[HN Gopher] Amtrak is streaming an empty railroad on Twitch
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Amtrak is streaming an empty railroad on Twitch
Author : CrazedGeek
Score : 139 points
Date : 2022-04-10 13:37 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.vice.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.vice.com)
| carapace wrote:
| First of all, I love trains. I've taken more than one trip across
| the continent (N. Am.) and it's incredibly fun, and you see so
| much of the country, and meet so many interesting (and annoying
| sometimes, sure) people. I recommend it wholeheartedly.
|
| 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.
| dottedmag wrote:
| A direct train from Zurich to Milan takes 3.5 hours, departs
| every hour from the the center of Zurich, arrives to the center
| of Milan and costs EUR30.
|
| A direct flight from Zurich 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 EUR550.
|
| So passenger trains sound pretty competitive to me, at least
| short-distance ones.
| carapace wrote:
| The answer to this is the same as the answer to gaadd33's
| comment: Distance and density. Europe and the East Coast are
| densely populated and the distances between the population
| centers are relatively short. The reasons are even the same:
| both were laid out largely before the advent of motorized
| transportation.
|
| 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...
| gaadd33 wrote:
| To fly from NYC to Philly will take at least an hour on the
| plane, plus about an hour to go from Manhattan to the airport,
| plus 30 mins or so to go from the Philadelphia Airport to
| Philadelphia...the train takes an hour and departs/drops you in
| the center of both cities. How is that technologically
| obsolete?
| bombcar wrote:
| Short-range intercity can be usable, but cross-country travel
| in the USA is honestly just impractical by rail. Should it be
| kept operational? Certainly! Should it be seriously
| considered as a competitor for airlines? Unlikely.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| Anything you turn from a 2-3 hour flight into an 8-10+
| (especially overnight) train trip has pretty much lost you
| every business traveler--and lots of others as well,
| particularly if it isn't any cheaper.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You don't have to even look that far afield. I did a ride
| between NY Penn and Rochester NY that took longer than the
| 6 hour drive because of delays.
| bombcar wrote:
| Heh I remember transiting Chi-town to PA and getting
| stuck waiting for the Late for Sure Limited (Lakeshore
| Limited).
|
| Personally I'd rather have a slow train that kept
| schedule than a fast train that rarely did.
| gaadd33 wrote:
| Oh I agree, it's a regional thing and not cross country (at
| least this country). It should connect metro regions and
| maybe have some long thin routes between those.
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| Before we try to do SF to LA in ~3 hours, let's get LA to
| SD down from 3 hours (this seems to have improved about
| 10 minutes in 20 years).
| superdisk wrote:
| Isn't Amtrak a government-run operation? Why is it "beefing?" Why
| is everything so stupidly infantilized these days?
| bombcar wrote:
| Amtrak, like the post office, is given impossible tasks by
| congress and then yelled at when they fail to complete them.
|
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| It's not just congress. On the west coast, they also answer
| to the state legislatures and multiple municipalities.
|
| 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!
| bombcar wrote:
| Too bad we couldn't change the definition of "wheelchair"
| to include bikes and get them to comply under the ADA.
|
| 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.
| politelemon wrote:
| 'is streaming' is a bit generous or premature; at present Amtrak
| have only posted 3 videos, 30-60 seconds each, all 4 days ago.
| iso1210 wrote:
| New Orleans has a population about 400k, Mobile 200k, it's 140
| miles.
|
| That should be an hour long trip with 1-2 trains an hour
| ac29 wrote:
| Take a look at the current tracks from the article:
| https://i.imgur.com/7Tyt2Y3.jpg
|
| 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).
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| MegaBus has two buses each way on that route every day. If
| demand increased, adding another bus each way would be
| relatively trivial.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Suppose you ran 20 trains per day each way between those city
| pairs. What do you guess the average passenger load would be on
| each of those trains? Could you average even 100 pax per train?
| Would whatever the average total fare collected be enough to
| cover just the direct operating costs of that service?
|
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| By this logic, we should also stop allowing passenger cars on
| the freeways between those cities, and let shipping companies
| pay for road maintenance if they care.
| sokoloff wrote:
| When considering whether to run 4 or 20 round trips per
| day, it seems like the fundamental economics ought to come
| into play at some point. Otherwise, you eventually run out
| of other people's money.
|
| 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)
| hedora wrote:
| Those two stations are 215 miles apart by car, and the
| trip takes 4 hours by train. The train is only averaging
| 53mph.
|
| 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.
| iso1210 wrote:
| Manchester-London is 180 miles and takes 2h20, which
| isn't great, certainly not high speed, but that's being
| rectified. Pre covid it was 3 trains an hour for the
| majority of the day.
| bombcar wrote:
| At some point even if your train is infinitely fast, you
| can't get above a certain average speed, dependent on the
| distance between stations.
|
| 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.
| Macha wrote:
| If you can only fill 7 trains per day between cities with
| metro areas of 5 million and 20 million, there is
| something else wrong with your network beyond just how
| much people like to take trains or not.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's also not really correct. That's just the Acela.
| There are about the same number of regional trains (which
| are almost as fast; I generally don't even take the Acela
| unless someone else is paying). For people to the south
| of the Boston metro, there's also the option of taking
| Metro North from New Haven.
