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Comment by eudamoniac | Hacker News Reader

As an American with no good rails, I've always been curious: what stops a crazy person from throwing a boulder onto the high speed tracks, or a raccoon getting on it, or other such derailment attempts? Is there high security electric fencing all around the track the whole route or something like that?

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Animals become a fine red mist when presented with these sorts of forces. The train feels a bump, but will not crash. I'm unsure at what size a rock will cause issues, but I would expect in most cases they would be kicked away by the train without issue, if a person can move them.

Animals on tracks remain a problem, although they do not pose risk to human life (just damages to the trains). One of the attempts to protect animals include acoustic deterrents, here's a Polish one as an example [1] but they are manufactured around the world. The Polish one plays sounds of predators, dying creatures, hunting dogs, etc to scare away forest animals (search for "UOZ-1" on youtube if you want to hear the sounds). Such devices significantly lower the number of collisions but unfortunately they are not 100% effective.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0j68iepI88

We do have good rails, but they're regional. the NE Corridor is pretty solid overall and METRA and Amtrak in the Chicago area works quite well.

The brand new fastest rail in the country is barely over half the speed of the Shanghai bullet train, so I have to disagree about our rails being "good" even in the best case.

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