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Comment by math_dandy | Hacker News Reader

If the government mandated that rail companies sell passage on their track networks at reasonable rates and in a nondiscriminatory fashion, how much of Chicago's rail network becomes redundant? Perhaps removing this redundancy would allow Chicago to redevelop significant patches of urban real estate for residential and mixed-commercial purposes.

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tracks themselves should be nationalized, just like roads are. then the government can allow any operator to use the tracks. don't get rid of redundancy, use it to increase capacity, and where practical, keep cargo and passenger tracks separate.

mixing busy cargo and passenger tracks is a bad idea, because passenger trains need to be reliable without delays in order to be attractive. cargo can handle delays better but wants to travel as fast as possible which is pretty difficult when passenger trains with their multiple stops get in the way.

so without knowing the chicago rail network, i'd claim that there is no redundancy that could be freed

We dont need the space in the parts where the railroads are tbh

Railroads sell passage at market rates. I don’t know how reasonable they are, but seemingly good enough that it is a common practice. Therefore one often sees engines from the western railroads all the way in the northeast, e.g. BNSF and UP.

Merges was proposed in the article too, along with a link to Swiss railways i.e. outright nationalization.

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