Longer and Longer Freight Trains Drive Up the Odds of Derailment
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
The limit should be whatever fits in the sidings on a track. It's ridiculous that the rail industry can handicap passenger rail by just increasing the length of the trains until they physically can't fit in the sidings.
Then if they want to make their trains longer, they have to improve the infrastructure instead of putting pressure on everything and everyone except the shareholders' profits.
Transporting more humans by rail is an inefficient use of rail capacity that increases use of truck transport which causes a lot of road damage and uses a lot more fossil fuels.
Transporting humans by train makes a sense over shorter distances, over long ones, air transport has clearly won it in terms of convenience, and also helpfully frees up the rails for more environmentally friendly rail freight.
Europe has a lot of passenger rail, and as a result, shorter freight trains, and more use of trucks for transport.
You can't generalise european train networks because they are not monolithic at all. Netherlands, germany and france all have different networks that cannot interoperate. It's a mess for completely different reasons. Switzerland, for example, has one of the best passenger and train networks out there but you can't take a direct train from any european country to switzerland nevermind freight.
There are also at least a couple connections from Germany to Basel, so I don't think the last point is entirely correct.
It’s awful for passengers. It’s bad for the environment (derailments), it is less then ideal for customers outside unit trains and drives them to trucks , and current infrastructure does not support it nor is being upgraded too. Freight outside unit train has/is being gutted
And no passenger rail is better for the environment and more convenient when you have a good rail system
A good but long video on why rail in America is bad, awful, and failing is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNkYNjADoZg
It covers long trains
> 63 trucks per 1,000 people in the EU — compared to only 21 trucks per 1,000 people in the United States
The reasons given are the increased urbanisation in Europe, difficulty of cross-border rail integration, tighter driver hours regulations, and the fact that drivers are not paid per distance/time as they may be in the US.
"Freight rail accounts for around 40% of long-distance ton-miles" (USA) https://www.aar.org/data-center/ Those line up with figures elsewhere like on wikipedia. So US transports 2-3x more by rail. And yes as people pointed out there are other factors impacting Europe. But one of the many is a rail system designed for passengers, not freight (see links in comment below). Unfortunately you can't pack tons of people in with the same efficiencies of slow speeds and really long trains that you can for freight, so every measure possible should be made to increase freight by train until truck transport is reduced to a minimum. Certainly long-distance truck.
Europe has many more of those lines than the US. But I'm not sure the US doesn't have any.
The reason I brought up length was that if the distances are longer, efficiencies of trains over trucks goes up steadily and by a large degree. And at the same time, the longer the distance, the more air travel makes sense for the humans in terms of time. While it's definitely true that rail makes more sense than car or plane for human transport efficiency, the problem is that if that is causing even a modest reduction in the far heavier freight, passenger rail is more harmful than helpful. So until the vast majority of transport of freight is by rail, better to leave the roads and planes to the humans.
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/why-is-europe-so-absurdly-... This one focuses on the design of the rail system itself. " the European railway business model was about moving passengers and not freight – the opposite of how North America dealt with its railroad system. " https://www.freightwaves.com/news/railroad/us-and-european-f...
Someone else rightly pointed out Europe has other issues as well (some of them due to competing national standards) but prioritising passenger rail also caused some of their other limitations. and train lengths in Europe are definitely limited to avoid disruption to passenger rail which also has priority, which is completely backwards from an environmental perspective in my view. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Europe?usesk...
Quantity of freight is relatively fixed.
If running trains half as long. Reduces derailments by 20%, you now have 60% more derailments, because you have twice as many trips.
It is rare for more than a dozen or so cars to detail at one time.
The freight carriers own the tracks and have priority, passenger rail are just mere guests. The alternative is the freight carriers tell them to f off.
An analogy is the relationship between the cellular carriers (who own the digital rails) and MVNOs that ride on them; the MVNOs get deprioritized service.
You might think the regulations leading to this agreement were bad, but this is the reality. Legally, the freight carriers do not have priority, and by law they cannot tell passenger rail to "f off".
[0] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
> Except in an emergency, intercity and commuter rail passenger transportation provided by or for Amtrak has preference over freight transportation in using a rail line, junction, or crossing unless the Board orders otherwise under this subsection.... [1]
There hasn’t been enforcement of that rule, but it remains on the books.
I am sure the owners of the railroads imagine themselves to be bootstrapping heroes of capitalism, but the deal when the United States created the railroads and gave them 175 million acres of land was that " ... the government shall at all times have the preference in the use of the same."
It’s well known the reason Amtrak sucks is because freight trains run on the same tracks and their sidings are too short, relative to the length of the trains, to prevent freight-caused delays on most Amtrak lines. Avg. passenger rail speeds in the US peaked in the 1880’s iirc.
If you simply can’t use a siding because your train is too long, I can see a derailment becoming more likely.
There may also be loading fatigue contributions, similar to higher speeds and harder tires making semi trucks responsible for 90+% of US highway wear. The longest trains no doubt run on a minority of busiest routes, so there is less risk of derailment with shorter trains on the plurality of routes. In essence, it’s not that the derailed train is too long, it’s that the previous train is too long, causing the track to wear out too fast.
I’ve looked at longer Amtrack trips and the time it takes to travel across just a few states relative to flying just doesn’t make sense to me.
The weird thing is that Amtrak already seems to get plenty of use. The way people talked about it, I assumed all the trains would be near empty, but no, the few times I've ridden it they've all been pretty decently filled up. I've even seen them sell out on the website sometimes.
