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Comment by pstuart | Hacker News Reader

We should nationalize the rail infrastructure and upgrade it to make passenger traffic a first-class citizen of the rails.

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A given rail system can do freight or passenger well, but not both.

The US system is optimized for freight.

It's not obvious that passenger is a better choice.

How so? All over Europe the same infrastructure is being used for both.

The US rail system carries a lot more cargo than in Europe. On the order of 3 times more freight per mile of track. It is an also much cheaper to send freight by rail in the US compared to Europe. Reconfiguring the US rail system to even slightly more passenger friendly would seriously lower the amount of freight that can be transported by rail, as well as raising the price, and most of that would end up on trucks.

The other aspect is how the rail infrastructure is financed in the US vs Europe. In the US the infrastructure is to a large extent funded by the freight companies themselves, and in return their needs get priority. Take away that incentive and they'll stop funding the rail infrastructure meaning that much of that cost will end up pack on either the local or federal government, with all that that entails.

One of the heaviest rail, if not the heaviest rail in Europe, is a 500km combined freight and passenger rail that goes between Sweden and Norway (The Iron Ore Line). It alone carries more than the combined weight of all rail freight transportation in Norway, and close to 50% of all rail freight transportation in Sweden. It also happens to be one of the worlds oldest railways, built in 1888.

The biggest issue is speed. The maximum speed is just slightly above that of maximum highway speed, with freight speed limited to less than half of that.

That line is fantastic for freight (unless they've derailed an ore train again...), but the passenger service it offers would feel right at home in the US when it comes to both speed and number of departures. The passenger service to Norway leaves 0-2 times a day

The line between Kiruna and Narvik is so beautiful I’m not sure why you’d want it to go faster. The speed is heavily dictated by the number of tunnels and turns due to mountainous terrain. It couldn’t be much faster without very expensive kilometer long tunnels.

Population density in North Sweden and Norway is low enough that a few times a day is probably sufficient for most local travel. I haven’t been during peak tourist seasons when that number of trains might not be enough.

A fun fact is that since the ore trains travel mostly downhill, braking generates enough electricity that the ore empty trains can return to Kiruna effectively energy free.

> The line between Kiruna and Narvik is so beautiful I’m not sure why you’d want it to go faster.

That makes it a tourist line, not a transit line.

There's nothing wrong with tourism, but it isn't transit.

Far less freight tonnage per km of track.

The Us transports nearly 10 times as much freight-km as the EU and far more than 10 times tons/person.

We have the largest rail system of any country (USA 220k km vs EU 200k km). If you include the connections we use with Mexico and Canada it’s even larger. It’s almost all entirely freight. Trains can be 2000m long compared to 700m in the EU. It’s all built for freight.

2 km long trains are not long in the US anymore; in the west 3-4 km lengths are being seen more and more often. Turns out slower, longer trains filled with bulk commodities are better for business since they don't have tight delivery deadlines. There are towns where the train comes through for 45 minutes+.

Rail operators have also discovered a really nice side effect of ultra long trains: you don't have to pull into a siding to let a passenger train by as required by law if your train is longer than the siding.

Supposedly 10% of trains in the USA are about 10,000 feet or longer. Duckduckgo tells me that's about 3km. Supposedly there's at least one train 14,000 feet or longer.

https://www.aar.org/issue/freight-train-length/

It's worth noting that talking about the 'European' rail infrastructure is a bit of a misnomer since there is no standardisation of the rail system of regulations between countries and as such moving freight across multiple countries is basically never done.

Even for passenger transport the historical legacy of national rail networks means that travel across the continent hasn't been a priority. Recently EU initiatives seek to remedy this:

https://transport.ec.europa.eu/news-events/news/action-plan-...

It's used for both, and as a consequence, European freight prefers to go on trucks.

Part of this is also the different geography: Europe has more useful rivers and seas, so very bulk cargo can go by barge or ship.

"the United States is the world's largest consumer market for a reason: its rivers. Transporting goods by water is 12 times cheaper than by land (which is why civilizations have always flourished around rivers). And the United States, Zeihan calculates, has more navigable waterways — 17,600 miles' worth — than the rest of the world. By comparison, he notes, China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles. And all of the Arab world has 120 miles."

-- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/fareed-zakaria-ameri...

To be fair, Germany is fairly small (by US/China) standards.

The continental US (no Alaska or Hawaii) is > 22.5 times as big as Germany but has only 8.8 times as many miles of "navigable waterways." (However, it's not clear if the US numbers include the Great Lakes or the oceans; LA to Seattle and Miami to NYC goes by ocean, not some river.)

