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Comment by capitainenemo | Hacker News Reader

But long trains are far far more efficient than other alternatives for freight transport.

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.

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>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.

That's slowly being solved by ETCS to allow more interoperability, besides even within Germany there are drastic differences between city-wide, regional and long range services.

There are also at least a couple connections from Germany to Basel, so I don't think the last point is entirely correct.

That's strange, I often travel between Frankfurt and Basel..

And Zurich to Paris or Milan or Vienna or ...

It’s not “more efficient” it’s just cheaper/more profitable for the shareholders.

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

Then we should build sufficiently long sidings!

That's not the only problem.

I'd love to learn more about Europe being more reliant on trucks for delivery than the US. Got any references handy?

Not OP but did a quick google and found: https://www.theglobalist.com/america-and-europe-keep-on-truc...

> 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.

That one is easy. There is plenty of data out there. "In 2016 (EU-28), the share of rail in freight transport was less than 15 percent and the share of road freight around 80 percent." https://dhl-freight-connections.com/en/trends/global-freight...

"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.

Transporting humans by train makes sense for lines with a huge number of humans wanting to cross. The length isn't really relevant, except in the sense that the longer the line, the more humans you need.

Europe has many more of those lines than the US. But I'm not sure the US doesn't have any.

Typically if there's 2 points that a large number of humans want to travel between, a large amount of goods needs to travel between them as well. If the majority of good between those places are using an inefficient mode of transport (like trucks) then freight rail is not being sufficiently incentivised. In Europe it's pretty clear that the lines were not built for this.

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.

Europe also has lots of small countries with relatively few large cities, so passenger rail makes a lot of sense there.

Interesting viewpoint, hadn’t thought of it this way. Is there data to quantify this effect?

I've read a few articles about it over the years. I don't know if this one is a good source, but it showed up in the keyword list and I do need to get back to work.

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...

More use? I'd challenge you to find that European freight is substantially diverted from rail to road. In most cases I'd suspect it's a matter of small or mixed loads over short distances, which in Europe might still be multinational. Frankly, for the kinds of loads that in the US would travel by rail freight, the alternative to rail wouldn't be air, but sea.

There are many reasons cited in the links I dug up for others, but among the various issue such as interoperability rail systems that are designed for passengers that impacted track design and train length. This prioritisation happened long ago.

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