I guess they just lose so much money per passenger that there's no point in adding more capacity, but I do wonder why they don't just add a few more cars onto the train... (possibly ironic given the title, I know)
That said, there are some people for whom train travel makes a lot of sense, especially if you make it more efficient. You just don't happen to be one of them.
Some people enjoy the nostalgia, sure, but we’ve moved on and have better options.
The US will likely never embrace (or need) longer range high speed passenger rail like Europe. I don’t understand why we would dedicate more public money or policy to continue to prove this point.
Other than a few retirees who have time to kill, who would be interested in taking an Amtrack train from Chicago -> LA?
This trip via Amtrak takes 3 days. I am not interested in my tax dollars subsidizing pleasure trips for Senior citizens.
I had occasion once to take Amtrak from East Texas to Los Angeles and there were only a handful of other people doing that, but there were a ton of people who got on and later got off between East Texas and Los Angeles.
For these long Amtrak routes they are probably best thought of not as a means to travel from one endpoint to the other, which will almost always be faster and cheaper to do by air, but rather as a collection of local or regional routes arranged end to end that share trains.
Trains are great for the environment and pack a lot of people into a small area.
Roads and cars do not.
American rail infrastructure is, in many cases, outdated and obsolete. Rail as a technology is not. For freight, it is far more efficient than basically any other land transportation technology, even in the present state. For passengers, it is also more economically efficient than road travel, although the present quality of infrastructure often makes it impractical, and it lacks the aggressive subsidies of road travel.
> Other than a few retirees who have time to kill, who would be interested in taking an Amtrack train from Chicago -> LA?
This trip, which is an extreme example, takes 43 hours today (per the Amtrak ticketing portal). Driving this route (which people do) takes 30 hours and must be split up over 2-3 days due to fatigue. Greyhound takes 46 hours. Megabus does not serve California. Even with the current (bad) state of rail infrastructure in this country, the only more efficient travel method for this trip is flying.
An upgraded conventional railway (similar to the Acela Express) would cover that distance in about 30 hours. An average high-speed rail would take about 15-20 and could be done in a day.
Also, why are you pretending that this infrastructure doesn't serve shorter trips as well? A plane from Chicago to LA only serves Chicago and LA. The Amtrak route also serves Kansas City, Albuquerque, and Flagstaff. The route you were referring to (the Texas Eagle, 66 hours) serves Springfield, St. Louis, Little Rock, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, Tucson, and dozens of smaller cities.
The time/cost it takes is so bad, more often than not, that driving remains the faster/cheaper option. And in many parts of the country, those areas not immediately beside large airports, driving often remains competitive against flying too.
A longer train can, of course, derail more cars, and when it derails, will strand more cars (since the train's cars still on the rails are temporarily stopped and often can't be moved until the derailment is partially cleaned up). In addition, derailing the 50th car of a 50-car train can only cascade to cars ahead of it; derailing the 50th car in a 100-car train can cascade in both directions. (Stated more generally, the average car in a 100-car train is twice as far from the end of the train than the average car in a 50-car train.)
Even if a 100-car train had the same likelihood of derailment as a 50-car train, a 50-car train would, on average, have reduced impact.
It makes it really hard for emergency services to get to where the need to be. At least a couple of times a day, a train would cut Naito in half (the main road running on the west side of the river). The fire station was on one side, and a ton of apartment buildings were on the other. If a fire starts at the wrong time, it'll take 30 extra minutes to get there. Ditto for ambulances. Not to mention all of the impact on congestion in the city, which has tertiary effects on emergency services
Once you've built the rails, built the roads, sold off the land nearby and constructed buildings, adding a bridge later can be difficult. If your bridge is 22 feet high, and the approach ramps have a 6% slope, each approach ramp will be 360 feet long.
There are often alternatives, but they add 10-30 minutes depending on where you're at. That's really bad in an emergency situation
You may have noticed that greyhound busses are not famous as a luxury, high-status means of travel. Why do you think that is?
Is it because of aggressive marketing by the car industry, encouraging americans to look down on mass transit?
Is it classism, middle class types turning their nose up at the prospect of riding alongside poor people?
Is it because busses face the same congestion and speed limits as cars?
Is it the winding multiple-stop routes, waits for connections and inconveient drop-off locations, without higher speeds to compensate for them?
Is it the smoothness of the ride, impacting users' ability to read and get work done?
Is it the size of the seats? The lighting and decor? Onboard amenities like the toilet and catering facilities?
Is it the punctuality?
The problem is that most of our major freight rail lines were first built when land was very cheap or even free (stolen from indigenous people). Now the land for more rail lines will cost a lot whether it's purchased outright or acquired through eminent domain.
And even building more railroad tracks would only marginally reduce truck transportation. Most truck freight is time sensitive (rail freight can never be fast) or goes places that rail can't really reach.
They've never really figured out how to stop derailments there, they still happen on a regular basis. We've just gotten lucky recently and the derailed cars weren't full of toxic chemicals.
https://www.ijpr.org/disasters-and-accidents/2022-11-17/four...
https://www.propublica.org/article/train-derailment-long-tra...
If a derailment only happens X% of time and causes Y$ amount of monetary loss, you need to increase Y. Apparently no one cares when corn gets derailed, and maybe that is okay. If derailments cause human injury, the cost goes up. Toxic chemicals are the classic example.
So why not raise the cost when a toxic chemical is released during derailment? You can do it with fines, regulations, etc.. But until you fix the economics, its going to continue to happen.
Ask yourself: Over the course of 1 year, it better to have a 20% longer train with a 0.1% chance of corn derailment, or a 20% shorter train with a 0.001% chance derailment? If you arent breaking out excel, and instead using emotions, you never had a chance to make this decision.