But, that doesn't leave much for the rest of Europe.

The Mississipi, Ohio, and Columbia Rivers enter the room, sit down at a table where the Great Lakes are already drinking.

That's nice. The western two-thirds of the country gets the Columbia. That, um, might be a bit inadequate for their freight needs...

I mean, sure, you can get to Kansas City and Omaha via the Missouri. You can't get to Denver, though, or Phoenix, or Salt Lake, or...

It is for the passengers.

There are many instances of excellent freight and passenger rails systems all over the world. You have no idea what you're talking about.

Can you name a system that moves roughly the same amount of freight as the US while still having excellent passenger service on the same rail infrastructure? Genuinely curious.

On literally the same rails, I suspect that doesn't happen that much. China moves more tonnage by rail freight than anywhere else in the world, and it has an immature-but-excellent-where-it-exists high speed system, but it doesn't generally share lines with the freight.

80% of freight is done by rail in Sweden I know nothing about logistics so this is just first hit on Google, I do not make the point to contradict you. I think the issue here is how you split up the big numbers into managable percentages for easy statistics, I'm guessing there is a lot of issues when you are talking about this. The biggest is that the US has spent 70 years of lobbying from car manufacturers and oil companies to make people use cars, that has left a scar all over the world. Not only in the freight vs. passenger statistics.

80% of freight is done by rail in Sweden

I find that very unlikely and this link seems to contradict that: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

Another aspect that needs to be taken into account is that a large part (perhaps 40%) of any number you see on total tonnes of rail freight in Sweden, is made up of handful of short rail lines doing nothing but transporting iron ore from a few large mines to the nearest harbour.

It's true that the US moves more freight by rail compared to for example EU. But that doesn't mean the reason for this is the mostly excellent passenger rail system in the EU. I'm not an expert here at all, but for example this article cites a few plausible reasons: https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-europe-so-absurdly-...

As your link shows, money that is spent on making a good freight rail system is mostly money that doesn't help with passenger traffic.

You claimed that there were "many" countries that had both good freight and passenger rail, but have yet to come up with one. (Sweden isn't an example - its "good freight" service (mines to ports) is where there's insignificant passenger service.)

> We should nationalize the rail infrastructure and upgrade it to make passenger traffic a first-class citizen of the rails

Your response to the first high-speed rail line America is likely to see completed, being built by a private operator, is to propose effectively banning it?

How the hell did you get that from what they wrote?

If rails are to be nationalized in the future, why would a private operator build one now? If you believe the inability to profit from the build on a recurring basis will happen, that’s an effective ban on construction of then by private operators now.

> If rails are to be nationalized in the future, why would a private operator build one now?

Nationalisation in a country like the US generally means getting bought out at a fair, even generous, price.

> getting bought out at a fair, even generous, price

Can you show me one example from the post-War era where we nationalised something that wasn’t about to fail?

> Can you show me one example from the post-War era where we nationalised something that wasn’t about to fail?

If we don't nationalise things that aren't about to fail then why should anyone be scared of being nationalised?

This subthread started with that suggestion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40140547

Nobody is currently afraid of it, probably because no one is seriously contemplating it.

Yea but I wouldn't be so happy with nationalized rail tbh.

We have the MTA in NY, they run the railroads and subways. The agency is massively bloated by costs not just where it costs $1.5 billion per mile to expand the subway, but even the railways are bleeding billions per year.

I understand that GP commenter is referring to nationalisation of existing rail infrastructure, particularly given that the intent would be to "upgrade it to make passenger traffic a first-class citizen of the rails". That would not apply to the first high-speed rail line in America, as it already has by its very nature passenger traffic as a first-class citizen — indeed, it will almost certainly have passenger traffic as its only citizen.

The first high-speed rail line in America, was already completed by said private operator in Florida.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline

1. The federal government is not noted for running passenger traffic well.

2. We don't want 40% more trucks on the roads, so we need the system to still be able to carry large amounts of freight. The federal government is also not known for doing that well, still less for balancing that with #1.

3. In this country, we don't just get to nationalize things. We have to pay for them. Given the pathetic rate at which Amtrak is funded, do you really think that Congress is going to spring for the kind of money to buy all the freight railroads?

4. Speaking of Congress, it's going to take continual funding to pay for keeping the system maintained. Do you want the annual maintenance budget for this (including the freight portion) to be at the annual whims of Congress?

All around, this is a terrible idea.

No thanks, I'd rather my tax dollars not be wasted on a pointless boondoggle.

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