Now of course much of the route Amtrak wants to use is single track, which is especially a problem for freight trains since they're so long that only very long purpose made sidings can possibly allow them to pass. But on the other hand it's also notable that CSX insists daytime is "peak" for freight and that doesn't make much sense. Since passengers mostly want to travel in daytime, it makes sense to shift freight to the night, not schedule all the freight for daytime and then insist that passengers be re-scheduled instead.
Also tire dust is bad for you and other living things, train wheels have much less rolling resistance.
Freight and passenger rail rail do not mix. Amtrak needs to build their own track instead of complaining
According to what metrics? For example my country has over five times greater length of railway network per unit of area. For electrified rail, which is increasingly important for sustainability reasons, that advantage goes up to a factor of 200 (!).
Then invest in increasing the traffic capacity and enforce Positive Train Control on all rolling stock -- https://www.aar.org/campaigns/ptc/
Add in electrification where possible and allow for other "carriers" to utilize the lines to maximize utility.
It's makes it much harder to schedule, since you have to clear half the track before Amtrak can enter it, otherwise it would reach the back of the freight train.
> After publication, in response to a Motherboard request for comment, CSX dismissed the Amtrak stunt. “It takes a freight train about 8-10 hours to travel between New Orleans and Mobile,” a CSX spokesperson said in a statement. “Focusing on one point of a line that traverses approximately 138 single track miles, major ports and Interchange points and then purporting that it is indicative of the operational realities of the entire line is grossly misleading. Anyone that understands railroad operations, including Amtrak, would know that.”
So CSX argues the entire 138 mile track would be blocked if there is a single train travelling anywhere on it?
Efficiency!
Perhaps the government will be looking to add some tracks or dedicated bus lines the next time it funds a highway project. This demonizing of cargo when its absolutely needed in the US is just stupid.
It’s hard to imagine many examples of rail freight that is justifiably more time-sensitive than passenger rail. Surely very time-sensitive freight shipments already go on trucks or planes, for obvious reasons.
Yeah, no kidding! I've always understood the relevant law to be the other way around - granted, this based mostly on what I've heard from other Northeast Regional passengers while we're sitting at a dead stop waiting for a load of orange juice or something to get the hell out of the way, as seems reliably to happen at least once per trip.
[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/railways-earning-f...
Trying to block Amtrak from services should automatically incur a funding pause for those tracks.
This suggests a belief that typical Americans are dumbasses for preferring other forms of transportation, so they need elites to force them into what’s best for them.
The American rail system is focusing on what rail does best: haul heavy freight. When you emphasize passenger rail use, you’ve switched to an inefficient use of rail to appease hardliners.
I think this is an unfair characterization. The belief is that rail is currently _not_ great in the US and that's why people don't choose it. The theory is that if we make passenger rail better, then consumers will be more willing to choose it over alternate, less environmentally efficient methods like driving or flying.
I think there are other (unacknowledged by public transport advocates) concerns people have with passenger rail. Namely that every light rail car in every major city smells like piss already and feels much more unsafe than your own car. Until that reality is addressed and mentally ill people are not permitted to share the same space as normal, functioning members of society, people will continue to choose their own private transportation whenever possible.
If you don't think this is a reality then you should take a look at some of the shit that happens on BART and NYC subways. My chance of getting pushed off the platform or being the victim of a racially motivated hate crime is 0 in my own car.
Then we don't want these CSX tracks that are shared with freight. We want all new high speed tracks that can compete. Most people in the US have a car, and you need a car most places you want to go. Fast trains mean they are enough faster than a car to be worth it. Otherwise people look at the train and think "but I have a car sitting in my driveway that can get there faster for less money". Most of the cost of a car is fixed (insurance and payments is by time not mile), so the cost to drive one more trip is very low.
That said, passenger train travel makes about as much economic sense as riding in a horse-and-carriage. It's romantic but it's technologically obsolete.
