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Comment by resolutebat | Hacker News Reader

The US freight rail network is in excellent shape. It's the passenger network that's in shambles.

It is not in excellent shape. It is riding the coattails of investments made a century ago, optimizing profits through consolidation, relentless squeezing of costs, and minimal investment in growth. Freight rail companies have constantly reduced routes and cargo types while increasing latency, discarding just about everything in order to focus on low-cost bulk transportation of extremely high-tonnage regular loads like coal and grain, while becoming more and more uncompetitive and impractical for transportation of flexible or timely loads like containers, refrigerated products, and manufactured goods. The freight trains have meanwhile gotten longer and slower, and overgrown the rails that they run on. American freight rail is eating its seed corn without investing in the long term. It remains efficient at transporting the bulk goods that it is currently handling, but it's far below what freight rail's potential should be, or perhaps even what it once was. Trucking has taken up the difference, but that's not because trucks are better-suited to such jobs. It's because the highway investments are paid for by the government, and railway investments are not.

At the same time the infrastructure and their rolling stock is in horrible shape and in desperate need of upgrades and basic maintenance. Anybody who has ever taken an Amtrak knows all to well the hour long delays experienced because of a broken down freight train holding up the tracks further up. And those are on the shared tracks which are supposedly better maintained, I can only imagine how things are on the rest of the system.

The US has no passenger network. It's all freight rail. Passenger trains run on the freight network (and freight always get priority).

Amtrak in the northeast corridor is Amtrak owned track

Which is basically the only one in the entire country.

Everything else is freight. All the old passenger rail was converted (or abandoned/removed) long ago.

Untrue. Amtrak has an entire system https://ontheworldmap.com/usa/amtrak-system-map.jpg

What the US destroyed most of were local, municipal rail lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Isn’t that a map of Amtrak routes? That’s different from a map of dedicated passenger rail, which is what I was referring to.

Brightline in Florida just started service between Orlando and Miami, with plans to expand to Tampa.

> The US freight rail network is in excellent shape.

The German rail network is in shambles - but compared to how some American freight rail looks like, even that is more like Japan's excellent railways... I've seen far too many examples like [1] for my liking on youtube. This kind of shit would actually land you jail time here if you as a responsible person would let a train run there. Or this legit, on-camera derailment [2] - no way the train would be allowed to just continue to move on, it would get a full-blown investigation and those responsible for the dereliction probably a criminal trial for endangering rail traffic [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ao-24274Jw

[3] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__315.html

There's no way this is true ⊙ ﹏⊙

In the US we really believe in efficiency and cost savings, so our freight trains double as roller doasrers. Whee!

Yeah sure. That why their is constant derailment.

The constant derailment is because the operators are chasing profit above safety. Make the trains as long as possible, run them as fast as possible. At some point derailment is inevitable, if you operate the trains that way.

That makes no sense. One derailment erases any profit that would be gained from ignoring safety.

Have you seen John Oliver lately? Please go watch infoedutainment materials first.

You have to understand how profits in the rail sector work.

Making the system move faster translates directly to additional capacity. More capacity translates to more revenue. Think about it this way—if you increase the speed that a train moves by 10%, then you can make 10% more trips with the same system, in the same amount of time. You can keep doing this until profit you get from the additional capacity results is wiped out by the losses caused by accidents.

The largest rail freight company in the US has operating revenue of something like $25 billion, with margins around 50%. The recent derailment in Ohio cost an estimated $1 billion. By that math, you could increase the speed until every 4% speed increase would result in 1 derailment per year of that scale, or some combination of smaller derailments.

There are about 3 derailments per day in the US. (Note that this is a much lower figure than it was 20 or 50 years ago.)

Yeah and I'm sure they are paying for all the police, firefighter, cleanup and all the other issues caused. And they don't have to really pay for delay on Amtrak lines either.

They are systematically devaluing vital infrastructure to increase short term profit and have done the bare minimum of investment. Systematically devaluing vital infrastructure in the country.

For the US not to treat the railroads as a strategic infrastructure is borderline insane.

Yes and in Europe nobody cares about money or profit. That's why there is constant derailment there too. Ohhh wait.

There are a huge amount of accidents that have to do with bad infrastructure maintenance and bad signaling.

> if you operate the trains that way.

Yes, if you have badly maintained infrastructure and you run badly maintained trains on it, its gone cause issue.

Have you seen John Oliver lately? Here you go. https://youtu.be/AJ2keSJzYyY

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