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| It can be a lot easier to fill a train if scheduled right
| between a 20k city and a 1 million one - as the people in
| the 20k have real reasons to not live in the 1m and still
| commute there. But if you're looking at 5m vs 20m the
| "city" experience will be similar so ... why not move to
| the city you work in?
| Macha wrote:
| It's almost like I gave a second example that's not a
| commuter town for this exact reason.
| iso1210 wrote:
| People travel for reasons other than commuting.
| [deleted]
| bombcar wrote:
| Certainly, but if you look at the percentages, the
| easiest way to get to consistent usage is to use
| commuter. "Business" can be considered as a superset of
| commuter, short irregular business trips, but that's
| harder to build an entire line on (it can certainly be an
| upgrade to an existing line).
|
| The second easiest is feeder - for example if the line
| between cities includes the airport, etc.
| iso1210 wrote:
| It's crazy, there's currenlty only 1,000 seats an hour
| between Lonodn (10m) and Manchester (3m), having dropped
| from 3tph for covid. My experience recently is those
| trains are taking at least 600 people per hour now.
|
| 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).
| saalweachter wrote:
| It also becomes tricky because adding more trains (or
| more train cars) at different times does different
| things.
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| For commuter rail inside a city it's nice to know "the
| trains run every X minutes so I can always get one" -
| between cities it can be more clumped around commuter
| times.
|
| 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).
| sokoloff wrote:
| Note that none of those are "full". The most crowded of
| those 7 Acelas is showing ~50% full with the others split
| between the <20% and ~40% categories.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are a lot of factors.
|
| - 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/
| bombcar wrote:
| I suspect LA-San Diego might be better (Pacific Surfliner
| is an Amtrak cooperative with the LOSSAN corridor). Those
| trains end up really full (though off-peak ones are
| comfortable; the rush hour trains are standing-room
| only).
|
| 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.
| rascul wrote:
| There's a lot of people and a number of cities along the
| Mississippi Gulf Coast where the train could also stop.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Those intermediate stops must be severely limited if the
| train is to cover the 140 miles in an hour total as
| hypothesized above.
| bombcar wrote:
| And one of the huge values of a train is that it CAN stop
| at those intermediate stops. A high speed few stop rail
| from the big city near me to the next one is meh as by
| the time I've driven into the city I might as well just
| keep driving to my destination.
|
| But if a train, even a slower one, stopped in my smaller
| town or the next one over it becomes much more
| interesting.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If you had the high-speed train stop only at Gulfport
| (xor Biloxi) and _maybe_ at Slidell, with regional
| service to pick up the small towns in between and take
| pax to the larger stations where they'd change to the
| faster train, you may be able to preserve a competitive
| Mobile to New Orleans time and still catch the
| intermediate city travelers. (This is a limited version
| of the airline hub-and-spoke to allow the trains to be
| faster door-to-door than driving, because if you can't be
| better than driving in some obvious and personal way,
| many people will quite reasonably just drive the 140
| miles on their own schedule and terms.)
| bombcar wrote:
| That's the hardest part - people will drive 6+ hours even
| when there are faster/better options _if they need a car
| at the other end_.
|
| 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).
| ghaff wrote:
| At one point I was doing quite a bit of driving between
| New Orleans and a worksite in Pascagoula (just across the
| MS/AL state line from Mobile). This wouldn't have been
| very interesting at all given Pascagoula was very spread
| out and I absolutely needed a car once I was there. And
| it's a pretty straightforward ~2.5 hour drive.
|
| Taking the train to NYC by contrast a car is, in general,
| actively a negative thing once you arrive.
| rascul wrote:
| It's part of the plan
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| So basically the plan would seem to be to service New
| Orleans, Mobile, and the Mississippi coast with a
| relatively leisurely train trip as an alternative to
| driving or bus (given there is apparently no real air).
| rascul wrote:
| So it would seem. I did check just now and find no direct
| flights from New Orleans (MSY) to Mobile (MOB). The
| shortest flights (about four hours) appear to stop in
| either Houston or Atlanta. I have no idea what bus
| service there might be.
| Macha wrote:
| Modern airport security is fatal for overland airline flights
| of short durations. An hour by train? You could drive or
| train that in the time between when you're told you should be
| at the airport to the time the plane actually takes off
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes. New Orleans to Texas cities like Houston can make
| sense but not Mobile. Also public transit isn't great in
| either New Orleans or Mobile. It's not much more than a two
| hour drive. People will just get in a car.
| rascul wrote:
| > Yes. New Orleans to Texas cities like Houston can make
| sense but not Mobile.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| My comment was in reference to flying. Although I don't
| know what the pre-Katrina train traffic looked like on
| that route, it's not unreasonable to have a train
| connecting the Gulf coastal communities in that area.
| Though of course you're competing with a not terribly
| long drive.
| rascul wrote:
| > My comment was in reference to flying
|
| 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.
| inamberclad wrote:
| Went to New Zealand. My $30 ticket plane ticket from
| Christchurch to Hokitika was probably subsidized, but the
| sheer ease and accessibility of the flight was remarkable.
| I just got on the plane. No security, hardly a briefing.
| Walked out onto the ramp and got on. The plane was a Q-400,
| the size of which would make TSA security mandatory in the
| US. I know airlines like Surf Air in California were trying
| to specialize in small-plane (Pilatus PC-12, which is less
| than 12,500 lbs) but I haven't seen them grow much.