That's why freight trains get priority over passenger trains (despite what the law says on the books) because there's no economic incentive and little political will to do otherwise.
The only way it will come back is if the intercity travel keeps getting better and better, and even then routes on the coast may work but once you hit the midwest the distances get unreasonably far.
Chicago to Los Angeles would be ten hours at Nozomi speeds assuming zero stops. Even the proposed California high-speed corridor doesn't have much to offer.
A direct flight from Zürich to Milan takes 1 hour, plus hours of nonsense before and after, departs 3 times a day from the airport, arrives to the Milan airport, and costs €550.
So passenger trains sound pretty competitive to me, at least short-distance ones.
That should be an hour long trip with 1-2 trains an hour
I don’t see any non-stop airline flights between those cities for the smattering of dates I checked, suggesting that the airlines don’t find a lot of direct travel demand between that city pair.
The key with these kinds of service is you have to run them consistently for 10-20 years before they start seeing the kind of ridership that can support the train density. People don't start building their lives around a transport option that they can't rely on.
It's a similar distance as Penzance-Exeter in the UK which has 22 trains in each direction on a weekday
I'd definitely choose that instead over a 3.5 hour plane ride (good for that route), especially with sleeper cars.
On top of that, there are abandoned train stations closer to my actual destination than the nearest airport. With drive time on the Texas side, the train would actually be faster, door to door.
On 8 heading out of San Diego, you go from sea level to 4000 feet, down to (IIRC) 3000, and then back up to 4000 before going back down to sea level. Once over the Arizona border, you pretty quickly go from sea level up to about 2000 feet.
40 goes through Flagstaff, the elevation of which is almost 7000 feet. Albuquerque is at 5000 feet.
So, where in the world do you find HSR that transits not one, but three or four 4000 foot passes?
Does anyone know what kind of freight Union Pacific hauls to/from San Francisco? Mostly late at night?
>Amtrak, a government-chartered corporation, was created in 1971 from the ashes of private carrier passenger service. As part of the deal, freight rail companies generally retained ownership of the tracks, along with the responsibility of maintaining them and running service. Amtrak received the rights to run trains along those tracks. By law, Amtrak’s passenger trains also have priority over freight traffic.
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/livestream-viewership-...
I saw when this first started getting attention, and it was from Gen-Z rail fans who thought that it’s hysterical some young social media manager convinced Amtrak to stream on Twitch. YouTube wouldn’t have gotten the same reaction.
And not to say the actual videoplayer is also better, live rewind for example which still non-existent on Twitch
What will replace that space or will their revenue just slowly drop?
[0] https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AAR-Coal-Fact...
I suspect intermodal rail transport will probably do well as long as we keep buying cargo from Asia on post-Panamax ships.
The solution is to build parallel lines and more passing sidings and dual track, but that's expensive and nobody involved wants to.
For comparison, the double tracking of Los Angeles to San Diego has been in progress for 20+ years now and is at about 2/3s double track. https://www.sandag.org/index.asp?projectid=260&fuseaction=pr...
And if you really want freight and passenger to coexist you build entirely separate lines (or quad track allowing overtaking).
Edit: Not sure why I’m being downvoted. This was a thing for a long time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_train
The should also straighten the lines in the areas near Fremont so the train could run at at least 180mph.
Then, they should run the Amtrak every 15 minutes within metro areas.
Instead, they did the BART extension.
None of this infrastructure was well planned, it was all adapted to hundred year old rail lines with very low capacity in mind. I ride the Amtrak regularly and it's basically half empty most the time. Nothing to do with covid either.
All that to say, the freight is probably more important.
And how would surface Amtrak trains be better than BART? BART's pretty solid as regional transport. BART moves more people per year than the SFO airport!
Surface Amtrak trains have a much higher top speed than BART, and are nicer. If the freight lines were owned by Amtrak, and maintained to commuter rail standards (instead of freight standards), the existing trains could roughly double their cruising speed for most of the miles of that line, and be much faster than BART. Also, the Amtrak trains have bars and restrooms. They are quiet and don't stink.
