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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

The us has the best freight railroad in the world handling much more freight than countries that have nationalized rail.

Freight and passenger rail rail do not mix. Amtrak needs to build their own track instead of complaining

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This is American rail transportation’s learned helplessness. Freigh and passenger rail mixes just fine in other countries.

As far as I know, the UK is about the only country that's made this work reasonably well, and that's with pretty much all routes double-tracked or quad-track for the major ones, and much less freight rail than the US and worse passenger rail than Europe.

The exurban areas of Australia’s three largest capital cities. For example, the Central Coast line north of Sydney has half-hourly electric intercity trains interoperating with freight on a line that extends 165km from the city. Melbourne and Brisbane have similar lines radiating out to regional areas.

Within the Sydney metropolitan area, commuter trains are operating among freight trains at 5-15 minute frequencies, though with dedicated freight bypass lines in some places.

One issue in the USA, alongside private ownership of the rail lines, is oversized freight trains and resulting overbuilding required of passenger trains for crash safety. Unfortunately that rules out high-performance EMU designs as used in other countries. I believe Caltrain had to get an exemption for their ongoing electrification upgrades.

> Within the Sydney metropolitan area, commuter trains are operating among freight trains at 5-15 minute frequencies, though with dedicated freight bypass lines in some places.

AFAIK there a blackout periods for freight on the Sydney Trains network during the morning and afternoon peaks, though.

Plus the "dedicated freight bypass lines in places" nowadays is basically the complete route between the southern limit of the suburban rail network at Macarthur and Port Botany via Enfield Yard, plus a stub from Enfield towards North Strathfield. So major track sharing (especially with super-long interstate freight trains) only really happens from Strathfield on the line towards Newcastle, and that again is at least three or even four-tracked for parts of the way within Sydney (although unlike the southern half it's not exclusive freight infrastructure).

Plus whatever local-ish freight traffic might still exist around Western Sydney, towards the Blue Mountains, and along the coast to Wollongong.

Those overbuild passenger trains rules are no longer in effect, though the rules didn't change too long ago

Longer trains are more efficient. That is why we run them

It’s much easier to double, triple or quadruple track the beat up American railroad infrastructure if it was in public hand, working to maximise capacity for the whole market, rather than just every piece of track being used to maximise profits for a single company, acting as a moat to ensure as little local competition as possible.

Well the original railroads were mainly funded by taxpayer subsidies so I could say no CSX, etc needs to lay their own track, and fund it themselves.

For the most part they were not funded by subsidies. East of the Mississippi (very roughly) they mostly had to buy their own land and everything. Out west they were given free land, but the value of that land without railroads was approximately zero.

The problem is rights of way. Getting land is a lot more difficult than when the railroads first started and were given free land.

Where lines are constrained they can invest in parallel tracks and increase current capacity. Everybody could win in this way.

The only free land railroads got was worthless land out west. Of course once the railroad was built the land became valuable. Out east they generally had to buy land

America ranks #3 in terms of rail freight in terms of weight * distance behind Russia and China which sounds fine except there are few large counties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...

It’s hard to rank such systems but the US is a long way from #1. Being for example 113th in terms of miles of track per population.

Not sure of your source, but by most measures of efficiency US freight rail is the best in the world, and also carries 10x weight * distance per capita than Europe.

Weight * distance/population we again rank #3 behind both Russia and Canada. It says less about or rail system than our large size and relatively low population density.

In terms of efficiency we rank 31st in terms of miles of electrified track at a paltry 2,000km which significantly increases costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...

Don’t get me wrong I have heard people say the US has the #1 rail network, but objectively I have never seen anyone actually back it up.

I'm wondering if this would hold true, if you'd 'overbuild' the existing rights of way with overpass-like structures where it makes sense, instead of for instance doing it all over again from scratch for hypothetical hyperloops, maglevs, etc. and have long distance passenger rail running mostly grade separated over them. This would also give better views! :-)

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