It's hard to describe to the rest of the world how uncomfortable passenger rail in the US is to people not from the US. It's not "European levels but less availability". I've thought a lot about it and the best analogy I can come to is that if "German Autobahn" is the pinnacle of road engineering...and "zero roads whatsoever" is the bottom of road engineering...US passenger rail is closer to "unpaved and maybe gravel road" level of road engineering.

I've personally spent hundreds of hours on U.S. Amtrak trains in my youth. Truly, there is no equivalent in the US to the Shinkansen or even the Korean KTX or the French TGV. The Accela is a shadow of it's global peers. At it's absolute best, the American passenger rail system is the difference between being show via cannon to your destination and....maybe cargo train elsewhere. If the Shinkansen is something that fell out of a future alternate reality, the American rail system is a big box road truck, with a flat tire driving on an unpaved mountain pass with regular rock falls.

We once took a train from Rome to Florence, we sat across from a lovely elderly Scottish couple who thought the entire ride was entirely normal. We thought (this is before experiencing the magic future that is the Shinkanesen), that it was the most civilized travel experience we had ever encountered. We had a nice chat, a brief snack, and then were off to see the glories of the Renaissance.

My wife is Korean, but immigrated to the US before the KTX was a well known system. I dream of a future world where the entire planet has at least some level of passenger dedicated rail.

The cargo-first ownership policy is among the stupidest passenger rail policies I've ever encountered anywhere on the planet outside of heavy coal mining regions.

Unfortunately this fact is buried half way into the article.

From personal experience in commuter rail, derailments happen more often than one would like, but most are not severe enough to attract attention.

A single axle off the rail counts as derailment, and may get reported as such for statistical purposes. This can happen frequently on a siding or in a storage yard. Where there's no significant damage, the car body is lifted, the trucks replaced on the track, and once it is all back together, inspected.

The FRA stats linked don't seem to break down derailment causes from what I can see. To be frank, while that number looks significant, when one considers how many miles of track there is in this country and how many miles the rolling stock travels (bad track is just as guilty as bad rolling stock), it could be far worse.

Translation: We're never going to address rail union safety concerns.

Hedge fund buys asset, extracts ALL value, runs asset into the ground, leaving a shell. This is news ??

is this an uptick in instances or simply heightened media awareness of it? Obviously any derailment is bad, but it would be useful to know where on trend this is, to know exactly how bad

The US has expansive freight rail networks, but they are in poor repair as the operators, such as Norfolk Southern and CSX, cut costs even if it impacts safety. This has been a major complaint of rail works for decades, but little has been done.

There was a bill to help prevent just the type of accident that happened in Ohio by requiring electronically controlled brakes on cars carrying toxic / volatile chemicals, but it was repealed by the Trump administration.

Many are minor. Train cars can derail without even tipping over.

Source: I’ve helped clean up many derailments.