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.
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.
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.
Freight rail has significantly different requirements than passenger. People want to move quickly, with frequent daily trips (eg 24 trips per day, moving at 90mph). Freight does not care about train speed so long as it is reliable (eg 1 trip per day moving at 50mph). Logistics networks can plan around reliability.
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.
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.
This is a myth oft-repeated on HN. US freight rail does cheaply transport a lot of tonnage, but it is a shadow of its former self, after a half-century of digesting the investments of the past. It's squeezed out efficiency by running longer and slower trains (that exceed the length of the rail sidings!) transporting bulk goods on predictable schedules between fixed points (like grain and coal), while slashing routes and reducing maintenance. It ships a lot of freight, but it does not do so effectively, quickly, nor safely, or flexibly.
The existing rail system is very efficient for heavy freight.
High speed intercity rail needs a new railway system. There can't be any grade crossings with highways - a 200 mph train hitting a flatbed semi with a bulldozer on it is not something you want to have happen. The railway has to have curves of much larger radius that are banked correctly for high-speed operation. High-speed rail can have steeper grades, since the locomotives are powerful and the cars are light. High-speed rail is electrified with overhead catenaries, while freight is diesel with high clearance for double-stacked container cars.
That makes sense. Rail freight carriers built their own infrastructure with success (50% of US freight transport is done by rail vs 10% in Europe). High Speed Trains are nice, but they shouldn't be built by dismantling what's already working, and working well.
Does freight need to go that quickly? Quicker than a normal high speed train? Is there enough value in the freight going faster to fund the infrastructure?
I read somewhere previously that the USA (and Canada) largely prioritise (bulk) freight over passenger travel when considering rail transport. Freight trains are given priority over passenger trains, when passenger trains having to wait for, yield to, and let freight ahead of then.
Further the tracks in NA are designed to carry weight rather than for speed. The design considerations are quite different.
On the other hand, in North America, massive amounts of freight are moved by rail, extremely efficiently, and railways are generally pretty profitable. A train might be a mile long (as a child, you count the cars as you go past on the highway, and 80 or so was pretty standard). The freight companies own the rails and their trains get priority over passenger trains. Via Rail has exactly the same problem in Canada.
In contrast, in Europe, while some cargo is moved by rail, the focus is on passengers. Freight trains (all trains) are short, and passengers have priority over freight.
A quick google brought this up, though I haven't read through it in full:
On high speed lines, you often can only run either one of those. Not only that freight trains are slower, but they often aren't allowed to use tunnels at the same time as high speed passengers trains. So on some of the most direct and modern tracks, freight can only be run at night.
"This is actually worse for freight than for passengers, which is why the speed limits on curves are lower for freight trains than for passenger trains"
I'm 91% sure that this is less to do with freight specifically and more to do with the amount of weight involved and how it's distributed in each car. Then again, I'm no expert on freight trains.
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.
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.
reply