The penalties on cargo timing are pretty severe. If that cargo train is supposed to be somewhere to load / unload, it really is a problem if it doesn't arrive on time and costs the railroads money they do not want to pay. Cargo, as many SV startups have discovered, is much more profitable than passenger.
Also, the whole scheduling of cargo trains has big dollar penalties for delays in loading, unloading, and not arriving on time. Its amazing how detailed folks get about trains showing up. Cargo rail has a lot of moving parts that need to coordinate to keep the goods flowing.
Most cargo is going long distances that passengers should fly for. The needs of freight and passengers is different enough that they should almost never be on the same track.
When humans are on a train speed counts and they are willing to pay extra for it. When freight is on a train they can save money by going slower.
It happens sometimes, if there's delays and it'd make more sense for a cargo train to go in front of a slower commuter train. But absolutely not on the scale it happens at in the US.
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.
Freight doesn’t have priority, passenger trains have priority according to the law but the law is functionally unenforceable so freight steals priority from passengers.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
Trucks are much faster than train. Depending on the cost incurred in having goods be unsellable for some period of time, trucks often make sense.
Trains also aren't that much cheaper. I'm not sure why this is, but my hunch is that much of the cost in transportation is pick up from origin and drop off at destination and this essentially has to be done via truck. So, if you're shipping via train, you incur an additional pick up and drop off, since the goods need to go from the trucker's hub to the train, then from the train to the trucker's hub. That probably erases a lot of the savings that you see when you just calculate costs based on the physics of truck vs. train.
Rail companies don't know how to operate the business model required for that. They can get you a train load every day no problem, but if you want a truck once in a while at times not planned well in advance they are lost.
Right. In other words the amount of vulnerable wait time is a direct consequence of wanting to fit ever increasing amounts of cargo on fixed infrastructure.
How do truck shippers protect their wares? 1 driver per truck with eyes on the load all the way through. If they have to take a nap, it's in the truck...
How do valuables travel? In armored cars with armed personnel.
The train company isn't entitled to its business model of very long trains with loose security.
Scheduling is also problematic, particularly when you have a lot of local restrictions from cities and market changes that require freight rail to increase or just plain harvest.
that's part of it but not the main reason. the main reason is that if you make the cargo train too big to fit into the pull off on single tracked rail, then passenger trains have to yield to the cargo trains.
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.
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