Apparently the situation with freight is the opposite, where the US networks are efficient compared to Europe (and even China), hence so much stuff is trucked across Europe instead.
As always, take YT videos with grains of salt, but it makes good points:
Meanwhile, other videos suggest that the US’s own passenger rail suppliers (like manufacturers/designers) are basically gone because the situation is so bad, hence companies like Amtrak end up importing EU stuff.
couldn’t they add freight cars to passenger trains to help with this?
Based on my experience playing Railway Empire, passenger cars with people and their luggage is significantly lighter than a freight car of the same size loaded with cargo. This means it takes a lot more energy to get the freight moving at a higher speed, and maybe more importantly a lot more to stop (I think it takes 3-4 football fields for a loaded freight train to stop from 30mph). So just having passengers allows the train to travel at much higher speeds. Speed is something more valuable for passengers because they want to get where they are going sooner. Freight is more about total throughput volume so it may be better to have one heavier train carrying twice much at a slower speed than two trains have the size each moving faster. So while you could have a mixed train it’s not going to be as fast as the passengers want due to the heavy freight cars slowing the train down and won’t carry as large a volume as the freight customers want because some cars are being taken up by passengers.
Freight and passenger trains optimize for very different things, and those things are largely incompatible.
Passenger trains want speed, quick turnaround on the vehicles, frequent stops etc.
Freight wants efficient transport (= lower speed), few stops, turnaround time is less important.
Here in Italy most cargo is on trucks, our highways are a nightmare when it comes to traffic. The rest of Europe is usually better.
The way I understand it in the states is that all the rail lines are freight lines, and amtrack shares the rails. I’ve taken amtrak before and had to stop for like 15 minutes for a freight train because they have the right of way
AFAIK passenger trains have priority. But they have a lot of single rail infrastructre and freight games the system with trains that are too long for passing sidings, so the passenger trains have to wait.
I had heard that freight usually has priority largely because Amtrak leases the tracks from the freight companies that own the rails and usually a stipulation of those leases is a priority for the company’s trains.
Federal law requires that passenger trains be given priority
Kind of? The new locomotives are the Siemens Alc 42, but they are built in California.
Edit: To your point, Seimens makes a way better locomotive, and profits go overseas.
The US absolutely needs more and better trains. But also, the US has large areas with no population. That’s why when you look at electoral maps you need to control population density.
Even with a high quality rail system with support for populated areas of the US the map would still have large gaps and wouldn’t be nearly as full as the EU map.
Simply putting two maps side by side and saying “this one bad” isn’t great. Yes, it’s absolutely bad, but for the exact reasons this map shows.
Yeah, but excluding entire states is ridiculous.
Yeah where’s my train to Hawaii?!
Exactly. Every state has a major population hub. Excluding major cities is pretty bad. Except Wyoming. No one fucking lives in Wyoming. Why are they even a state…
In the vague defense of Wyoming and the other great planes states, quite a lot of their population growth was hindered or outright shrank due to the dust bowl which they haven’t recovered from. It’s kinda like how Russia goes through a population dip every 20 years or so due to the sheer number of people who died during WW2.
South Dakota only has two cities with populations over 50,000.
Another state that shouldn’t exist
Is it? There are entire states with populations less than that of major cities.
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Cars and asphalt roads are even more expensive.
We’re already paying to connect rural villages to infrastructure. Do you think connecting a rural village in the middle of nowhere to the street network is profitable? Of course it isn’t. Same for water, wastewater, electricity, and internet.
Besides, a train station doesn’t have to be fancy. If you make it so that people can pay for their ticket on board of the train, all you need is a concrete platform. Relatively cheap, and last approximately forever.
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Tbh do you really need all of that at any train station? Now you could sell the tickets on a website or with a machine. Land yes, that’s true. Don’t actually need really any amenities although would be good of course. Even electricity barely needed if it’s day only. Seriously at the end of the day you dont even need a roof.