| sueders101 wrote:
| If you're looking for an example of a successful small
| plane airline in the United States: Cape Air.
| iso1210 wrote:
| It's interesting how the American view of transport (other
| than private cars) has to make a profit. Other countries fund
| transport to various degrees as it increases economic output
| and provides social needs.
|
| It's a similar distance as Penzance-Exeter in the UK which
| has 22 trains in each direction on a weekday
| missedthecue wrote:
| The word "profit" has turned into a pejorative in the
| modern lexicon for some reason, but don't think it's
| unreasonable that such services should be self sufficient
| lkbm wrote:
| If all competitors were too, and we internalized all
| externalities, sure. But personal car travel is currently
| heavily subsidized (no, the fuel tax does not cover road
| costs), and has some serious negative externalities (both
| from air pollution, and traffic accidents being the
| leading cause of death for people under 30).
|
| 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.
| coredog64 wrote:
| > But personal car travel is currently heavily subsidized
| (no, the fuel tax does not cover road costs)
|
| 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.
| missedthecue wrote:
| The conclusion here should be that gas taxes must be
| increased, not that we should continue to pump infinite
| money into the industrial sized furnace that is Amtrak.
| sokoloff wrote:
| We pretty obviously don't demand that. Amtrak has lost
| money every year since it was created in 1971.
|
| https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-amtrak-train-
| rail...
| lkbm wrote:
| We don't legally mandate it, but every discussion about
| Amtrak and public transit involves people insisting it
| should cover its own costs while ignoring the fact that
| the alternatives don't.
| jdasdf wrote:
| Profit is not a sin. On the contrary it is a 1 to 1 match
| with the good that it is providing its users.
|
| This idea that services shouldn't turn a profit is a
| massive problem.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Coca Cola provides more good to people than water,
| penicillin, insulin, cabbage, schools, libraries or
| parkland, because Coca Cola is more profitable than
| water, penicillin, insulin, cabbage, school, libraries
| and parkland?
| GraemeMeyer wrote:
| Nobody reasonable is saying that profit making is a sin,
| the argument is that only allowing/focusing on direct
| profit making services is shortsighted and misses
| opportunities to implement services that have indirect
| benefits
| gatlin wrote:
| Zero-sum profit certainly requires taking from someone
| else to succeed. This doesn't make it immoral as such but
| it creates malevolent incentives.
| bombcar wrote:
| Replace "profit" with "worthwhile" and it may become more
| clear. Literally getting to fare-box neutral is one way of
| determining if something worthwhile but it's not the only
| one. But people are bad at comparing the value of projects
| that are in the billons, and the value may take decades to
| appear. It can take 10+ years for people to decide to start
| using commuter rail that was just added, even if it would
| have worked fine the whole time.
| iso1210 wrote:
| You're assuming the direct profit is the benefit, and
| ignore all externalities.
|
| 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.
| closeparen wrote:
| Yes, the parcels along those streets pay property tax.
| Municipalities that supply infrastructure to vacant or
| low-value used are in trouble.
| bombcar wrote:
| No, I'm saying it's hard for people to see the
| externalities and so they're inclined to ignore them. And
| in the US at least, sewers are "farebox positive".
|
| 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.
| oneoff786 wrote:
| It's not, and random commenters don't mean anything.
|
| Amtrak is a state owned enterprise. It is for profit, but
| it's understood that it's an economic multiplier.
| bombcar wrote:
| Los Angeles to San Diego is 120 miles, and the Pacific
| Surfliner serves it - and it only has 9 trains a day (round
| trip). (I notice that they've added a early morning service
| getting to LA at working time).
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| antisthenes wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| The tracks that Caltrain uses between San Francisco and San Jose
| are shared with Union Pacific freight trains, and that works.
|
| Does anyone know what kind of freight Union Pacific hauls to/from
| San Francisco? Mostly late at night?
| toast0 wrote:
| Last time I rode Caltrain, nearly all of the spurs to nearby
| buildings were blocked by fences, presumably trying to reduce
| 'trespasser incidents'. IIRC, UP would generally only operate
| on the tracks outside of the hours Caltrain was scheduled; and
| that's part of why Caltrain to Gilroy isn't scheduled often
| (there's a lot more frieght activity south of San Jose
| Diridon).
| xg15 wrote:
| > _Between 8 a.m. and 12:49 Central Time, Amtrak says it counted
| three trains on CSX's tracks._
|
| > _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!
| ars wrote:
| It's not quite as silly as it sounds - Amtrak trains travel at
| twice the speed of cargo ones. So you have to clear at least
| half the track before an Amtrak train can enter. But there's no
| problem running a cargo train after the Amtrak one.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Maybe some lines, but here they travel at the same speeds.
| makomk wrote:
| It's probably not quite that bad, but if there's a single train
| anywhere on any single track section that means the entire
| section is effctively blocked off to traffic in the other
| direction, it sounds like there's a lot more than a single
| freight train on it at any given time, and Amtrak wants to run
| round trips down the entire 138-mile track a couple of times a
| day.
| protomyth wrote:
| The government should build its own line. Its no joke to delay a
| cargo shipment, there are tons of penalties built into those
| contracts. As a railroad, you have a very specific timing on when
| your train needs to arrive, and the people doing the loading need
| to have it loaded in a set time period. Frankly, given diesel
| prices, cargo is much more important than people at this point.
