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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Europes rail network is far worse - but it appears better because you see passanger traffic and don't think what else. That and europe mostly can't see beyond national borders (there is a language barrier with most) and so they fail to create good eu wide rail of any sort.

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Far worse in what sense? More tracks, sure the US rail network is about 1.5 times the size of the European network for the same landmass.

But then, I don't think quality wise I don't think you'd encounter a track like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI anywhere in Europe. Or the comparison of high speed tracks 9600km in Europe vs 70 km in the US.

The reason for this is obviously the completely different priorities US is freight, Europe is passenger. So I don't think you can really compare the two networks and say one is clearly better.

> track like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI

I can't believe that the train can actually travel down that track. If I had just come upon that track, there's no way I would have ever thought that it was still an operational track. I'm sure the engineers navigating that track have a lot of colorful opinions about it as well

While certainly suboptimal track, much of that seems to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion due to extreme telezooming.

There's a great video from 1944 of how much rail you have to knock out before derailing a train. Pretty humorous voice over too.

Train Wreck: Experiments To Derail Trains

https://youtu.be/Xplxx0Fc4ew

that VO sounds much more modern than the footage. I was hoping for authentic 1940s voice over like from Newsreel type of footage.

here is a different voice-over: https://youtu.be/RK8cWY7MOtU

also not original, but an explanation in the description: The quality of the audio was poor in the copy of the film we obtained. Some audio restoration was attempted, but the results are less than ideal.

i guess the original audio will remain lost.

here is a related video with some original voice (first original is half a minute in): https://youtu.be/Zz0dadJoyzc?t=36

cool! thanks for digging

The European network is far more fragmented than it seems. There are differences in power supply, track width, station and tunnel width and signalling such that you cannot easily cross borders in a train. There are lots of trains that are equipped for multiple signalling standards and have variable axles. But in general, you can only go to the immediate neigbouring countries, as soon as you cross another border you have to change trains. In some countries, like France, you even have concurring standards within the same network. A hypothetical Lisbon-Moscow connection would need to change trains at least 2, maybe 3 times.

I don't think, therefore, that "total track length" has any useful meaning in Europe.

Here is some maps to illustrate my point:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_rail_electrif...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge_in_Europe#/media/F...

Throwing in Moscow with Europe is a choice. Spain and Portugal are doing their own thing according to your rail gauge map, true, but there are many city pairs crossing multiple borders that are accessible nonstop, see the route map for the Austrian sleep railroad, nightjet.

https://www.nightjet.com/en/dam/jcr:6a8041cb-0131-4ad3-84fd-...

Yes. But if you look at the electricity system map, you'll see that those are mostly north-south connections through easy transitions. They skip the south of France, east of Poland. Some of those routes use different locomotives than all the others. And the number of border crossings is limited for that reason.

picking a worst example isn't inditative of the state of things. The us uses our rail a lot more for freight traffic.

I meant specifically from the perspective of passenger rail, yes. I don't doubt that the US has significantly better freight rail.

(I've crossed borders several times on European trains, and it was never a problem. By contrast, crossing the US-Canada border by train is an exercise in boredom and frustration.)

Notably most of the BN part of BNSF was not built with land grants.

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