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.
Also tire dust is bad for you and other living things, train wheels have much less rolling resistance.
Freight and passenger rail rail do not mix. Amtrak needs to build their own track instead of complaining
Where lines are constrained they can invest in parallel tracks and increase current capacity. Everybody could win in this way.
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.
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 (!).
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...
What would the multiple be if you compared your country’s metrics to just the northeast corridor?
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.
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.
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/railways-earning-f...
Trying to block Amtrak from services should automatically incur a funding pause for those tracks.
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.
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.
Note that I just made a statement about the sanity of Texas Central and Brightline.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
That should be an hour long trip with 1-2 trains an hour
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.
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.
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.
It's a similar distance as Penzance-Exeter in the UK which has 22 trains in each direction on a weekday
Amtrak is a state owned enterprise. It is for profit, but it’s understood that it’s an economic multiplier.
This idea that services shouldn't turn a profit is a massive problem.
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)
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).
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.
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.
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?
Does anyone know what kind of freight Union Pacific hauls to/from San Francisco? Mostly late at night?
>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.
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/livestream-viewership-...
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.
And not to say the actual videoplayer is also better, live rewind for example which still non-existent on Twitch
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).
What will replace that space or will their revenue just slowly drop?
[0] 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.
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).
Edit: Not sure why I’m being downvoted. This was a thing for a long time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_train
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