Edit: Also, building out a multilane freight rail from the port to east of Oakland would allow the port operator the option to increase port capacity.
They could move containers by rail to a rail yard outside of the bay area commuting zone. They could load trucks there, cutting hours of stop and go truck drive time during commute hours.
So you're right, in places where the density is high and the distances are not too great passenger trains can be competitive. (Especially if the tracks were laid a century ago, or more, eh?)
In the US we have "the largest highway system in the world." (For better or worse.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_System_(Unite...
That is definitely not going to support trains that would have to average well over 140mph (there are 4 proposed stops between the 2 ends).
In the areas where Amtrak is separated from freight traffic or owns the rails, it performs well enough, if not great. The "late trains get later" problem kills the major interstate routes, leaving them as land cruise ships for vacationers.
Example insanity:
Capitol Corridor trains have 4 cars. Two are handicap accessible on the bottom level and/or also bike cars. The Berkeley station has two platforms on one of two tracks. (The other track has four platforms).
In practice, very few handicap people use the train, since the stations are basically only accessible via bike, car or corporate shuttle. However, many people ride bikes to the train. This causes a shortage of bike slots, so people would bungee their bikes to rails, etc in the handicap area, always leaving a few seats for wheelchairs. (The conductors would make a bicyclist move their bike in the vanishingly rare scenario when the handicap spaces filled up. This wouldn't even delay the train in practice.)
The liberal politicians got wind of this, deemed it discriminatory, and forced the conductors to crack down on bike bungees, potentially stranding commuters even though the train was mostly empty.
Amtrak responded by adding bike slots and redesigned the cars. The conservatives deemed this unacceptable, since the new cars don't contain gun lockers.
You see, you're allowed to carry a gun on Amtrak, but it must be secured in a locker. So, Amtrak retrofitted the bike spaces so one closet (for three bikes) had a sliding metal door that could be locked. The door partially blocked one of the three bike slots (so road bikes fit, usually, but not mountain bikes), and if (and I don't think this ever happened, even once) someone brought a handgun on to a full train, they'd kick 2-3 cyclists off the train.
Why did I mention the Berkeley station, you ask? Well, with the lower bike storage density in the cars, sometimes (1 of ten rides), the train would have departing bikes in a car without a platform. The "platform" is a concrete pad that sits about 6 inches above the gravel. For liability reasons, allowing a bicyclist to disembark on gravel was a firable offence.
Instead, the bikes were supposed to move to the correct car one station earlier (though it was not always known which car was correct). Failing that, they could attempt to take the bike upstairs then downstairs to move cars, or be dropped one station later (downtown Richmond), then bike back to Berkeley.
It would have cost a few hundred in concrete to add two platforms, but it would have required coordination between multiple bureaucracies.
Also, they were forcing cyclists into dangerous situations to avoid liability. I'd love to be on the jury if something ever happened!
Note that I just made a statement about the sanity of Texas Central and Brightline.
This kind of thing happens all the time where the perfect becomes the enemy of the good, and solutions that everyone knows are silly become the standard.
Although I've done it, even doing the whole Northeast Corridor is a stretch. DC is a pretty short flight from Boston whereas it's a full day by train.
Right now Youtube is having to write huge checks to lure away big streamers from Twitch. They'll probably do better with that than Mixer.
Atm the optimal strategy is to livestream on twitch then pay an editor to create highlight videos on Youtube.
Live rewind existed on Twitch until very recently, though it wasn't called out in the UX: you just have to click on the person's profile and go to the VOD page. However recently Twitch added a gate where they changed the default "automatically make VODs available immediately" from true to false, as a mitigation strategy against their DMCA volume (RIAA scrapes twitch VODs in volume).
https://www.southernrailcommission.org/new-orleans-to-mobile
> To initiate new daily passenger rail service between New Orleans and Mobile with two round trips each day, morning and evening, with stops in Bay St. Louis, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Pascagoula offering business-friendly service.
