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Comment by formerkrogemp | Hacker News Reader

We wish we had decent rail lines in the US.

I wish we had decent rail lines outside of London

We do; just not everywhere. I've moved to Liverpool, and the rail system here is great (as far as it goes - it could always use more lines). Fifteen minute interval suburban service from the south suburbs under the city all the way to Southport, fast and frequent service to places in the Wirral etc. It's great - Merseyrail is an unusual example of a forward-looking rail system done in the 70s. The trains are old now (new ones on the way) but it just works.

Leeds? Not so much. Daventry? Nothing. Whitby? One slow train every two hours.

Oh hello I live on the Wirral. I wish the line on the south of the peninsula was more used.

Scotland’s rail system seems fine

I haven't followed things in detail, but don't they have some substantial service cuts at the moment some due to some combination of the governments financial situation and the impacts of Covid on public transport ridership, not enough drivers and/or now additionally an ongoing dispute with the unions?

We used to until Dr Beeching

We do, we just use it to move astonishing amounts of cargo instead of humans.

The US only has like 500 miles of modern rail track - between Boston and Washington.

I wouldn’t call that “modern”: the “high speed” train has a top speed of 86 mph and in my experience only attains that for 15 minutes between Boston and NYC.

On the NYC DC stretch, scheduled “high speed” service is only 20-30 minutes shorter than the much cheaper regular service that stops at every station.

> “high speed” train has a top speed of 86 mph

Wikipedia says 150, but I guess if you live there you probably know better.

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

yes, that’s my experience, though there is a thread parallel to your comment that disputes it.

> has a top speed of 86 mph and in my experience only attains that for 15 minutes between Boston and NYC.

135 to 150mph. There are plenty of YouTube videos of people independently verifying the speed either from the train using a phone speedometer app) or using a speed measurement device from alongside the track.

Here is one (go to timestamp 6:13):

https://youtu.be/KHF8ajhAZa8

The conductor sometimes announces it and I’ve never heard it exceed mid 80s. I also have a phone and can look how fast I’m traveling myself. I’ve never personally experienced the speeds claimed by that video on Acela.

The Acela schedules for nyc-dc last week were pretty damning. Shaving 30 minutes (at best!) from a 3 hour makes-every-stop trip clearly doesn’t mean significant high speed travel.

At earlier stages of my life I was a regular traveler on tgv/Thales/Eurostar, ICE, and Shinkansen. I know what a high speed train feels like.

I don't think "It didn't feel that fast to me" is a basis for claiming the published speeds are a lie. You can get real time train information at https://www.amtrak.com/services/maps.trainlocation.html . The first two trains I clicked on in MD and NJ were at 104mph and 124mph.

For Boston to NYC, the Acela only hits peakish speed for a relatively short part of its journey. It is faster than the regular regional train but not by all that much--maybe by 30 minutes or a bit more. (The biggest benefit to the introduction of Acela was that it required the electrification of the tracks north of New Haven which eliminated what could be a fairly long engine switch on the regular regional train.) If I'm paying out of my own pocket I usually just take the regional.

North of NYC is definitely slower than south of NYC (and nobody misses changing locomotives in New Haven.) It sounded to me like the poster was claiming a top speed of 86 for the entire Boston to Washington route, which is what I was responding to.

I didn’t use the word “lie” just related my experience, including using a gps speed app. It’s fine if other people have a different experience. I like trains which is why I use such an app on my phone.

In my experience the Acela is rather absurd. Comfy, sure; I do take it on the BOS-NYC route but in my experience it’s not worth the price for NY-DC. Lookimg right now at Amtrak app nyc-was, we have the regional 57 Vermonter taking 3:27 and the Acela 2259 3:04. I don’t think that’s worth paying extra for.

I wasn't arguing the Acela's merits vs those systems (which I agree are superior). Just that 86mph is not the top speed.

Why is 70% of freight carried by trucks then?

Who said you can't do both.

Anyone who has ridden Amtrak and had to pull over and weight for a freight train to pass.

Avoiding that situation has to be Scheduling 101.

isn't it by design, given the freight companies own the railways?

in the UK it's the opposite, freight trains get pushed into sidings so passenger trains can overtake

(but then they don't get charged for causing delays)

Amtrak is legally supposed to get priority but I think they can't directly sue the freight railroads for failing to meet this requirement.

My understanding is that Amtrak is supposed to get priority if the Amtrak train is on schedule. That is often not the case.

I don't understand how a train may not be on schedule. There's two rails on which the train runs in completely deterministic matter, unlike air or car traffic.

Because trains get delayed by other trains even though they're not supposed to be, crew are late, there are mechanical issues of some sort, person on the tracks... Most air delays don't have to do with weather or other things in the air. They have to do with things that happen with getting into the air.

I take commuter rail every now and then which mostly doesn't compete a lot with freight and delays are, if not super-common, not rare.

Amtrak is very possibly worse than other systems in this regard but it's not hard to see how multi-day train trips could accumulate delays when sharing tracks with miles-long freight trains traveling at sometimes very slow speeds.

I imagine that locomotives have redundancy of some sort so a single mechanical failure should not cause paralysis.

Other than that, having some padding and a schedule should get you two nines.

I imagine you have to strech the schedule or skip maintenance to get that sort of cascading failures.

https://wiki.openraildata.com/index.php/Delay_Attribution_Gu...

The rails are owned by freight. Scheduling 101 is to optimize their freight throughput.

Also, the sidings can't accomodate 100-car freight trains, so Amtrak trains are forced to wait in the siding for the slow freight train to pass.

Yeah at like 15mph through old track in urban areas.

We do have a huge freight network that moves a lot of tonnage, but I wouldn't call it modern or world-class in track infrastructure, speeds, signaling, train control automation, or electrification.

That's a nice little take to hide the fact we can't build or run anything as competently as we used to do. Our trains aren't the fastest, or haul the most commuters, or the most extensive, or the safest, but we sure do haul some tonnage of coal. FYI 70% of goods, ie cargo, in the US are transported by trucks. Our trains suck in the US and need massive investments to become more relevant.

We wish we had decent rail lines in London.

I often think that the British love of whining and complaining must give people elsewhere in the world a very distorted impression of the country. London has a very good rail system. It’s striking that the only specific complaint that you’ve made about it in these comments is that some sections of some lines are a bit noisy. Oh dear!

"A bit noisy" ... you have no idea ... I was talking one specific, current issue that is horrendous on the Jubilee Line ... I'm happy to raise many more complaints about our, in my opinion, very average (compared to the the best) underground system if you want ... but I'm sure that'll be exceedingly boring for all and simply dismissed by someone with, apparantly, such low standards as yourself.

Have you ever been anywhere other than London? What a distorted perspective!

Ever been to a big city in asia?

There is a reason its the MTR (of Hong Kong) Crossrail Line...

The MTR was designed 100 years after the first subsurface lines in London; you'd expect them to have avoided at least some of the mistakes. Also, they don't have to worry about funding by holding a property development monopoly around their stations, amongst other factors.

Give them a train network that's almost as old as London's to run (example: Melbourne), and they are just as bad as any other operator.

Yes.

My experience in many other Asian and European modern cities has been far better.

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