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Comment by jsnodlin | Hacker News Reader

Yes. It’s much, much cheaper to carry power with you rather than electrify hundreds of thousands of miles of rail.

> hundreds of thousands

You missed the point, that those locomotives will only be used in the yard (shuffling wagons). It's not gonna work to long-haul using battery power (too low power density).

It feels like moving around a fixed urban area rather than travelling at high speed through mostly empty areas is probably the more impactful place to remove ICE engines.

Similar to how electric busses usually get assigned to the start-stop routes in the urban centres.

I wonder what the economies are of splitting the difference between total electrification and battery power.

Strategically-located sections of electrified rail to charge trains as they pass through without stopping. Retractable catenary so still compatible with existing clearances. I'm sure someone has had this idea before.

You might not need nearly so much infrastructure, but you invite bottleneck congestion.

Indeed.

Nevermind how vastly more expensive MOW costs are for electrified lines.

This depends heavily on the density of operation; globally at least for heavily used lines the total cost of operation (infrastructure, locomotion, etc.) is much lower for electrified lines, in no small part because each locomotive needs much less maintenance.

From that regard, it's somewhat surprising that none of the busiest lines have been electrified.

The sheer vastness of rural America does not lend itself to using overhead wires. In Europe, a bout of bad weather will tear down the wires in multiple places and make the line unusable even though the tracks themselves are fine. It is always "fun" to commute after a night of heavy wind, but at least the countries here are mostly compact and the locations that took damage are close to one another, so a few crews can fix them in a day or so.

That would be much harder in the flyover country. I am not sure how the Russians keep up their Transsib line; it is long, electrified and goes straight through thousands of miles of wilderness.

My father in Belarus in eighties and nineties used to travel few times per week about 35 milles in one direction by a local electric train with overhead wires (called "elektrichka" in Russian). Not a single time the train was cancelled. Even delays more then 10-15 minutes were extremely rare including on the days with heavy snow or strong wind. Even all maintenance were done at night and never disrupted the traffic.

So if 40 years ago Soviet Union managed that, I am sure US should be capable to build electrical lines that are not destroyed by a bad weather.

We love cars, trucks, NIMBYism, and the petroleum industry way too much to ever build sensible trains in the US.

You've got that right. A sensible passenger train that runs north/south along the Rocky mountains? That would be too easy.

I though taking the train from Montana to Utah would be nice break from driving it - then I saw the only route was to go out to the coast, down the coast and back inland. What should be a one day trip takes three.

In photos from the USSR, I noticed that forests around the railway tracks are cut down in a pretty broad strip, perhaps 100 m wide?

This is an efficient countermeasure against the trees falling on tracks and taking the wires with them, but some countries aren't willing to cut down that much of a forest.

Or willing to pay so much to the current owners of land for all the miles of railways you would have to purchase to do the same here

Forestry land is really cheap.

Not in the U.S., it isn't. There's not much forest left in the interior of the country that wouldn't be snapped up for residential real state if it weren't already privately owned for logging or as National Forest/National Park acreage. Or, it's so mountainous that it would be impractical to use for railways.

Clear cutting an acre gives you about $1500 for wood that took 20 years to grow. This is not an intensive industry in terms of what it generates per acre. I don't see how you are going to have to pay a lot to keep a strip clear on either side of the railroad. $75/acre/year would seem to be enough.

https://www.forest2market.com/blog/how-much-money-is-an-acre...

That’s fair. The US South has far less expensive timberland and land in general than the West does.

Ah interesting, I was actually thinking less about the cost for the maintenance but rather the cost for land acquisition. Even with imminent domain you're going to be fighting lawsuits for years, if there's any real infrastructure built in the new area you need that's going to be quite expensive to acquire and tear down, etc. but maybe they're already zoned out from building that close to the tracks

The context up-thread is removing trees in a wider strip to avoid them falling on the cables and tracks. It's not about tearing down buildings, which tend not to fall over in the wind.

Nothing like 100 meters, more like 15-20. I guess that was based on height of trees.

Belarus doesn't get winds as strong as western Europe. Other weather is worse (heat and cold).

I think the GP comment was wrong anyway. The trains are delayed due to fallen trees and landslides much more frequently than damage to the catenary. (And neither is common enough that you'd think about it.)

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/01/Wind_speed...

Switzerland has some of the most extreme weather around and their lines are heavily electrified.

Switzerland is around 40,000 sq km to the US’ 10,000,000 sq km. I don’t think you understand the scale of what electrification of lines in the US would mean.

I think you're really condescending.

The relevant metric is population vs rail line length. Switzerland has 8.4M people for 5.7k miles of railway. The US has 335M people for 294k miles of railway. The difference is not too crazy. The total scale is different, but the true problem is probably something between economics and politics. My guesses would be that (1) Swiss railways are pretty much run as a public utility. (2) Swiss railways prioritize on passenger rail, which means more rail near population centers. Diesel is not ideal near population centers. (3) Electrification of rail has been a Swiss priority for a long time, so the marginal cost to add it to new rail installations is low.

Why is that the relevant metric?

That’s not the relevant metric unless you take population density into account.

It makes sense in Switzerland because of the mountainous terrain there.

Maybe improving rail emissions should be a very low priority, because:

* It's already the most CO2 efficient way to move freight.

* It's also one of the things that's going to be hardest to improve.

Little steps like considered here: battery-electric locomotives for use in rail yards-- make a lot of sense. There may be some specific rail lines that lend themselves to overhead electrification. And otherwise, maybe the focus should be on moving more goods transport to rail instead of making rail more CO2 efficient.

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