But if a train, even a slower one, stopped in my smaller town or the next one over it becomes much more interesting.
This sounds like a JIT failure more than anything else.
For California if they could do SF to LA in ~3 hours, that would be a huge change since the current drive is about twice that (and extremely boring from my drive last week). LA to Vegas is another route that should exist given the massive amount of 45 minute flights and cars that already do that.
Personally I'd rather have a slow train that kept schedule than a fast train that rarely did.
2) Your characterization of light rail does not remotely resemble the reality my partner and I have experienced in the Boston area. We have yet to ride in a rail car that "smells like piss". It's fast, safe, and inexpensive. We do not have to worry about enduring property damage to our private vehicles, or injury from other drivers. I suspect our experience is not unusual among MBTA riders; per the 2015-17 MBTA Systemwide Passenger Survey [1], 70% of subway riders have access to one or more cars and 82% hold a valid drivers license.
2) In my experience Boston was _the_ best light rail system in the US I've ridden by far. Only China was better (because it ran at faster travel speeds and had more modern train cars). You should come to the Bay and experience BART for what light rail in other cities is like. I recommend the Civic Center station and any of the Oakland stations for the optimal experience. Bonus points for if you decide to walk for more than 1 block around said stations at night.
Public rail in many places is a dangerous, dirty, and chaotic experience. A gritty, anarchistic, and truly American experience. Yet, this is why I loved it. I hope it never changes -- a complete departure from the sterile, arrogant, and uninspiring clinical reality of air travel. I'd rather be stabbed on the red-line than watch it descend into a dystopic clinical, authoritarian, dressdown administered by the TSA in the name of safety.
[1] https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2022/3/27/22998488/cta-wo...
As a reference, there are only 7 Acela trains per day (or at least on Monday 4/25) from Boston to New York, two cities with substantially higher population and apparent demand (as evidenced by the 59 non-stop flights from BOS to any of the NYC-3 airports on Monday 4/25)
We manage to do that between a town of 20,000 and a city of 1 million for comparison. Or if you feel commuter routes are different enough to not count, a city of 60,000 and a city of 1 million with similar travel time as google maps quotes me for Boston to New York.
In my experience over the last few weeks there's barely been an empty seat.
I took the London-Paris train last week, absolutely rammed, there's 13x 900 seat trains a day at the moment, and that has all the nonsense of eurostar (airport style security, passport checks etc).
And this is on the Northeast Acela, the crown jewel of the Amtrak network and between two cities with generally functioning public transit once you arrive. Most US city-pairs would be worse.
The Northeast Corridor service is very popular. In fact, I believe Amtrak has plans to expand it given that it's pretty much the only place in the country Amtrak doesn't lose money.
A train every hour is convenient for some purposes, but for others you just want a bunch of trains early in the morning and later in the evening.
I don't think its popularity is a reasonable predictor of demand for a modern train that would be 3-4 times faster.
I'd wager if all the other competitors were also running with tech typical of the 1920's, the train would be more popular.
Fun fact: technically the boring large Pacific Surfliner trains could be "high speed rail" since they could get to 120 MPH through Camp Pendleton if the line had PTC and was signaled correctly. As it is hits 80-90 through there, but it soon has to slow down for a stop.
To do high-speed rail right you basically need four tracks - a slower local service that stops at every stop, and a faster high-speed express service that only stops rarely.
UK tried it with rail and it didn't go so well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlTq8DbRs4k
Other than the NE lines, Amtrak is a pet project.
I can see the argument for nationalized being cheaper due to not being for-profit, due to having larger negotiation power (via the government), etc.
What's the argument for nationalizing it increasing cost? Is it just "look at all these anecdotes?" or is there some fundamental economic reason.
