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Comment by yew | Hacker News Reader

Trains didn't die as an industry. Actually the US has an exceedingly good (privately-owned) freight rail system, compared to the rest of the world (assuming you're talking about the US from the Amtrak reference).

What did happen is that Amtrak was displaced by said freight rail system. It doesn't really own any rail - everything is under contract, with freight getting first priority contractually. Though it also has other issues.

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Amtrak is actually a creature of the federal government that does own the northeast corridor rail lines. There's no reason Amtrak can't run bullet trains on the NE corridor except that they lack the capital needed for the track upgrades, and likely are incapable of executing on the project.

From my understanding and someone editing Wikipedia, Amtrak has priority by law [1], thought the Amtrak page mentions a time window which the trains must hit to receive priority [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackage_rights 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak#Trains_and_tracks

Not at my primary computer at the moment, so can't check this.

That's not the case as far as I'm aware - but I'm not an Amtrak expert. A citation (the Wikipedia article doesn't provide one) would be nice.

[EDIT]

Looking around, it seems that Amtrak does have preference under certain circumstances. Until around 2008-2009 the rules for enforcing that were very lax and the common case was that freight was given priority. See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/opinion/04hallock.html and http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-500395_162-2522531.html for example.

Some legal changes (including the Rail Safety Improvement Act of 2008) improved conditions, mostly by setting standard rules for allocating usage - but the language of the regulations is still very flexible. There are also some issues around the difficulty of one train passing another on single-tracked rail with limited sidings.

Moving freight by train is also a lot more efficient than moving people by train. Freight doesn't need room to walk around, doesn't need to eat, doesn't need to sleep, doesn't need bathrooms.

The tohoku shinkansen in Japan can have trainsets with up to 1600 people in one 16-car train, and can slam them down the line at 250+kph, one every 3 or 4 minutes. A couple of E5s could do 1400 people at 320. If that isn't efficient then I'd love to know what is!

Japan is a very compact country. Lovely for anyone in the DC-Boston corridor, doesn't scale to most of the states however. Consider how there isn't much of anything between San Francisco and LA.

Love the Shinkansen though. My preferred method of travel within Japan.

The "compact" excuse is a cop-out, IMO. LA and SF are two massive cities well within high speed train range. Of course there's nothing in between them - there's no transport! You're thinking backwards. Put a station 150km outside of SF with a 30 minute commute and do you think there'll still be nothing there in 5 years?

My point is that these lines would be considered viable in Japan - more than viable; completely obvious. The fact we can't seem to build them - can't even take the idea seriously - is more about the nature of our society than anything to do with geography.

Its not really that though, there is nothing between LA and SF because the land is not really suitable for big cities. Japan is quite lucky because much of the island is unsuitable for habitation pushing many of the cities into a narrow band (e.g. Tokyo - Osaka). You can't really fight geography, and you work with what you got.

> Put a station 150km outside of SF with a 30 minute commute and do you think there'll still be nothing there in 5 years?

At Shinkansen ticket/pass prices? Really? Depends if we can become as rich as the Japanese. I also find this to be a bad outcome; if you work in SF, why not just live in SF? Do we really need to build a 150km-away bedroom community?

> Japan is quite lucky because much of the island is unsuitable for habitation pushing many of the cities into a narrow band

Lucky? How is that lucky? I believe this is the first time I have ever heard someone describing a lack of habitable land as "lucky".

It's true that in the last 50 or so years, the USA has become extremely suburbanised, totally reliant on cars for transport, which makes it hard to pick "winners" as to where gets a station, but you can't just use that as an excuse to do nothing!

> At Shinkansen ticket/pass prices? Really? Depends if we can become as rich as the Japanese.

The Japanese are far from "rich". Anyway, a commuter pass pass from, say, Utsunomiya to Tokyo only costs a few hundred, and is anyway paid by employer. The alternative is spending several times that on housing, in a situation of intense competition for limited housing stock in a viable commuting range.

> if you work in SF, why not just live in SF? Do we really need to build a 150km-away bedroom community?

I don't understand this answer. Obviously, not everyone can live in the CBD of the city they work in. That's the problem fast transport solves in this situation. What's your better idea?

Anyway I'm not blindly recommending anything the Japanese do. I'm just saying that fast transport has the effect of greatly expanding the viable urban living of a major city.

I agree. I'm quite happy with the current freight rail system, though I'd enjoy more passenger rail for mostly aesthetic reasons.

I don't think that's a good reason to be too disruptive towards the freight industry.

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