|
| 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.
| rhino369 wrote:
| Especially since Amtrak (aside from the NE regional line)
| doesn't provide any service that Greyhound or Megabus don't
| already provide.
| leetcrew wrote:
| greyhound doesn't provide any service that your own two legs
| don't provide. it is quite a bit faster though.
| bombcar wrote:
| Amtrak has an extensive bus line to extend their reach - and
| they can't sell you a ticket on it unless it includes a train
| segment.
| rhino369 wrote:
| We don't need a subsidized government run bus line, the
| private ones work fine.
| zeckalpha wrote:
| They are often subcontracted to the private companies.
| bombcar wrote:
| To be fair, all bus lines are government subsidized,
| unless one somewhere has built their own roads - maybe
| the Disney shuttle?
| monsieurbanana wrote:
| How many businesses are _not_ government subsidised, if
| we follow your logic?
| zeckalpha wrote:
| Now you are onto it!
| [deleted]
| majewsky wrote:
| Exactly.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| In theory fuel taxes and registration taxes on the buses
| should cover their share of that cost but the math
| becomes tricky when you start trying to calculate the
| time and space value of different road segments.
| kingkawn wrote:
| Broad ideologically motivated dismissals of entire
| avenues of problem solving seem suspect at best
| rhino369 wrote:
| I would characterize the Amtrak support as ideologically
| motivated solutions in search of a problem.
|
| Other than the NE lines, Amtrak is a pet project.
| [deleted]
| kube-system wrote:
| I thought this until I tried to book a ticket recently
| and found that megabus had cancelled the route I wanted
| to use entirely.
| ghaff wrote:
| Just because a private bus company canceled a route
| doesn't mean that the government would (or perhaps
| should) operate routes that don't meet some metric of
| popularity.
| kube-system wrote:
| It is very common for governments to operate or subsidize
| unprofitable public transport routes in the name of
| accessibility.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yes, but they invariably draw the line somewhere.
| katbyte wrote:
| except they clearly don't? especially in places that need
| to be connected but will never be profitable.
|
| UK tried it with rail and it didn't go so well:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlTq8DbRs4k
| tshaddox wrote:
| > Its no joke to delay a cargo shipment, there are tons of
| penalties built into those contracts.
|
| 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.
| protomyth wrote:
| Well, no. Multiple plants around this country process crops
| for multiple end-products. These plants are fed by the
| railroads and need to keep running. Delaying a passenger
| doesn't shut down the airport, but it could shutdown a plant.
| There are large classes of freight that are not shipped by
| planes and trucks are a feeder for rail in those situations.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Why do we prioritize industrial efficiency over
| individuals? Surely businesses can adapt to minor
| disruptions. That's the promise of an efficient market,
| right? So then why do we force those inconveniences onto
| the public, where delays and disruptions are personally
| costly and frustrating? Why do 250 people need to have
| their travel plans disrupted instead of the supermarket
| having eight varieties of mayo instead of nine, or my new
| sofa arriving in thirty days instead of twenty five?
| protomyth wrote:
| Because more individuals depend on our nation's logistic
| system than would benefit from riding the train.
| Passengers have an array of solutions to solve their
| problems. Individuals are served by choice and dependable
| delivery of goods. Why should 250 passengers be valued
| over thousands of people?
| bastawhiz wrote:
| But that's based on the idea that our logistic system is
| running on a razor thin tolerance. The logistic system
| can be designed with buffer and resistance to disruption.
| There is no reason businesses and process can't become
| tolerant to disruption rather than shifting pain on to
| individuals.
| bluGill wrote:
| Why are we running low speed long distance trains in the
| first place. You just made the argument that Amtrak
| shouldn't run on this track at all, but get its own track
| with real high speed. I agree with that idea
| tshaddox wrote:
| Of course a huge amount of agricultural freight
| transportation goes by freight train. The question is
| whether these train deliveries are highly sensitive to
| small delays (relative to the time the train journey
| normally takes). Is it a major problem for these
| agricultural plants if, say, a particular freight train
| that normally takes 48 hours to complete its journey
| instead takes 60 hours due to delays?
| protomyth wrote:
| The addition of 12 hours to a freight contract can cause
| a processing plant to require a shutdown. There is a
| reason for the penalties in those contracts. Worse, the
| people who show up to load a train and have a small
| window are now waiting for the train and stuck in a
| holding pattern. Disrupting the freight system when
| passengers in the US have multiple other ways to get from
| A to B is problematic. The whole idea that moving people
| from A to B is more important than moving cargo from A to
| B doesn't take into account the jobs and time required to
| maintain our complex economy. Delays will increase the
| price of basic goods which has a big effect on the rest
| of the economy. Look at what happens when energy is more
| costly then add other basic product building blocks to
| that rising price beyond just fuel. That person buying
| groceries is more important than passengers riding a
| train.
| Teever wrote:
| Why can't these plants float a 12 hour buffer of stock?
|
| This sounds like a JIT failure more than anything else.
| protomyth wrote:
| Why spend extra money for an event that doesn't happen
| very often? Elevators have storage (it's part of their
| function) so plants don't have to deal with that.
| Changing our manufacturing/ agriculture sector to cater
| to people wanting to ride the train seems a poor decision
| based on the needs of everyone else.
