.

Even while they were designing the Seattle light rail system, they were still destroying the last of the existing rail corridors so they could not be used for light rail (the rail line that ran parallel to I405, the perfect place for commuter light rail).

The kindest thing one could say about this is it's incomprehensible.

Last mile from the port should all have destinations for the containers, so I'm not convinced that's the issue?

I think the US already has a better than average rail freight system.

It does, but that doesn't mean that the major west coast ports have adequate freight rail service.

It seems to me the solution is to have a major rail artery which at least allows freight to be delivered to a distribution center farther inland(Ontario, Palm Springs, or somewhere east). That would free the truckers from dealing with LA freeway traffic.

Another option would be a canal up to the Salton Sea. Obviously that's a much more major effort but it has nearly endless economic and ecological benefits.

> Another option would be a canal up to the Salton Sea. Obviously that's a much more major effort but it has nearly endless economic and ecological benefits.

That would be an obscene undertaking... going a hundred miles THROUGH several mountain ranges.

There would be no ecological benefit. Salton sea will still not have an outlet, so after a one-time dilution, the seas will continue to increase in salinity, endlessly. It needs a massive supply of FRESH water to try to dilute the salt down to acceptable levels. Sea water with salt will just worsen the problem, long-term.

The economic benefits are marginal. You'll be limited to the number of vessels the canal can handle, the size of the port you can build in the desert, and you very quickly overwhelm the roads in the area.

Any malfunction or damage to the canal would be devastating... the unstoppable flooding in the low desert and along the canal zone would be unprecedented.

Salton Sea was a big mistake in the past. It has opportunities. I have heard several proposals for Salton Sea canals, but this is interesting. I would like to hear more if the original poster can elaborate.

No, I'm saying go up from the Sea of Cortez. No mountain ranges that way. That region is an active rift zone and with that combined with sea level rise will likely cause sporadic flooding anyway. El Centro is a dozen or two feet below sea level already. The alternative is, what, a toxic dust bowl with little economic value besides a lithium farm and a geothermal plant?

> go up from the Sea of Cortez.

Okay, so now it's an international construction project, with all the political barriers that brings. And running close to the Colorado river.

> The alternative is, what, a toxic dust bowl

It's the Salton sea that caused the area to become "toxic". Bringing in more sea water with no solution to ever clean it up will provide just a short-term reprieve to the area, but exacerbate the problem long-term.

Your plan is to create a much larger toxic dust bowl.

You mean like this major rail artery from the Port of LA? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alameda_Corridor

Down to the Salton Sea, it's surface sits 65m below the Gulf of California. You dig a 200m wide canal and massive network of locks, all you've done is build a half trillion dollar shortcut from the Colorado River to the Coachella valley, an area with no infrastructure.

Or you could build a 20 mile tunnel from the Port of LA/Long Beach to offload the road network. I even know a local guy with a tunnel boring machine company.

LA/Long Beach ports already have a dedicated rail corridor specifically for quickly sending rail traffic out of the LA basin and on to the midwest. Part of the problem is that rail yards in Chicago are clogged with trains that can't be unloaded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alameda_Corridor

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