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Comment by jajko | Hacker News Reader

If US doesn't accept say Swiss products/designs then there is some serious flaw in that process (probably stemming from protectionism/corruption)

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There's more to it than that. Our freight trains are much larger, heavier, and longer than swiss/European freight trains. It's not unreasonable to think that a passenger train sharing track space with North American freight trains would need to be more heavily built, if withstanding a collision is a goal.

There are other options. Positive train control is better than strong cars - train control means the trains can't crash in the first place (they can still derail, but you can't run into a slow/stopped train in front of you as the train will automatically stop if it cannot verify there is no train on the track in front of it). This is now mandatory in the US (with a lot of fine print exceptions).

Yes, because PTC systems never fail. Ugh.

PTC generally is designed to fail safe, so it will stop the train if something might be wrong. Nothing is perfect, but everything has a compromise and strong trains have a lot of negatives - they cost more, use more energy (read global warming as it there is normally some non-clean energy in the mix).

The hierarchy of controls suggests preventing collision

Swiss trains from Stadler are in fact selling rather well in the US recently (Caltrain, e-BART, New Jersey Transit, Austin, Dallas, and most recently Metra in Chicago)

That Metra project looks interesting, they are buying battery powered trainsets: https://metra.com/newsroom/metra-buying-battery-powered-trai...

45-65 miles range, and 20-30 minutes to charge 20->80%. Better than I would have expected, and certainly could work well on shorter routes where full electrification is impractical. Sounds like it will be built in the US as well.

Trains in Europe don’t have one engine pulling 200 cars stretching back for more than a mile.

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