| dehugger wrote:
| Yes. logistics is a house of cards. Small delays cascade
| and pile up, leading to systemic problems with staffing,
| spoilage, contract violations, etc. A 12 hour delay means
| an entire shift of workers doing nothing while they wait
| for the product to arrive, for example. When you have
| production scheduled out months in advance it matters
| quite a bit, which is why contracts are so strict on this
| in the first place.
| tru3_power wrote:
| Dumb question but why can't they just tack on passenger carts to
| freight trains?
| ch4s3 wrote:
| No, the freight trains don't make frequent stops or start and
| end in places you would want to travel to/from.
| ghaff wrote:
| Because freight trains can be really really slow. (I suspect
| there are a ton of other issues as well--including that you
| probably wouldn't even cut costs very much.)
| bombcar wrote:
| The freight railroads fought for years to get Amtrak setup so
| they could ditch their unprofitable passenger rail. Freight
| trains also don't travel in the same way passenger rail wants
| to, and rarely stops, and is slow.
|
| 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).
| tannedNerd wrote:
| I think the easiest solution would be tie all infrastructure
| funds railroads receive with the delays Amtrak incurred on their
| tracks due to freight trains. Do it to many times and you lose
| out all funding for the rest of the year.
|
| Trying to block Amtrak from services should automatically incur a
| funding pause for those tracks.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| The railroad lobbyists aren't who Congress would be afraid of
| if they passed such a law, it's the industries that make use of
| the freight rail system that would have Congress running for
| the hills. The US has an extraordinarily robust and high-
| capacity freight rail system. Anything that interferes is going
| to get extreme blowback from those who depend on it. Amtrak's
| very existence could be in danger if they started causing
| freight users logistics problems.
| graupel wrote:
| But why Twitch? Seems like YouTube would be the place to get
| eyeballs on this, if not in place of Twitch, along with it.
| josephpmay wrote:
| Twitch is more culturally relevant, so they get more attention
| streaming on Twitch.
|
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| Would it? Who watches streams on YouTube??
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I do, pretty much daily. Casino poker streams and stringers
| livestreaming their news chasing, for my evening
| entertainment. Sometimes other stuff if it surfaces in my
| feed.
| gambiting wrote:
| I asked because that's a functionality of YouTube that I'm
| only barely aware of - it's interesting to hear how people
| use it. Thank you!
| easrng wrote:
| VTuber fans.
| e2le wrote:
| Why not do both?
| haunter wrote:
| A lot of people? Youtube is streaming live sport events,
| concerts, political rallies, conferences etc. It has a far
| bigger reach and scope than Twitch.
|
| And not to say the actual videoplayer is also better, live
| rewind for example which still non-existent on Twitch
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| Discoverability for streams is awful on Youtube. Twitch
| also has a very different culture surrounding channels and
| chat. This results in Twitch having a much smaller
| audience, but far higher engagement.
|
| 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).
| pedrosorio wrote:
| Twitch is still the dominant platform for live streaming (as of
| early 2022)
|
| https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/livestream-viewership-...
| technick wrote:
| Stream is down... looks like Amtrak has already given up.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| I really don't see rail expanding in the US in my lifetime for
| many reasons, including our national debt, the loss of the
| dollar's reserve status, the similar functionality provided by
| trucking (negative externalities like pollution, shared cost of
| road upkeep, and employment levels notwithstanding), the right of
| way vs NIMBYISM of expanding rail and running extra lines, and
| finally the inability to complete infrastructure projects in the
| US on time, in budget, and with quality. I am just not optimistic
| about any of this.
| mlindner wrote:
| What Amtrak should actually be doing is closing down all it's
| long distance routes followed by privatizing it so it can
| profitably run it's short haul lines.
| mlindner wrote:
| This whole thing kind of ignores the fact that the rail companies
| own these lines and Amtrak doesn't want to pay them enough to
| make it worth their while.
| hehebdbdwjeb wrote:
| And your whole comment ignores the fact that government
| subsidized those rail lines under the condition that the
| companies run passenger rail. They failed to do so, and
| government gave them a free pass. Government should have
| stripped them of their rights due to breach of contract
| tialaramex wrote:
| For comparison, the Elizabeth line (Crossrail) under London will
| launch with 12 trains per hour (one every five minutes) and will
| eventually go to 24 trains per hour during peaks. CSX says 8-10
| through trains _per day_ use this route, plus 1-3 "coal and
| grain" trains and "numerous" local services. The reported
| scarcity of trains on the stream matches this.
|
| 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.
| ars wrote:
| That's not a comparison. Amtrak trains travel at like double
| the speed of cargo trains.
|
| 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.
| thot_experiment wrote:
| Maybe we should just nationalize the existing rail network.
| America has a decent rail network but unfortunately much of it
| is private leading to this bullshit. Here's a fun rule of thumb
| for ya: Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of weight
| per wheel. A truck moving things does something like 400-600x
| as much damage to roads as a car.
|
| Also tire dust is bad for you and other living things, train
| wheels have much less rolling resistance.
| pirate787 wrote:
| The United States already nationalized passenger rail--
| Amtrak is the sorry result. We should privatize passenger
| rail, following the successful models in Germany and Japan.