Competitive passenger rail is high speed. High speed requires double tracks (to avoid slowing down to let trains pass), straighter rights of way to go faster (increasing land acquisition cost), and very high maintenance levels for safety and comfort reasons. Hosting is freight trains on high speed rail tracks also significantly increases their already high maintenance costs because they are so much heavier and cause more wear and tear.
Nationalization, I think, is less the driving fundamental here than the inherent conflict between timely, regular passenger services and the American freight rail system for bulk freight. The only time the freight railroads really prioritized passenger services was when they delivered mail on those trains, which is also lightweight and needs fast delivery, but that has long moved to air freight.
Well, not even air freight. How much extremely time-sensitive information is actually transported physically these days?
I have a few things like my tax return but most of what I deal with these days is sent electronically if it's really urgent.
Hold that question for the next time the MTA gets caught spending stupid amounts of money to get nothing done.
The exact people you are agreeing with now will be happy to provide you a laundry list of ways government dysfunctionalality wastes money and gets taxpayers and riders less for their dollar if you ask in that context.
A management that is not incentivized to reduce costs, or a the very least, following the operating policies set by politicians coming first before reducing costs. (It's hard to reduce costs when how you operate is decided by politicians.) The same problem that plagues government run systems all over the world.
A great post on just a few of the silly policies is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263
This argument doesn't seem to me as if it's fundamental.
Politicians are at least in theory incentivized to reduce costs since citizens would rather not pay more taxes, and in theory a politician who enacts wasteful policies would not be elected.
On the flip side, companies are only incentivized to reduce the cost charged to consumers (or in this case, companies shipping freight) in the face of competition, and long-haul freight has a massive up-front investment cost of building out rails, so there won't ever really be that many choices. This is akin to the highway robbery ISPs can still charge, even though they are private companies and the moat of laying fiber isn't nearly as extreme as that of laying rail
> following the operating policies set by politicians coming first before reducing costs
Won't it be equally true that private and public corporations will have to follow laws? That seems identical.
> A great post on just a few of the silly policies is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263
I'm trying to ask if there's a fundamental reason here, not a bag of anecdotes, and we were also talking about freight, not commuter trains, so that comment isn't particularly relevant to the comment tree you started about freight specifically.
That's a good point. Whenever I've had the misfortune of using public transport in the US, it ended up being extremely unreliable.
Commuter bus at 6:30PM on a weekday? Just doesn't show up. Have to wait 40 minutes instead of 10.
NY to DC bus? Breaks down midway, have to wait an extra 2 hours for a relief bus to arrive.
DC to NY amtrak? Union station shut down for 3 hours due to weather-related power outage.
Now maybe I'm just super unlucky, but I've never heard of weather straight up shutting down an entire train station in other countries, especially in a nation's capital.
How about shutting down the entire network? Happens after any snowstorm in the NL.
That being said, it's amazing to have a reliable and fast passenger railroad network, which functions like an intercity metro and reliably and predictably brings you where you want to be in those 363 days out of 365 when there's no snowstorm, or a system failure, or a general strike.
So transit between cites doesn't work as well until the endpoints are adequately transited themselves (or your destination is something like an airport where you can't bring your car anyway).
Taking the train to NYC by contrast a car is, in general, actively a negative thing once you arrive.
You also run into trainset issues where you want to run 5 trains in one direction and 5 back in the evening, which will require 5 trainsets, but if you run them back and forth you could do more trips with less trainsets, but some would be running off-peak (and in the worst case, nearly empty, but getting into position).
- There are about double that number of trains if you count the Regional (which you should) so ~hourly trains.
- A lot of people still fly. Especially if you live in Boston proper, flying means you can easily make a morning meeting without flying down the night before (which people with families etc. may prefer not to do)
- Especially if you're south/west of Boston or in New York's Connecticut suburbs, it's probably cheaper/faster to just drive, something I really try to avoid when it comes to NYC but nonetheless for me taking Amtrak actually involves me driving for an hour in the wrong direction/
The only way to get consistent usage is to commuter rail; commuters travel five times a day in both directions vs "travelers/vacationers" which may travel once a month or less.