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I have a few times but not recently. Why?
US also has the advantage of being one big federation with established standards bodies and a federal budget. A train that goes Between Belgium, Netherlands, Germany has to pass through 3 different electrical standards (yes, they are very different), 2 traffic regulations (left or right side), and 3 signalization standards. And they make it work.
My baby doesn’t take the morning train?
One of the many reasons why those “fuck cars” groups are so ridiculous to many Americans.
It sucks, but cars are pretty much mandatory here.
As an American, I don’t find those groups ridiculous at all - they are incredibly sane, actually. These groups can imagine what our world would look like if we reduced our reliance and dependency on cars and I believe there is a lot of value in that.
For example, I believe that we need high-speed rail for freight and passengers in the US. A nationwide push would create a lot of jobs and tractor-trailers would likely be vastly be reduced on our roadways, which I’d consider to be a big win.
This may seem like a bad deal for truckers, but their jobs are already threatened (in some part) due to self-driving tractor-trailers.
Trucking jobs should never be considered universally essential anyway. Trucking should be a stopgap until public infrastructure can improve.
I lived in Arizona with no car until I was 25 and it was pretty hard to get by even here with 340ish days of sunshine. Everything in the US is incredibly spaced out, and if you’re in any suburban place, there simply aren’t bike racks anywhere. In rural NH where I lived, there was nowhere fun to ride to, and nowhere to lock up even if I wanted to go do errands close enough for me to do on bicycle. The US, in many places, needs a page 1 rewrite of its public infrastructure.
I’d be happy if the people that decide road layouts were at the very least people that got passing marks in elementary school.
instead we get signs like:
“die if you’re a cyclist”
Is this joke?
No :(
The lines that just end at the Russian border and continue in the next country over are kind of sus.
It’s part of network that should be one network. It shall be connected again comrade
The United States is more rural than Europe.
Not to this significant a degree ;-)
That’s too vague. What would be nice to see is cities above a certain population, so you could quickly see if the US lines reaches them at all.
When I got off the ship I worked on in NYC, I could have taken a plane, train or bus back to California and I opted for the bus because I don’t like flying (unless I get to be the pilot) and it was cheaper.
I should have taken the train. Fuuuuuuuck the bus.
How long did that take you?
A whole week.
Damn. Do you get breaks? I need to stretch my legs every few hours.
Yeah, it stopped for gas, food, etc. We made even more since some tweaker just absolutely destroyed the on-board toilet within the first hour of the trip. And I mean destroyed. Not just a huge gross mess; they FUCKED that toilet up, like with a sledgehammer. IDK how they did it, but it was FUBAR.
We had a stop in, I think, Oaklahoma and it was so fucking flat it was like being between europe and the us in the ocean again. All us smokers had to form a wall to block the wind just to light up as even a windproof lighter was no match for this wind 🤣
Also made me sad hearing someone describe the smallest apple I had ever seen as the largest they had ever seen when we stopped at a McDonald’s just outside of New York.
bUt tHe US Is a yOunGEr coUnTrY! wE haVeN’t HaD mUCh TiMe tO caTcHuP.
Looks at China over the last 10 years…
Are we suggesting China is a younger country? I don’t deny they’ve caught up insanely fast though.
It both is and it isn’t. An entity know as China has existed for millennia, but the modern government has existed for a little over 100 years.
It’s an interesting thought exercise on how to treat these types of things though. Like how old is the German state? Do you count it from the original unification in 1866, or do you count the government that’s continued since the fall of the Nazi party? What about the Reunification after the fall of the Soviet Union?
The culture and the idea of a country can carry past the fall of its government, but how old does that then make the new state?
Truthfully I don’t know how to answer this, it’s neat though
No, I didn’t say anything like that. I’m saying they’re a large country that only took 10 years to build out a high speed rail network.
US was constituted in 1787. Trains were invented in 1804 and made commercial in 1829. You’ve had the same time as the rest of us.