| Amtrak should lose control of the nationalized Northeast
| Corridor and those timeslots awarded to bidding private
| companies.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| As a German I wouldn't call it successful. Maybe seen
| through pink glasses while stoned or drunken. Otherwise?
| Meh...
| chrisandchris wrote:
| I think the answer is more complex. In Switzerland, it's
| mostly state-owned (with a few local concessions) and it
| runs very smooth and we have one of the most punctual
| railroads in the world.
|
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Well, Amtrak was the nationalization of the _services._ The
| main issues with Amtrak today are that they do not run the
| tracks as well, so despite laws with contrary intent they
| never have priority on the rails.
|
| 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.
| pirate787 wrote:
| Incorrect. Amtrak owns and operates the most valuable and
| viable stretch of rail in the United States, the
| Northeast corridor stretching from DC - Baltimore -
| Philly - New York City - Boston.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Hm. I meant to say that "The Amtrak-run NEC is decently
| run."
|
| 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| How does it work in the Netherlands? They do such an
| awesome job I can't believe it. I think it is semi
| privatized. But I don't know the details.
| danhor wrote:
| Germany has very little private competition in the longer
| distance sector (>2h) and almost no private infrastructure.
| Both are controlled by the state owned DB and there are
| ambitions to make the infrastructure part even less profit
| oriented and talks about moving it out completely into a
| separate, even less private, entity. In the regional rail
| sector there are more private actors, yes, but they work
| routes tendered by the state with pretty strict
| requirements as to frequency, vehicles and branding. It's a
| bit more like contractors in housing construction (and most
| of the infrastructure is still directly or indirectly state
| owned).
|
| 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.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Where even the regional operators are at least partially
| owned by the states in turn.
|
| 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.
| bastawhiz wrote:
| Sounds a lot like the argument against a public USPS: put
| it in a position where it can't succeed and has no
| leverage, then point at it and say that a public model
| can't possibly work and that it needs to be privatized.
|
| 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.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| USPS is awesome. But there are other examples of extreme
| incompetence in Government from local to Federal. SSA,
| USCIS, DMV (state), etc.
|
| 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.
| jhgb wrote:
| > America has a decent rail network
|
| 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 (!).
| sixstringtheory wrote:
| America has huge swathes of undeveloped and uninhabited
| land. Maybe over five times as much as your country.
|
| What would the multiple be if you compared your country's
| metrics to just the northeast corridor?
| jhgb wrote:
| I'm pretty sure we also don't have equal rail density in
| all regions. So this is just the average. Nevertheless
| I'm not sure how this can swing a factor of two hundred.
| (If I use rail length per capita instead, which somewhat
| compensates for unpopulated regions, the advantage is
| still ~1.4x for non-electrified and ~50x for electrified
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| The Northeast Corridor where the Acela runs is all
| electrified. In fact the electrification of the tracks
| north of New Haven (so an engine switch was no longer
| needed) was one of the big benefits Acela brought to even
| the non-Acela trains.
|
| 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.
| danhor wrote:
| Adding up the metropolitan areas around the NE corridor,
| there are ~40 Million people living there, around half of
| Germany. The NE corridor includes 611km of electrified
| track (or 1500km for all electrified rail in the US,
| adding up all the numbers mentioned in the Wikipedia
| page).
|
| 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.
| jefftk wrote:
| I'm confused: why are you only counting electrified rail?
| For example, all of Boston's regional rail is diesel
| locomotives.
|
| (US transit agencies are unreasonably ignorant of best
| practices, including electrification and EMUs, but it's
| still rail.)
| danhor wrote:
| Electrified Rail is important for great passenger rail,
| by nature of it's much higher acceleration and lower cost
| for increased service. This is part of great rail
| infrastructure for me and much of the electrification in
| the USA has been rolled back due to the different needs
| of freight providers and cost-cutting measures. Countries
| like India and China are also huge on electrification for
| dedicated freight routes, so it's not just a passenger
| service thing.
|
| 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
| jefftk wrote:
| _> 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._
|
| 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/massachuset
| ts-...
|
| I'm not completely up-to-date on this, though -- has it
| gotten better in the last couple years?
| danhor wrote:
| The Wikipedia article implies a consensus on
| electrification and budgetary issues for Boston, but Alon
| Levy is a better source and I doubt anything major
| changed in that time frame (even if according to the
| wikipedia page first test runs are planned for 2023 on
| already electrified track). That's even worse,
| artificially pushing expected costs up for common sense
| things is ... something else.
|
| Very glad germany has the opposite problem
| (Schonrechnen), where expected value is artificially kept
| high and expected costs low for politically wanted rail
| projects. It's also bad, but less so?
| willnonya wrote:
| i think youve misread this issue. i can assure you that
| the us is aware of best practices. the private swctors
| awareness of the economics involves drives a lot of their
| behabior while the politicians lack of awareness of
| anything but the political costs drives the regulatory
| side.
| coredog64 wrote:
| I'm not 100% sold on these [0] values as I have seen
| different elsewhere. But according to this, the US is third
| behind China and Russia on rail ton-miles. I think those
| are reasonable numbers given a) the compactness of the US
| compared to Russia and b) that unlike China, the US has
| major ports on both coasts and doesn't need to traverse the
| entire country.
|
| 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...
| jhgb wrote:
| > But according to this, the US is third behind China and
| Russia on rail ton-miles
|
| 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."