The reason I'm skeptical of the numbers is that UP/US DoT reported 2.7T ton-KMs for 2018 [1]. Given that there are good reasons for 2020 in particular to be low, I wouldn't hold 2020 out as representative.
[0] https://www.russia-briefing.com/news/russian-rail-freight-vo... [1] https://www.up.com/customers/track-record/tr120120-freight-r...
That's awesome if you're not interested in carrying people, but whether a network incapable of carrying people is "a decent rail network" is something many would dispute.
Also, Russia has ~44% of population of the US, yet it still outperforms the US in absolute terms? That's quite impressive for Russia in my book. Having said that, they've always been heavily dependent on rail to lower their transportation costs. Trucks and airplanes won't work for them nearly as well. So I'm not surprised if they're placed so high in rail freight ranking.
> The reason I'm skeptical of the numbers is that UP/US DoT reported 2.7T ton-KMs for 2018 [1].
I'm reading 1.7 on that page. Am I looking in the wrong place? It says "In 2018, 1.7 trillion ton-miles of freight (calculated by multiplying shipment weight in tons by the number of miles that it is transported) was shipped by rail, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation."
What would the multiple be if you compared your country’s metrics to just the northeast corridor?
In Germany 20000 km are electrified, so around 25cm per inhabitant. In comparison to the NE corridor with a number of 1.5cm per inhabitant, this is a huge difference. To account for other railways inside the NE corridor, we can also just use all electrified rail as a reference and arrive at 3.7cm per inhabitant).
And Germany hasn't been great about electrifying it's rail.
(US transit agencies are unreasonably ignorant of best practices, including electrification and EMUs, but it's still rail.)
Also, is there any statistics for this northeast corridor, regarding region area, electrified, and non-electrified rail length? I only know where to get national statistics, so that doesn't help me a lot here.
I don't know what it looks like north (basically Portland) and south of the northeast corridor--or the non-coastal routes in New England.
Politicians are incentivized to give lip service to reducing cost, not actually reduce costs. They only need to look like they're more likely to reduce costs than their opponent, assuming the voter actually cares enough in the first place. Further, it assumes that politicians even know how to reduce costs when they have no experience what-so-ever in running a train company.
The second easiest is feeder - for example if the line between cities includes the airport, etc.
One of the bigger issues with Amtrak is the lacklustre infrastructure, that is mostly owned by freight companies (with prominent exceptions like the NE corridor). I wont say that Amtrak is great, but infrastructure is the bigger problem. No freight company is interested in upgrading, electrifying, speed increases or even building new lines. There are few private actors interested in the passenger rail sector (with exceptions such as Texas Central and I wish them the best).
I also can't imagine great results with new private actors, since non-high speed rail suffers even more from the competition with the car due to a lack of attractive or in many cases usable public transit option near the start or destination. And high speed rail is really expensive to build, so I have my doubts that private actors will be able to secure funding without any previous examples.
To fix passenger rail in America, in my opinion, you have to at least have a major rework of how rail infrastructure works.
Canada is also doing a lot better with rail than America, with a major priority being the independence from freight companies in regards to infrastructure.
Furthermore this is causing friction when the contract ends, and another bidder wins.
Compared with how it has been before this, when it was all state run, much hilarity ensues on all levels of operation.
Beginning with the engineers, now dispersed over different sub-contractors, not being able to assist when there is a shortage in another sub-contractor.
Leading to delays, because available ones have to be brought in by taxi from over 100+ of km away.
'Streckenkunde' == knowledge of tracks, stations and switching/marshalling/maintenance yards is degraded, because the sub-contractors don't do it all, everywhere, anymore.
