Unfortunately not all goods are going to the same places. Nor are all goods moving at the same pace. Freight trains are a great piece of logistics infrastructure, but they can't just be US logistics infrastructure.
The US rail system is very well established and has been well built out since before the rise of the automobile. But goods need to get from the rail depot to the end destination and right now the best we have is enormous 18-wheelers and as long as those are on the road, it's too dangerous for me to want to take a smaller car
I think another issue is that we move 72% of our freight (by weight) by truck. This causes a ton of wear and tear on roads by comparison to normal cars. It would be much better to send these things by rail, but the US is unwilling to invest in its aging century-old rail infrastructure
Other countries need to use trains for bulk like the US does.
Rail is just a lot more complex to plan for. You still need trucks for last-mile transport, so for the typical short haul it sometimes makes more sense to just drive to the destination directly. Then transporting by train just takes longer which isn't always acceptable. Sometimes you just need things there today/tomorrow.
My guess? Prioritize freight over people. That's what happens in Canada. Greyhound bus when it was a thing here was considerably faster to go cross country than the train.
> Every rail line devoted to moving people around is another one that can't be used for high efficiency freight transport, resulting in freight being moved far less efficiently by trucks.
Movements of people tend to be in certain time windows though, and there's no particular reason why freight needs to move inside those windows. And if there are lines operating at capacity, it's not like the US lacks the land to build more...
The US have a well-developed and really busy network of freight trains. Trains already carry a lot of stuff that's economical to carry by train, especially bulk goods.
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.
Come on. The USA has one of the best freight railroad systems in the world. A large percentage of our cargo moves on rails. But rails can't extend everywhere, and it will seldom be practical to carry perishable, time-sensitive cargo in trains. That stuff pretty much has to go by truck.
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.
> Freight does not need to travel super fast or super high tech.
That depends on what you want to ship. In the US the train just gave up on many other class of freight. Yes, large scale slow bulk transport doesn't need speed, other things might.
Typically if there's 2 points that a large number of humans want to travel between, a large amount of goods needs to travel between them as well. If the majority of good between those places are using an inefficient mode of transport (like trucks) then freight rail is not being sufficiently incentivised. In Europe it's pretty clear that the lines were not built for this.
The reason I brought up length was that if the distances are longer, efficiencies of trains over trucks goes up steadily and by a large degree. And at the same time, the longer the distance, the more air travel makes sense for the humans in terms of time.
While it's definitely true that rail makes more sense than car or plane for human transport efficiency, the problem is that if that is causing even a modest reduction in the far heavier freight, passenger rail is more harmful than helpful.
So until the vast majority of transport of freight is by rail, better to leave the roads and planes to the humans.
Is it in Americans' interests that more freight should go by road, at a higher cost, so some Americans can travel by train? It's not a simplistic 'big business bad, passenger trains good' argument.
Alternatively, we could build more rail and move the shipping done by heavy trucks to trains. Even in their very reduced current form, and with heavy trucks getting their infrastructure for free, trains are still more economical than heavy trucks, so if we remove those factors then trains become the obvious choice.
The real problem here is that freight trains have so much priority in the US, unlike every other major country in the world.
It doesn't matter how many or what kinds of trains we have. This sort of policy will always makes trains an unreliable and therefore impractical mode of transportation.
And this is a major reason for the US leading the world in carbon consumption per capita.
The US is still littered with railroads, and rail carries a large amount of cargo.
It's still not not as dense as UK, Germany, or Netherlands, and cannot be, outside areas like North-East. What makes sense around places like NYC, Chicago, or Seattle, may not work equally well in Nebraska. Building a road and running trucks on it is just more affordable.
Also, rail is optimized to have ridiculously high throughput at the expense of latency. Rail is great at hauling grain, huge hunks of steel, wood, etc, but is too slow for time-sensitive stuff like flowers or that birthday present you ordered at a last minute with express delivery.
This is why relatively long-haul trucking exist in the US, despite the presence of a large and busy rail system, to the best of my knowledge.
(Passenger rail vs cars is another kettle of fish entirely.)
Why? Cargo is what we do best in the US and it doesn't care how fast it gets to the destination. Further, the car shown is far too small to replace the 125 car unit trains we send around the US. We have a larger, harder to replace cargo infrastructure than any passenger system.
Freight has no opinion about speed. Trains are great for this.
Reducing the total amount of freight that has to be moved, and moving as much of it to rail as possible, is the easiest improvement we can make.
I think the US falls short sometimes because of the unwillingness to admit of excessive first class things that can help subsidize cheaper options.
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