| mlindner wrote:
| America's freight transport is cheaper than anywhere else in
| the developed world. Nationalizing it would increase that
| cost, not lower it. It would also push a lot more freight on
| to the roads instead of rail because road transport would get
| closer to the price of rail transport.
| TheDong wrote:
| What is the mechanism that causes nationalized rail to
| inherently be more expensive?
|
| 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.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| > What is the mechanism that causes nationalized rail to
| inherently be more expensive?
|
| 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.
| mlindner wrote:
| > What is the mechanism that causes nationalized rail to
| inherently be more expensive?
|
| 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
| TheDong wrote:
| > A management that is not incentivized to reduce costs
|
| 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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Freight rail is perfectly fine spending minimum amounts
| of money on clapped out tracks that twist and curve.
| Freight rail is never going to compete with air freight
| on speed, and is also much faster than boats, so speed is
| not really a priority.
|
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| >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.
| bobthepanda wrote:
| Mail services also included small parcels, and if
| anything those continue to need ever faster logistics.
|
| When we talk about air vs rail we are talking about hours
| and days vs. days and weeks.
| ghaff wrote:
| Fair enough. The transfer of information has moved online
| to a significant degree. But the transfer of small/light
| physical stuff has definitely moved into shorter latency
| territory.
| pstuart wrote:
| Thank you for putting that out there -- I've been saying the
| same thing.
|
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| The us has the best freight railroad in the world handling
| much more freight than countries that have nationalized rail.
|
| Freight and passenger rail rail do not mix. Amtrak needs to
| build their own track instead of complaining
| Retric wrote:
| America ranks #3 in terms of rail freight in terms of
| weight * distance behind Russia and China which sounds fine
| except there are few large counties. https://en.wikipedia.o
| rg/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...
|
| 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.
| pirate787 wrote:
| Not sure of your source, but by most measures of
| efficiency US freight rail is the best in the world, and
| also carries 10x weight * distance per capita than
| Europe.
| Retric wrote:
| Weight * distance/population we again rank #3 behind both
| Russia and Canada. It says less about or rail system than
| our large size and relatively low population density.
|
| 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_co
| untries_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.
| krolden wrote:
| Well the original railroads were mainly funded by taxpayer
| subsidies so I could say no CSX, etc needs to lay their own
| track, and fund it themselves.
| throwaheyy wrote:
| This is American rail transportation's learned
| helplessness. Freigh and passenger rail mixes just fine in
| other countries.
| makomk wrote:
| As far as I know, the UK is about the only country that's
| made this work reasonably well, and that's with pretty
| much all routes double-tracked or quad-track for the
| major ones, and much less freight rail than the US and
| worse passenger rail than Europe.
| throwaheyy wrote:
| The exurban areas of Australia's three largest capital
| cities. For example, the Central Coast line north of
| Sydney has half-hourly electric intercity trains
| interoperating with freight on a line that extends 165km
| from the city. Melbourne and Brisbane have similar lines
| radiating out to regional areas.
|
| 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.
| pstuart wrote:
| The problem is rights of way. Getting land is a lot more
| difficult than when the railroads first started and were
| given _free_ land.
|
| Where lines are constrained they can invest in parallel
| tracks and increase current capacity. Everybody could win
| in this way.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| I'm wondering if this would hold true, if you'd 'overbuild'
| the existing rights of way with overpass-like structures
| where it makes sense, instead of for instance doing it all
| over again from scratch for hypothetical hyperloops,
| maglevs, etc. and have long distance passenger rail running
| mostly grade separated over them. This would also give
| better views! :-)
| kjs3 wrote:
| The trains on the Tube under London aren't 3 miles long.
| trenning wrote:
| How screwed are commercial rail companies going to be when coal
| finally phases out?
|
| What will replace that space or will their revenue just slowly
| drop?
| kube-system wrote:
| Coal transport by rail is already way down:
| 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.
| newsclues wrote:
| In Canada we ship oil via rail because the rail barons blocked
| the pipelines.
| pg_bot wrote:
| Coal accounts for ~11.5% of rail volume[0], so they won't be
| screwed. (obviously not great to lose that much business) You
| might see prices drop due to a lack of demand, but other
| products will still be shipped via rail. Intermodal containers
| have been increasing in volume recently and I could see that
| taking up some excess supply.
|
| [0] https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AAR-Coal-
| Fact...
| missedthecue wrote:
| I saw Amazon branded shipping containers on a freight train
| just the other week
| tshaddox wrote:
| Could those have been intermodal containers, each of which
| will eventually be hauled on a tractor trailer?
| toast0 wrote:
| Some containers go right from boat to rail, or maybe moved
| around the yard at the port to go from the boat to rail.
| Amazon may also have warehouses serviced by rail spurs, and
| not have to use trucking to get their containers from a
| rail terminal. I don't know if they do, but certainly some
| containers don't see any road on the way from the shipper
| to the receiver.
| UncleEntity wrote:
| Yep, try to catch an Amtrak out of Phoenix and you have to drive
| about an hour to Maricopa instead of the old train station
| downtown because of them not getting priority over freight
| traffic.
| hedora wrote:
| Think that's bad? Drive on the 40 (route 66) from California to
| Texas sometime. All those abandoned train stations used to be
| Amtrak stops. Modern passenger trains could hit about 200 mph
| on that terrain. San Jose to Dallas is about 1400 miles, so a
| 8-9 hour trip would be enough to ride the entire line, with
| stops at the towns along the way.