Regarding maintenance, more empty movements to farther away, because not every shop can or will service everyones locos, trainsets.
For some 'unexplainable' reason, during the slightest bad weather chaos ensues, every year, again and again. No matter if cold, heat, wind, wet.
While aeons ago, they advertised with an engine plowing through the snow, caption: "Everybody is talking about the weather. We don't."
[·] https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/68er-plakate-a-946587.html...
[·] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo8l2qp2N8M
[·] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGhJW5TvIuQ
This was the truth, at the time.
What we have now are a few high-speed tracks connecting the larger centers, and regional mass transportation in and around these. Outside of that it's patchwork, or doesn't exist at all. (Though it did! Once.)
In addition to that, it costs much more, and is inflexible to book.
It's FUCKED!
edit: Also 'type-ratings' for the engineers. Before pseudo-privatization and splitting in sub-groups, there was only distinction between Diesel(hydraulic) and electric locomotives, and passenger vs. freight rail. Those were about a dozen each, and they usually could drive all of them from their branch of diesel or electric. Today? Not anymore.
That's oversimplifying things a little too much – type-ratings were a little more fine-grained than that even during the days of the Federal Railways.
Privatization does essentially nothing to fix the issue of rail ownership or use. Making the service privately owned gives it no leverage to operate efficiently: that comes from regulation, which is a separate problem. The biggest difference with a privatized service is that a private service can be bullied out of existence.
So both sides cherry picking their favorite gov agencies does disservice to improving things and doubling down on what works, and criticizing what doesn't.
That, and the requirements for high speed rail are pretty much opposite of the host freight railroads, which are content to have slow, low-standard track because it’s cheaper.
The NEC is decently run. The rail conditions are so bad that if we were to privatize rail pretty much everything outside the NEC would dry up.
Is it true high speed rail, no, but at this point the startup costs of actual high speed rail are so high that private entities pretty much never take it on. (Brightline in Florida is not actually high speed rail due to the speed, Texas Central is floundering due to lawsuits, Las Vegas to LA is on constant life support, etc.)
The only profitable private railroads are the ones that started off with cheap property to develop near stations and never sold it off, essentially becoming landlords/property developers in their own right. But the horse has left the barn for that in the US and nearly all city center property is expensive for a singular entity to just buy up and redevelop.
So just saying "state owned is bad" may no be the full answer, just a part of it. There are many factors that play a role and may lead to a different answer for a different country.
The vast majority of passenger trains and all railway stations are owned and operated by NS: again a private company with the Government as sole shareholder.
Various other private companies are running local services, and all freight traffic is done by private companies too.
When we talk about air vs rail we are talking about hours and days vs. days and weeks.
Within the Sydney metropolitan area, commuter trains are operating among freight trains at 5-15 minute frequencies, though with dedicated freight bypass lines in some places.
One issue in the USA, alongside private ownership of the rail lines, is oversized freight trains and resulting overbuilding required of passenger trains for crash safety. Unfortunately that rules out high-performance EMU designs as used in other countries. I believe Caltrain had to get an exemption for their ongoing electrification upgrades.
Where lines are constrained they can invest in parallel tracks and increase current capacity. Everybody could win in this way.
It’s hard to rank such systems but the US is a long way from #1. Being for example 113th in terms of miles of track per population.
In terms of efficiency we rank 31st in terms of miles of electrified track at a paltry 2,000km which significantly increases costs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...
Don’t get me wrong I have heard people say the US has the #1 rail network, but objectively I have never seen anyone actually back it up.
It made sense until Katrina destroyed a bunch of the infrastructure and Amtrak had to stop running. The fight is to restore service, not create a new service.
Do city streets make a profit? How about sewers?
The value of those resources is immeasurable - they enable trillions of dollars of economic benefit in the US alone.
Instead of trying to nail on rail to cities it should be part of comprehensive travel planning that includes roads, etc. But selling it alone gets things like the California High Speed rail which hasn't sped anywhere, and dampens further similar projects.
