AWS for Industry, but Better: The Railroad Investment Case | Hacker News Reader

AWS for Industry, but Better: The Railroad Investment Case

thediff.co

72 pointsmxschumacher38 comments

Great deep dive. Those that decry the US for not having a rail network comparable to Europe's only consider the passenger side of the equation. We have perhaps the best freight railroad network in the world.

That’s disturbing. Being familiar with a couple of railroads, they aren’t exactly the best run corporations.

The first time I saw this claim was about 15 years ago in libertarian circles, deployed as a talking point against high-speed passenger rail, and justification for lack of investment therein by the U.S.

There's no doubt we have an extensive rail system—most of the country was built by rail—but is it modern? Is it safe? Is it serving its purpose? Seems to me there are many scheduling, personnel, automation, safety, and supply-chain issues constantly popping up around the rail industry, though I'll be the first to admit I'm no expert. I wonder how much of its success relies on work done in the 19th and early 20th century that won't scale (or isn't scaling) with modern needs. I'm curious if there are any industry folks hanging around HN who'd care to comment.

A fairly good rule of thumb for the market test of an industry is how much subsidies they receive as a percentage of their revenue. For example renewable energy is constantly said to be cost competitive with fossil fuels, yet the industry is always demanding (begging) for subsidies and carve outs. In Boston they recently increased everyone’s electric bills by 30% by switching everyone’s supplier to renewable with an opt-out rather than opt-in change. If renewables were so cost effective, why are they always scheming for tax credits and subsidies?

For railroads, the story is the same. Passenger rail networks are enormous money losers in every country they are deployed. But they win a lot of votes and get a lot of union make-work jobs so they keep getting subsidized.

> Passenger rail networks are enormous money losers in every country they are deployed.

Citation needed, in the UK they are franchised to private companies. It's hard to imagine companies bidding to renew their enormous money losers. :-)

Here is a fairly good overview from 2013 https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/high_speed_rail_...

But again - lose the subsidies and lose the unions, and then see what is cost effective.

UK railways were (no longer are) public companies in all but name.

To claim they were privatized in anything but name is quite frankly insulting.

>For railroads, the story is the same. Passenger rail networks are enormous money losers in every country they are deployed.

Roads don't make money either.

> For example renewable energy is constantly said to be cost competitive with fossil fuels, yet the industry is always demanding (begging) for subsidies and carve outs.

> If renewables were so cost effective, why are they always scheming for tax credits and subsidies?

I don't quite follow; subsidies don't get worse if you're already profitable. They get better!

I think the parent meant it this way:

In any country there are thousands of special interest groups looking to do the same. How are the folks advocating for renewables succeeding over and above so many other groups where tax credits, subsidies, etc., are a matter of life and death, when renewables are already so cost effective, and thus don’t need it as much?

You don't get subsidies based on whether you need them. You get subsidies based on whether subsidizers like you. That's what a subsidy is.

How do they get the susidizers to like them over and above other groups willing to offer life and limb?

That question is nonsense; you're asking for subsidies. You have nothing to offer; you're taking, not giving.

If the other groups had something to offer, they wouldn't need subsidies either.

How badly you need something just doesn't have anything to do with whether someone will give it to you.

Do you really think lobbying groups or special interest groups, or groups in general, have ‘nothing’ to offer to politicians?

> If renewables were so cost effective, why are they always scheming for tax credits and subsidies?

Because they are competing against fossil fuels which we have and continue to subsidize the living hell out of. For example: How many loans did California subsidize for the replacement of old gas storage tanks that might leak? Think we might be better off if we had forced everyone who got that money to install a charging station or two?

What is actually amazing is that renewables really are approaching parity in spite of the massive subsidies that fossil fuels get.

Did they not cover "positive externalities" in economics classes?

The petroleum industry has the biggest subsidies in the world. We are literally burning the entire world so that we can give them more money.

It's hard to compete when you don't have a level playing field.

Precision Scheduled Railroading can work, but the changes it entails need to accrue down to the workers, who are still running on a very draining call-based system that produces a lot of burn-out. If the railroads want to run a firm schedule, where trains run without waiting for cars from customers, they need to make the same commitment to their staff; paying them fixed schedules that don't change at the last moment, with overtime if the trains run late or over.

I've heard a lot of tension & angst from workers in this industry, growingly so. One question I really don't have any idea about is what kind of headcount it takes. How big is the crew of a train? If you're picking up or dropping off some trains from a factory or warehouse or whatever, are there also on the ground people? They're part of the same union? Are they employed by the people running the train? How many might there be?

