Amtrak is streaming an empty railroad on Twitch
vice.comFor 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.
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.
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
This is American rail transportation’s learned helplessness. Freigh and passenger rail mixes just fine in other countries.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Those overbuild passenger trains rules are no longer in effect, though the rules didn't change too long ago
Longer trains are more efficient. That is why we run them
It’s much easier to double, triple or quadruple track the beat up American railroad infrastructure if it was in public hand, working to maximise capacity for the whole market, rather than just every piece of track being used to maximise profits for a single company, acting as a moat to ensure as little local competition as possible.
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.
For the most part they were not funded by subsidies. East of the Mississippi (very roughly) they mostly had to buy their own land and everything. Out west they were given free land, but the value of that land without railroads was approximately zero.
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.
The only free land railroads got was worthless land out west. Of course once the railroad was built the land became valuable. Out east they generally had to buy land
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.org/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.
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.
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_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.
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! :-)
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.
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.
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.
> there was only distinction between Diesel(hydraulic) and electric locomotives, and passenger vs. freight rail
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
As a German I wouldn't call it successful. Maybe seen through pink glasses while stoned or drunken. Otherwise? Meh...
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.
The rail infrastructure is owned, managed, and maintained by ProRail: a private company but its sole shareholder is the Government. Everyone running trains pays them a usage fee.
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.
> 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 (!).
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...
> 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."
kilometers vs miles.
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?
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.
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.)
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
> 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/massachusetts-...
I'm not completely up-to-date on this, though -- has it gotten better in the last couple years?
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 (Schönrechnen), where expected value is artificially kept high and expected costs low for politically wanted rail projects. It's also bad, but less so?
Levy's most recent post gives an update: electrification on the Boston commuter rail lines is still under debate. https://pedestrianobservations.com/2022/04/12/quick-note-reg...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
> 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.
> 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.
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 trains on the Tube under London aren't 3 miles long.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
Maybe some lines, but here they travel at the same speeds.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
Why can't these plants float a 12 hour buffer of stock?
This sounds like a JIT failure more than anything else.
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.
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.
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?
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
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?
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.
Why change when it works fine and will negatively affect more people than it helps. It would be cheaper to buy Amtrak it's own track than rearrange the people and companies needed to get passenger service on current tracks. Why are the needs of a few so much more important than everyone else?
Especially since Amtrak (aside from the NE regional line) doesn't provide any service that Greyhound or Megabus don't already provide.
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.
We don't need a subsidized government run bus line, the private ones work fine.
To be fair, all bus lines are government subsidized, unless one somewhere has built their own roads - maybe the Disney shuttle?
How many businesses are not government subsidised, if we follow your logic?
Now you are onto it!
Exactly.
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.
I thought this until I tried to book a ticket recently and found that megabus had cancelled the route I wanted to use entirely.
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.
It is very common for governments to operate or subsidize unprofitable public transport routes in the name of accessibility.
Yes, but they invariably draw the line somewhere.
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
They are often subcontracted to the private companies.
Broad ideologically motivated dismissals of entire avenues of problem solving seem suspect at best
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.
greyhound doesn't provide any service that your own two legs don't provide. it is quite a bit faster though.
The elderly and disabled disagree.
> 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.
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".
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...
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Sounds like an opportunity for a private company to test the market!
No sane private company would do a private railroad in the US. NYC in the 1920 put in laws to ensure private rails cannot compete and by the 1950s forced the private companies to give their system to the city.
Note that I just made a statement about the sanity of Texas Central and Brightline.
> 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.
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) 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.
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.
I thought that was part of the experience. Red Line in chicago I regularly had schitzophrenic people start to breakdown with violent tendencies in front of me, watch people shoot up drugs, smell a mixture of piss and shit and general stench of months long unwashed clothing of the unhoused. Watch the news and even the CTA employees on the red line have been known to shoot customers whom they disagree with in the back [1].
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
A direct train from Zürich to Milan takes 3.5 hours, departs every hour from the the center of Zürich, arrives to the center of Milan and costs €30.
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.
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...
'is streaming' is a bit generous or premature; at present Amtrak have only posted 3 videos, 30-60 seconds each, all 4 days ago.
I am not sure if you are aware how twitch works. Not all streams are published as video on demand. Those videos are clips viewers generated from the stream.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Yes, the parcels along those streets pay property tax. Municipalities that supply infrastructure to vacant or low-value used are in trouble.
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.
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
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.
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.
I wouldn't go with just the gas tax, but yes, ideally we would internalize all externalities via taxation.
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.)
> 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.
We could, but as they currently stand, but I've yet to see any analysis suggesting those come close to it covering the difference.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?
My understanding is insulin in the US is sold at ridiculous prices for profit, where as in the rest of the world it's just something that people who need it have it, like water, cabbage and schools.
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
Zero-sum profit certainly requires taking from someone else to succeed. This doesn't make it immoral as such but it creates malevolent incentives.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If you’re looking for an example of a successful small plane airline in the United States: Cape Air.
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.
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)
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.
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).
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.
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/
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.
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.
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?
It's almost like I gave a second example that's not a commuter town for this exact reason.
People travel for reasons other than commuting.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
There's a lot of people and a number of cities along the Mississippi Gulf Coast where the train could also stop.
Those intermediate stops must be severely limited if the train is to cover the 140 miles in an hour total as hypothesized above.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.)
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).
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.
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).
MegaBus has two buses each way on that route every day. If demand increased, adding another bus each way would be relatively trivial.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Gotthard Base Tunnel is rated for 140 mph, not quite 200 mph but close. It has a maximum depth of 8000 feet. Would something like this qualify for the route across the mountains? Optimal train path would probably be somewhat different from the current road network anyway, so road examples provide only approximate information about railway network construction difficulty.
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?
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).
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.
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
Except they weren't subsidized. They were built from the very beginning by private companies.
The article addresses the fact that, while the freight industry owns the track, Amtrak by law have priority. So either the law is being carefully tiptoed around, or the freight industry is breaking the law.
>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.
It's the first time I've ever heard of this law and isn't true in the general case or entirely not enforced. I've ridden Amtrak (outside major corridors) several times and every time the train has had to stop to let freight trains pass. It's never had priority.
I have always wondered why a startup never tried to build single car electric trains on the miles of idle already paid for track.
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.
But why Twitch? Seems like YouTube would be the place to get eyeballs on this, if not in place of Twitch, along with it.
Twitch is still the dominant platform for live streaming (as of early 2022)
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/livestream-viewership-...
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.
Would it? Who watches streams on YouTube??
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
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).
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.
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!
Why not do both?
VTuber fans.
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.
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?
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...
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.
I saw Amazon branded shipping containers on a freight train just the other week
Could those have been intermodal containers, each of which will eventually be hauled on a tractor trailer?
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.
In Canada we ship oil via rail because the rail barons blocked the pipelines.
Stream is down... looks like Amtrak has already given up.
Dumb question but why can’t they just tack on passenger carts to freight trains?
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).
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.)
No, the freight trains don't make frequent stops or start and end in places you would want to travel to/from.
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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?
Isn't Amtrak a government-run operation? Why is it "beefing?" Why is everything so stupidly infantilized these days?
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.
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!
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.