Amtrak is a state owned enterprise. It is for profit, but it’s understood that it’s an economic multiplier.
We demand that public transit be self-sufficient, while subsidizing private personal transportation. The market is a great "figure out the most efficient solution" mechanism, but not if you skew it in favor of one particular solution as we're doing now.
If only there were some other way to collect funds for roads. One idea could be that governments require some kind of annual "license" that they charge you for. Alternatively, since private automobiles involve a large capital purchase, maybe we could levy some kind of fee or tax on the purchase to cover annual road maintenance.
https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-amtrak-train-rail...
This idea that services shouldn't turn a profit is a massive problem.
AFAIK there a blackout periods for freight on the Sydney Trains network during the morning and afternoon peaks, though.
Plus the "dedicated freight bypass lines in places" nowadays is basically the complete route between the southern limit of the suburban rail network at Macarthur and Port Botany via Enfield Yard, plus a stub from Enfield towards North Strathfield. So major track sharing (especially with super-long interstate freight trains) only really happens from Strathfield on the line towards Newcastle, and that again is at least three or even four-tracked for parts of the way within Sydney (although unlike the southern half it's not exclusive freight infrastructure).
Plus whatever local-ish freight traffic might still exist around Western Sydney, towards the Blue Mountains, and along the coast to Wollongong.
Longer trains are more efficient. That is why we run them
Oops, I missed that.
> Although I don't know what the pre-Katrina traffic looked like on that route
I don't know either. I didn't live in the area at the time, and I wasn't easily able to find any numbers.
> Though of course you're competing with a not terribly long drive.
Very true. I've driven part of it a number of times. I-10 can get bad with traffic in some areas at some times of the day, but I suspect the total driving time from New Orleans to Mobile to be around 2.5 hours normally. I'm certainly not authoritative, though.
I'm certainly in favor of that, but my point is not "we should subsidize everything equally" so much as "pay attention to one-sided demands for self-sufficiency".
(To the extent that it's viable, I think "equal" subsidies would lead to a better outcome and uneven subsidues, since it would allow the market to sort out the most efficient way to meet people's desires, but I'm not sure that's even remotely possible.)
Most things do just look at parking and gas tax, but licensing fees are negligible compared to gas tax. The car sales tax might be a big source to make a difference, though. A few states don't have a sales tax on cars, but most do, and that may outstrip gas tax revenue if people buy frequently enough.
It's also much easier to compare as a baseline of decent rail infrastructure, since it implies a minimum condition of the line and a certain amount of investment in the last 100 years (and it was much easier to compare for the NE corridor, since that contains most electrified rail in the US). Most countries that are considered to have a great rail network have a lot of electrified lines, beginning with Switzerland but countries as Russia have also invested a lot in electrification. Electrification is a lot of effort, and it will take multiple decades to achieve a decent percentage in the US if it were started right now with a lot of political backing.
Many transit agencies in the US, including the one in Boston, are planning electrified rail (as they're aware of the benefits as well) but are unable to construct it right now (and likely the next 10 years) due to funding and ownership issues.
It's not impossible to run decent service over non-electrified rail, but the slower acceleration, near impossibility of high speed as well as the increasingly low availability of DMUs make it harder and, coupled with the higher fuel costs, unattractive.
Properly assessing the state of the routes without using electrification as an easy shortcut was way too much effort for me.
In short: Just because you have a lot of gravel roads everywhere doesn't mean you have a decent road network
Boston's MBTA owns its tracks (generally all the way to the state border), so ownership isn't the issue. Instead, it's been an issue of opposition to electrification. Ex: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/23/massachusetts-...
I'm not completely up-to-date on this, though -- has it gotten better in the last couple years?
Very glad germany has the opposite problem (Schönrechnen), where expected value is artificially kept high and expected costs low for politically wanted rail projects. It's also bad, but less so?
