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Comment by RobLach | Hacker News Reader

The benefit of rail is that you exchange the enormous capex of shaping and planting metal rails for only having to run and maintain a single locomotive that pulls simple boxes with wheels that can move staggering amounts of tonnage efficiently.

This system requires both building more infrastructure to leverage the granularity of the cars, more infrastructure to keep a massive fleet of batteries charged, and more maintenance as each freight car now has a drive system.

If this already existed someone would pitch leveraging the economies of scale where you'd build a huge car that pulls all the other ones and you only need to keep 1 battery charged... which is what we have right now...

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Actually it turns out rail lines have fairly low capex compared to many other transport types. It makes sense once you think about it, but I was surprised too.

Unfortunately, for historical reasons the US railroads are private and pay many sorts of taxes, and the roading industrial complex is largely publicly funded.

Many lines used to have double or quadruple or even electrification but are now single unpowered tracks, because the additional improvements counted towards property tax assessments. It's just not a level playing field.

Yeah, laying enormous amounts of wide, graded asphalt with proper drainage isn’t exactly cheap either.

I wasn't sure. Intuitively rail would seem to be cheaper, it looks like it should be a lot easier to lay a rail line than build a road. But rail lines need a lot more fill or bridging over low areas since heavy freight trains cannot climb grades of more than a few percent. On the other hand, rail switches and diamonds have got to be way less expensive than highway interchanges.

But if it's a two-directional shared medium it might be more practical to use than a centrally controlled rail line.

sort of like a shared packet network compared to a centrally managed circuit switched network

IIUC - standard heavy rail lines are 3-4x more expensive to build than a lane of freeway.

I guess no one is building one lane freeways, but I was still surprised by how much more expensive rail is.

At least for passenger lines the single track of heavy rail has a >30x higher route capacity than a single freeway lane (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity). So a fair comparison would be a single line of heavy rail to a 30+ lane freeway (one direction), making the rail about 1/10th the cost.

Assuming you’re referencing the graphic on that page, note that it’s discussing throughput of road vs rail in the city. Freeway is a very different kettle of fish.

That makes it cheaper if you can use it: a railway track has 20 times the capacity of a freeway lane.

(This is just the result of a basic Google search. It also says maintenance costs are "much less" for the railway.)

There are probably economy-of-scale issue too (we build a lot more roads), and different expectations of road vs. rail safety (a rail accident with a few injuries has national media coverage for days, upgrades costing millions may be rolled out to prevent a repeat; every day several people die on roads, the infrastructure is rarely improved).

I wonder if hyperloop/boring thing won't motivate realistic underground narrow freight trains.

ps: obligatory history article https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/02/a-world-without.html

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