Railways were being built in the US as early as 1795, and their first purpose-built “main line”, the Baltimore & Ohio, opened in 1830, 5 years after its British counterpart the Stockton & Darlington.
If the train (with a locomotive engine, I assume) wasn’t invented until 1804, as per the comment you’re replying to, were those first railways in 1795 used with animals like horses? Or maybe there’s a disagreement on what counts as the first “real” railway?
Trains have been in use since the mid-18th century, powered by gravity, men, or horses.
They were likely referring to an event in 1804 when, to satisfy a wager, Richard Trevithick’s second rail locomotive hauled ten tons of coal, 5 wagons and 70 men along the full length of the Merthyr Tramroad. It was this run which publicly resolved the question of whether enough tractive force could be generated with only the adhesion of the locomotive itself to the smooth rail.
While this was an experimental design, commercial use of steam locomotives started in 1812 on the Middleton Railway, which had been built in the 1750s and part of which operates as a museum railway today, the oldest route in continuous operation in the world.
Their 1829 date refers to the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, which was the first purpose-built inter-city main line, but was pre-dated by a lot of other railways.
As there’s a lot of variability of what constitutes a railway (plateway / edgeway? wood / granite / metal tracks? Common carrier or single-user? Passengers? Nags or Kettles Etc) dates are tough. The British rail industry has decided that “modern railways” began in 1825 with the opening of the Stockton and Darlington, and there has been a full year of celebrations for Rail 200. This is a somewhat arbitrary figure and reflects more the desire to rebrand the “newly” re-nationalised rail operators, because the public apparently didn’t sufficiently notice when they were actually nationalised in 2020 as part of the covid emergency. Like I said, dates are tough.
That’s the joke
I always find this one funny as perhaps more than any other nation railways massively shaped how the UA grew into what it is today.
It’s much harder to plan around property ownership when you can’t just kill the property owners.
American culture is generally anti-collective so that “independence” coupled with cars becoming status symbols ensured the death of rail in America.
the UA
… Ukraine? Normally you’re not supposed to use “the” when referring to it these days.
And while I’m sure rail is an important element of the development of modern Ukraine, I don’t think its the most significant example.
Was a typo. Meant to type US.
My goodness. Never realized Europe had such a train problem!
Plate glass vs laminated glass
That’s basically all of Canada’s lines too. Our East/West line and the Polar Bear Express is that little line at the top of Ontario.
In Europe there is definitely a difference between TGV quality lines and the regional ones which are rarely better than taking the car, sadly (speaking from my years of experience).
I wonder what the map would look like if you at least greyed out the slow lines.
Why is no one concerned that europe has taken the place of mexico??? Where is mexico now??? How is this not international news?
It’s an exchange program so that the Scandinavians can learn to cook Mexican food for us
Yeah but now Mexicans are cooking pickled herring tacos.
Hmm. I would try it.
I mean yes this does show passenger trains but it doesn’t actually show all of the passenger trains such as the lines that run in Utah nor south well over a hundred miles carrying passengers for commuter purposes. So there’s quite a few lines that are missing on here there’s also lines that run up and down the East Coast I know as well and there’s other passenger trains and other cities such as salt lake as well.
Yup, I can see multiple NJTransit and SEPTA lines missing from this map.
Yeah, you’re right. The train at the end of my street isn’t pictured.
The european map does not show all minor railsystems, I am not 100% sure but it looks more like interregional rails.
In Holland it seems to show them all but it probably differs by country.
One thing we are really really bad at in Europe is homogenising rail systems. Every country does its own thing, like voltage, signalling systems, sometimes even with their own gauge (e.g. spain). Only the high speed lines are fairly commonised.
There’s some projects going on like the ETCS safety system but they go at a snail’s pace because there’s so much installed base and design by a 25-country committee that are all trying to rope in their own industry ties is a slow process.
would be good to have a good map …