I have so little knowledge. But I imagine like 2, 3 people tops working on a huge huge train. I understand that it's completely bogus that the company just can't plan ahead, that they're so unprepared when a delay causes the crew to hit their maximum allowed hours for a stretch. But I also have so little idea how many people it takes. If it indeed is like 2-3 people, holy shit, these companies just need to employ standby people at some significant volume, and stop being total cheapasses.

From what I can gather, the current crew for most trains is 2. There are no cabooses anymore, so it's just what crew can fit in the engine compartment, and there is no provision for crew rest or sleeping on the train. Engineers and crew are swapped out at specific points, when the train arrives at that spot.

The workers suspect that the railroads want to go down to 1-man crews on the trains, for cost savings, but they feel (and I agree) that that's probably unsafe. There are on-the-ground people at endpoints, some bridges, critical crossings, etc., and the number of fixed ground staff would go up with 1-man crews, but that doesn't help when you have a problem 60 miles into the cascades.

Standby people is a possibility, but trains are often out in rural, or even inaccessible places; it may not be possible to get a supplementary crew member to a train without a helicopter or at least a multi-hour drive.

Never mind one-person crews; why don't we have zero-person crews? In most cases the crew are just responding to signals anyway; trains accelerate slowly enough that it's very rare that train crew can see a problem in time to do anything about it anyway.

How do you find the Skytrain in Vancouver? As an occasional visitor I've found it reliable and friendly, but it is also a fully-isolated track (right?). I'm not sure how well current automation would cope with the semi-open train yards and crossing points that we have in Seattle's Interbay or SODO districts.

Skytrain is awesome. Tracks are isolated for some definition of "isolated"; skytrain doesn't have to interoperate with any other rail traffic (unless you count maintenance vehicles) but there isn't any wall separating the track from the station platform like e.g. the Las Vegas airport has (it has been discussed as a safety measure, but skytrains don't presently park accurately enough to line up the doors) and there are many places where you can hop a fence and get onto the tracks (resulting in trains being stopped and police showing up to escort you away).

The DLR in London is another example of how zero-person trains may work.

That's still a significant difference from running traditional trains on unprotected track. Skytrain has no grade crossings.

Here's why:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-Mégantic_rail_disaster

RIP to all 47 victims.

That was an interesting read, thanks for posting that.

However, in the write-up the TSB cites several sources of human error and a _lack_ of automation such as rail circuits as key factors.

The article notably specifically cites oil as an hazardous & risky thing to carry. Let us not find fault with the whole idea for but one aspect which we ought not implement (carrying oil).

> Let us not find fault with the whole idea for but one aspect which we ought not implement (carrying oil).

We can't find fault with that; oil's got to move somehow. It can move by truck, by rail, by ship, by air, or by pipeline.[1] How much worse is rail?

[1] Technically, I guess we could also pour it into the ocean somewhere and hope it naturally floats to somewhere more useful.

Add mecsred notes, this disaster illustrates the risks of rail, especially with hazardous cargo (which could have been carried far more safely by pipeline!) but it also illustrates an over reliance on humans. A zero-human-drivers railway would have (a) had automatically locking trains rather than relying on humans to hit the breaks, and (b) more remote monitoring to detect if anything went wrong.

A zero-human-drivers railway sounds extremely vulnerable to "the train is on fire, the fire brigade shut off the generator, which it turns out the brakes depended on" which is the essence of what happened there.

That's absolutely a problem if a train designed to have a driver doesn't have one (which is what happened here). If trains were designed to not need drivers, this wouldn't have happened, because (a) enough mechanical brakes would have been applied automatically, (b) the engine fire would have been detected and reported automatically, and (c) if the brakes failed there would have been an immediate alarm when the train started moving.

Does anyone have any up-to-date info regarding fully autonomous freight trains? Self-driving cars and semi-trucks seem to grab all the headlines, but someone's got to be working on automating freight trains. It seems like a much easier problem to solve. Or is it?

The incentive is also much lower, given the ratio between driver comp and freight volume.

My buddy is a freight conductor. It’s generally him and an engineer on the train.

It’s a shit job that breaks marriages and encourages bad behaviors. You’re basically on call for 24 shifts, and can get called or not anytime from hour 1 to hour 24. You have to chase work, so many guys get “dead headed” having to take jobs hours away. It’s common for guys to have crash apartments or pooled cars to drive 4-5 hours home.

Sounds about right. Can you imagine if they actually gave him a scheduled time to arrive at work, and paid him regardless of if the train was ready? That's what they should do.

Railroad is to industry what a telco (Verizon att etc) is to IT. They are not AWS.

The closest thing to AWS to industry might be flex port, but it's still on the international trade.

Big internet and railroads both began with loaded capitalists granting themselves first pick of pristine territory all over a new map. Same start, same result. All other info "business-wise" is beans compared to this primary detail.

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