Hacker News Reader

Comment by CraigRo | Hacker News Reader

Tons of foamers in the HN community. I'm sure that it is a lovely experience, and seeing America is incredibly powerful.

But the truth is that you are in an extremely heavy, expensive, and slow vehicle that requires over 1000 man-hours to carry fewer than 300 seats the whole length of the ride. That doesn't account for the capital costs of the vehicle or maintenance on the route, or overhead for the stations.

Loosening regulations to reduce the staff, making the train itself go faster (if possible), and allowing for lower cost and lighter weight cars (possibly to include the much denser sleeping cars found on Chinese and Swedish railroads) would change the economics from 'taxpayer subsidized cruise' to 'reasonable form of luxury transit'

View on HN

Is the weight of the car really that much of an issue? With steel wheels it seems like the rolling resistance is going to be hardly affected by a few extra tons per car so it's just acceleration that suffers, and since you only stop once per every few hours of travel that seems quite marginal.

On the other hand, a train where you are crammed in like an airplane with no amenities but can travel quickly on high speed rail would be a lot more cost efficient, but at that point you're basically replicating the airline experience except that it will never be as fast over medium or long distances even with high speed rail.

> Loosening regulations to reduce the staff, making the train itself go faster (if possible), and allowing for lower cost and lighter weight cars (possibly to include the much denser sleeping cars found on Chinese and Swedish railroads) would change the economics from 'taxpayer subsidized cruise' to 'reasonable form of luxury transit'

Trains are already more than 6 times as dangerous as planes (0.43 vs 0.07 deaths per billion passenger-miles, according to https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/ipsavage/436-appendix....). Those ideas sound like they'd make them even worse.

Those fatality rates for Amtrak are quite clearly a result more of the denominator being too low than anything else.

Increasing passenger miles covered will lower the final rates far more than increased safety.

Especially when the lowered safety is likely also a result of low usage and low funding thanks to low usage.

There is no reason to think the regulations do anything to improve safety. It's more likely that they make the trains less safe by banning modern rolling stock used in the rest of the world.

This has nothing to do with regulations and I'm not sure where that's coming from. It has to do with America being designed for and catering to cars above all other forms of transit, which makes it exorbitantly expensive to expand our train network.

This is before we even talk about how much price gouging and other cost reductions our current train networks already get away with thanks to private ownership. I'm assuming you must've been asleep at the wheel considering the railroad strike and the conditions that the workers are put thru.

"Fewer than 300 seats" feels somewhat disingenuous--Seat Miles is the stat that matters. People riding from end-to-end is the exception not the rule.

The majority of Amtrak's usage outside of the Northeast Corridor is providing transport to small, underserved communities, not vacation trips like in this post.

Wouldn’t it be better to run more frequent shuttle trains between those underserved communities connecting them to major cities where they can take a plane or train from than running a 43 hour train that probably runs once a day?

It'd be tons more convenient! But the Class I Railroads won't let that happen.

The reason why Amtrak is great in the Northeast Corridor and so mediocre everywhere else is because the Class Is own the tracks and control all of the traffic flow. Amtrak would run more trains tomorrow if they could.

https://www.railwayage.com/regulatory/amtrak-eyes-stb-invest...

Unfortunately, private companies own most of the rails so unless they decide to upgrade them, that's as fast as we can go. A lot of other countries with successful rail infrastructure has the government own them.

Taking a train vs plane can cut your CO2 emission quite a bit: https://www.seat61.com/CO2flights.htm

What are the regulations on staff? I'm not aware of what Amtrak is required, currently. I'd imagine that's their biggest cost, not weight. Although, I do like the idea of having a more compact/denser sleeping cars. The Roomettes are really small, but they come with attendants, etc.

Amtrak is currently upgrading some of their long distance cars: https://www.travelandleisure.com/amtrak-upgrades-overnight-t...

Why are you worrying about something you have no control over?

"foamers"?

It's the term that railfans call themselves these days. As a railfan, I have to admit that it's pretty accurate.

Rabid rail fans, i.e. “foaming at the mouth”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com