|
| 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.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I used to make the trek from Dallas to LA a few times a year.
| I have tried flying, I have tried driving, but I've never
| taken the train. Travelling solo, the flying can have you in
| the other city within a few hours. Driving solo takes about
| 24 hours. Booking a train shows arrival in 48 hours. Just not
| even in a realistic time frame.
| ghaff wrote:
| Last time I had a trip from Boston to Chicago, I briefly
| look a look at the train. It would have been a long
| overnight trip and cost about 3x the plane if I got a
| sleeping compartment. Just made no sense.
|
| 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.
| coredog64 wrote:
| Which parts are they going to hit 200mph on? I have driven
| extensively on 8, 10, and 40 into and out of California, and
| I can't recall a path that doesn't transit the North American
| Cordillera:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Cordillera
|
| 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?
| hedora wrote:
| For the specific case of the Capitol Corridor (Sacramento - San
| Jose), the government should just sieze the line from the freight
| companies, and use imminent domain to run freight lines from the
| port of Oakland out to less densely populated areas. As it is,
| freight trains run through the pedestrian areas of Jack London
| Square.
|
| 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.
| carapace wrote:
| Your ideas would be political suicide, and cost a bajillion
| dollars too. Port of Oakland is a pretty major port, your would
| disrupt service there for years, for what?
|
| 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!
| hedora wrote:
| The freight trains are regularly delayed by issues along that
| line. It runs through pedestrian plazas, marshland, hairpin
| turns in hills, etc. A straight shot east for a few miles
| would land it in flat, unpopulated areas. They'd lose freight
| access to the salt evaporation plant north of milpitas, which
| seems to be the remaining freight stop on that corridor (it
| is being decommissioned for environmental reasons, so by the
| time the rail rework was done, it wouldn't matter)
|
| 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.
| carapace wrote:
| You're making a lot of sense here. It would make things
| nicer for the cities and more efficient for the freight
| movers. I like it, but I don't see how one would get the
| economic and political "oomph" to push it through?
| throwntoday wrote:
| What about the Benecia-Martinez bridge? Sometimes the capitol
| corridor train gets stuck there because a container ship has to
| pass under it.
|
| 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.
| pvsukale3 wrote:
| In India both freight and train services are government owned and
| are part of same network. Revenue from freight subsidises
| passenger services which run in losses [1]. But in general
| passenger service is given preference over freight every day.
| Hence there are some serious delays in freight service. So
| government is building these special double electric lines across
| country especially designed for freight called as dedicated
| freight corridors [2].
|
| [1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/railways-
| earning-f...
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSsRmbUnvK4
| ykevinator2 wrote:
| I have always wondered why a startup never tried to build single
| car electric trains on the miles of idle already paid for track.
| mlindner wrote:
| Because the track is already in use. Also private companies ARE
| now starting to run trains on the tracks and building their
| own. See the brightline service in Florida. Privately owned and
| run with a great service.
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| Most of the leading comments are justified with an implicit
| tautology: "passenger rail is needed so badly because passenger
| rail".
|
| 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.
| wetmore wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| AuthorizedCust wrote:
| Sounds like an opportunity for a private company to test the
| market!
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| > The theory is that if we make passenger rail better, then
| consumers will be more willing to choose it
|
| 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.
| jswrenn wrote:
| 1) Amtrak isn't light rail. It definitely doesn't smell
| like piss.
|
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.ctps.org/dv/mbtasurvey2018/index.html
| EE84M3i wrote:
| I'm curious what line you're riding and at what times of
| day. I love the MBTA and rode it for years (Red Line and
| Green B/D) but I've definitely been on rail cars that
| "smell like piss" or similar.
| jswrenn wrote:
| We've made a point to ride all the lines, but mostly ride
| Red Line (with a dash of Green), plus the Providence
| commuter rail line. Our rides tend to be during evenings,
| so the cars aren't sparkling clean. But, so far, the
| worst we've experienced are some loose french fries.
| ceeplusplus wrote:
| 1) I've ridden Amtrak as well, and the sole reason it
| doesn't smell like piss is because there's a conductor
| who aggressively checks people's tickets and kicks people
| off who haven't paid.
|
| 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.
| binarymax wrote:
| I've got an absolutely bonkers idea: add two or three passenger
| cars to the freight trains
|
| Edit: Not sure why I'm being downvoted. This was a thing for a
| long time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_train
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| Cargo trains are usually quite long, slow to accelerate, and
| stop infrequently (comparatively, at least). Adding "two or
| three cars" would mean adding a very small amount of human
| capacity while forcing the cargo portion of the train to make
| many slow starts, and transporting people very slowly. While it
| is possible, it's a lose-lose for both cargo movers and
| potential passengers.
| throwanem wrote:
| > By law, Amtrak's passenger trains also have priority over
| freight traffic. But in practice this doesn't happen...
|
| 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.
| bombcar wrote:
| The key is they have _scheduling priority_ - and if they arrive
| at the segment on time, they get to go - but the moment there
| 's any delay, they lose their slot and the freights are now in
| priority. Combined with how much of the USA doesn't even have
| passing sidings let alone double tracks it ends up with "late
| trains get later".
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