That’s the problem. What’s good for freight is bad for passengers and good passenger lines are horrible for freight. Even the model is different (B2B versus B2C). The mixing is a big problem and any disruption in the current network would affect a lot of people. The private freight carriers are doing a fine job.
Typically everyone does both freight and passengers, but it'll be better at one or the other. Passengers want fast trains with few delays that get close to population centers. Freight doesn't care about speed as much but cares about the overall throughput and wants to end up in distribution centers.
Thing is, freight trains are a far better use of the track than passenger trains: the system is ideal for slow-moving bulk cargo that doesn't care if it has to sit on a siding for a week, not to mention that it's a much less damaging way of moving heavy material around than trucks. Passengers, meanwhile, want to go specific places at specific times, and that just does not coexist well with freight. Better for passengers to travel by air, private car, dedicated high-speed rail, and other systems focused on the job.
Honestly we need to build parallel rights of way anyways.
The freight rails are slow and dilapidated. It would make more sense for passenger railways to be separated from freight railways entirely rather than to try and squeeze into inadequate trackage. We don’t try to unload air freight through passenger terminals or vice versa.
that kind of depends on your definition of "problem."
One thing that is potentially a problem is that freight rail has been so optimized and cost cut to the bare bones that the network is now extremely brittle. This tends to impact passenger rail more than freight rail (passenger rail is legally supposed to have priority, but in practice this has never been enforced and the freight carriers usually just make passenger rail take the hit instead of freight), but this is a problem in major hubs like Chicago.
And I bring up coal and oil, to say that if major changes were to happen in those markets and they dried up, the American freight rail network is not set up to easily pivot to things like fast freight that might take its place, and then we would have a freight rail network that is great for addressing a nonexistent market. Fast freight needs generally straighter, faster lines than what exists today.
How so? If we prioritized passengers, then rail freight will regularly take several extra hours to get places. Would that even be a real problem? Would anything else bad happen?
At the same time, private carriers are losing out to trucking because trucking doesn’t pay a fair cost for the use of roads and RRs have to pay to upkeep their tracks. In the end, it may have been better for them to be able to offload the infra costs.
Due to this, they followed the model of minimizing infrastructure, equipment, and crew expenses which left them with slow service only good for a sliver of shipping. The freight RRs are efficient from a monetary cost standpoint but people are willing to pay more to get something quickly and they can’t compete on speed.
If someone else owned the tracks, and leased capacity, the track owner would try to maximize the use of tracks and clear trains quicker and provide new services. We’d see the complete opposite effect, the return of passenger trains, improved signaling, and maybe even electrification.
Freight makes better use of rail infrastructure than passenger transit does. Freight should monopolize the rails; that's the allocation that does the most good for the most people.
Rail can support freight of course and complements trucks very well. Rapid transit can’t really support freight if it wants to operate at any reasonable frequency - you just can’t load any real quantity of freight in a few minutes. Even baggage is stretching it a lot of the time on busy lines. And the slow acceleration times and length of freight trains severely conflicts with the needs of passenger rail. Therefore, freight and passenger rail need to be separated for either to perform well. On the other hand, cars and trucks are a lot more similar in performance and size, so they can share the same roads just fine - it’s only an issue if the road is completely choked with trucks.
A few comments here noting the conflicts between freight and passenger service on shared lines. Would it be a better use of resources to eliminate token passenger rail service to keep it from interfering with freight? Bus is as good or better than passenger rail in many cases, but there is no real alternative for moving hundreds of tons of materials.
Freight does better when it is slow and cheap per ton mile. They also tend to be long to save on labor costs.
Passenger rail is pretty much the direct opposite, requiring fast acceleration and speed. So the two do not mix well (freight trains will slow down passenger trains.)
The only country that operates both high speed rail and freight successfully, by China, literally built a whole separate new high speed network to reserve for passenger trains and to leave freight the freed up space on legacy lines.
Freight currently makes better use of US rail infrastructure than passengers do, because freight is less time-sensitive than passengers and the geography of the US makes that a problem for rail. It does not make sense to penalize the most efficient user of a resource to benefit one of its least efficient users.
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.
The problem is that its hard to schedule both passenger trains and freight trains on the same railways, and the benefits of transporting freight by train instead of truck are both economically and environmentally more important. OTOH high speed rails with their own tracks are awesome and let us get around this dilemma.
Because things which are designed to be good at one thing will not be as good at other things. There's only so much rail network and given a conflict either freight is a priority or passengers are. You can't have two number 1 priorities.
It is not in excellent shape. It is riding the coattails of investments made a century ago, optimizing profits through consolidation, relentless squeezing of costs, and minimal investment in growth. Freight rail companies have constantly reduced routes and cargo types while increasing latency, discarding just about everything in order to focus on low-cost bulk transportation of extremely high-tonnage regular loads like coal and grain, while becoming more and more uncompetitive and impractical for transportation of flexible or timely loads like containers, refrigerated products, and manufactured goods. The freight trains have meanwhile gotten longer and slower, and overgrown the rails that they run on. American freight rail is eating its seed corn without investing in the long term. It remains efficient at transporting the bulk goods that it is currently handling, but it's far below what freight rail's potential should be, or perhaps even what it once was. Trucking has taken up the difference, but that's not because trucks are better-suited to such jobs. It's because the highway investments are paid for by the government, and railway investments are not.
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