National Rail Network Map
arcgis.com
arcgis.com
Edit: It's not just the US (!) Maybe a 'North American rail network map'?
It makes you wonder what the country would be like if we'd leaned into the rail system instead of tearing up a chunck of it following the Beaching Report. The most interesting ones for me are the additional lines that crossed the Pennines, linking the north together much better than it is today.
But actually Britain had leaned in hard to the railways, by undertaking a large modernisation scheme [1]. The problem is, they did it a bit too early, in the 1950s, when electricity seemed like a risky bet so they stuck with steam which was the UK's core strength.
Of course, that turned out to be a mistake in retrospect. In the 1960s, investing in the railways in any form at all would've seemed like making the same sort of mistake as just a few years ago.
One interesting analysis I saw about the Beeching cuts said that the worse sin is that they did not preserve rights of way i.e. when closing a line they should have built a road and run a bus service (as Beeching's report recommended) or at least preserved it for potential rail reopening, but in many cases they sold the land off to developers so the chance was lost.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1955_Modernisat...
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ian+hislop+off+...
From a practical/political standpoint, it'll be interesting to see the backlash when a railroad attempts to start exercising its right to reclaim some of these properties, which are largely and falsely believed to have become community property.
Germany is just as bad. Between 1994 (the begin of the privatization) and now we lost 6.200km of rail infrastructure [1] - something like 15-ish percent.
My s/o and I went on a two week railroad trip through the whole of Germany. Seeing rotting or half-ass dismantled rails, former shift yards and smashed-in former other infrastructure just hurted to watch. Everything has gone downhill, there was barely any investment in upkeep of tracks and buildings, only in new construction of expensive billions-euros high speed rail... the reason is simple: DB Netz, the privatized infrastructure operator, has to pay for upkeep on their own (from usage fees) while the federal and state governments (and in some cases like the Munich S-Bahn also the counties and cities) pay for all the high-profile projects.
We had so, so many industrial areas served by rail as well: in 1994, over 11.000 companies and industrial zones had their own railway attachment - today, it's barely 2.300, a reduction of 80% [2]. No wonder our highways and side roads are overcrowded with trucks. The reason for that is that unlike the US, Europe still has chain-link and buffer couplers, which means shunting yards are extremely staff-intensive to run, and shunting from and to the industrial areas is expensive as well... which means that, thanks to privatization, DB Cargo was more or less forced to shut down the industrial zone supply because the absurd losses this branch brought in could no longer be cross-subsidized by passenger rail.
[1] https://www.allianz-pro-schiene.de/themen/infrastruktur/schi...
[2] https://www.rnd.de/wirtschaft/gueterverkehr-auf-die-schiene-...
In the UK it was somewhere around 25% of rail lines and 55% of stations. Complete short-sightedness.
There was definitely mistakes (Pennines) but overall most of the lines would have had to be closed at some point. They often connected tiny towns/villages by circuitous routes, often with stations ages from the actual place they were meant to be serving.
Despite that minor absence, the map you linked is clearly superior
(Just checked - OHM doesn't seem to have any data whatsoever - present or historical. Maybe I don't know how to use the interface, but all I see is land/water borders)
Regardless of whether it's more suited to OSM or OHM, I just think it would be a neat feature to have on Open Railway Map.
[1] London Kings Cross area with large rail yard to the north. By changing the transparency you can see things like ST Martins College and the new Coal Drops Yard development. The new British Library is also built over Somers Town Goods Depot.
https://maps.nls.uk/geo/explore/#zoom=16&lat=51.53529&lon=-0...
"Hi, I'm Olaf and I'm from Lund, Sweden"
"I'm Francisca and I come from Córdoba, Argentina"
"My name is Jayalalithaa and I'm from Erode, India"
"Hey everybody, my name's Peter but my friends call me Pete. I'm from Columbus, Georgia, and I'm super excited to be here"I'm surprised they get delivered. Impressed too.
It arrived without problems.
For reference, our address standard is ## Street Name,<cr> City, State, ZIP.
There was one neighborhood in particular that had a name like "Edgeview Cottages", and instead of getting letters addressed to 20 Apple St, you'd see Edgeview #20. It's crazy how people expect the post office to be able to figure this out.
Part of the reason I was wrong is that so much of the address is redundant. I think they only use four letters of the street name, for example, before they essentially always can narrow it down to one possibility in their database.
I know there's an API for AMTrak, but anything similar for commercial trains/lines?
I'm often stopped by trains, (what feel like) over 10 miles long, doing 30-50mph. Some carriages carry uncovered coal, and are left parked near my neighbourhood for days.
I'd love to track how many miles of carriages, and what type of carriages, pass through my neck of the woods, either with something like a Vizycam, and train it to count the carriages, or even by sound or vibration, and get a basic count, at what times, what dB, etc.
It shouldn't be hard to count cars if you wanted to, either by sound or laser or something similar. People have even done it by earth vibration.
As an example in Kansas, the steel rail lines from Osawatomie to Osage City have long been ripped up and scrapped. They are now rails-to-trails projects. Several other of the railroads marked are the same way (I know because well I visit these places quite often). Great use of the land btw, and makes for some beautiful passage across the state.
Connecting multiple carriages together to form a train was an amazing innovation - those carriages are separated by inches, whereas trains are separated by miles.
If everything could be separated by inches, we could have a network with 1000x the throughput. 1000x the throughput means we can use all the existing (expensive) rails, and be able to transport everything the interstate road network does today.
And, with enough innovation, that's possible. Imagine an infinitely long train. If more cargo needed to be added to the train, while in motion at say 60 mph, one link in the train could be broken, the gap widened to fit an extra carriage, and then an extra carriage comes in from a side rail, just like merging on a highway, and the whole lot is reattached again. All while still moving.
Infinitely long trains already exist - for example an escalator is a continuous 'train' of steps in a loop.
Disconnecting trains while in motion already exists - it was done regularly on the british railway 50 years ago.
And the rest is just a coordination and timing problem - one that computers are really good at.
The issue in the US is decades of cost cutting by the freight operators. This includes a lack of infrastructure investment, optimizing cost over speed, and overworking employees to an extreme amount.
The technologies for better rail already exist. We just need to actually use them in America.
The problem: most rail runs above ground, with level road crossings. Running trains at the same spatial density as cars would massively impact wildlife, and you'd need to rebuild all the road crossings as well. Additionally, you'd need to reconstruct a lot of bridges and other infrastructure as it was never built to handle that amount of load and traffic.
Another limiting factor is that switches need time to operate, you don't want to end up with the tip of the train going straight and the rear part of the train going off. That requires a further minimum distance between trains.