The US freight rail network is in excellent shape. It's the passenger network that's in shambles.

> The US freight rail network is in excellent shape.

The German rail network is in shambles - but compared to how some American freight rail looks like, even that is more like Japan's excellent railways... I've seen far too many examples like [1] for my liking on youtube. This kind of shit would actually land you jail time here if you as a responsible person would let a train run there. Or this legit, on-camera derailment [2] - no way the train would be allowed to just continue to move on, it would get a full-blown investigation and those responsible for the dereliction probably a criminal trial for endangering rail traffic [3].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ao-24274Jw

[3] https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__315.html

There's no way this is true ⊙ ﹏⊙

In the US we really believe in efficiency and cost savings, so our freight trains double as roller doasrers. Whee!

Yeah sure. That why their is constant derailment.

The constant derailment is because the operators are chasing profit above safety. Make the trains as long as possible, run them as fast as possible. At some point derailment is inevitable, if you operate the trains that way.

That makes no sense. One derailment erases any profit that would be gained from ignoring safety.

Have you seen John Oliver lately? Please go watch infoedutainment materials first.

You have to understand how profits in the rail sector work.

Making the system move faster translates directly to additional capacity. More capacity translates to more revenue. Think about it this way—if you increase the speed that a train moves by 10%, then you can make 10% more trips with the same system, in the same amount of time. You can keep doing this until profit you get from the additional capacity results is wiped out by the losses caused by accidents.

The largest rail freight company in the US has operating revenue of something like $25 billion, with margins around 50%. The recent derailment in Ohio cost an estimated $1 billion. By that math, you could increase the speed until every 4% speed increase would result in 1 derailment per year of that scale, or some combination of smaller derailments.

There are about 3 derailments per day in the US. (Note that this is a much lower figure than it was 20 or 50 years ago.)

Yeah and I'm sure they are paying for all the police, firefighter, cleanup and all the other issues caused. And they don't have to really pay for delay on Amtrak lines either.

They are systematically devaluing vital infrastructure to increase short term profit and have done the bare minimum of investment. Systematically devaluing vital infrastructure in the country.

For the US not to treat the railroads as a strategic infrastructure is borderline insane.

Yes and in Europe nobody cares about money or profit. That's why there is constant derailment there too. Ohhh wait.

There are a huge amount of accidents that have to do with bad infrastructure maintenance and bad signaling.

> if you operate the trains that way.

Yes, if you have badly maintained infrastructure and you run badly maintained trains on it, its gone cause issue.

The US has no passenger network. It's all freight rail. Passenger trains run on the freight network (and freight always get priority).

Amtrak in the northeast corridor is Amtrak owned track

Which is basically the only one in the entire country.

Everything else is freight. All the old passenger rail was converted (or abandoned/removed) long ago.

Untrue. Amtrak has an entire system https://ontheworldmap.com/usa/amtrak-system-map.jpg

What the US destroyed most of were local, municipal rail lines. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_consp...

Isn’t that a map of Amtrak routes? That’s different from a map of dedicated passenger rail, which is what I was referring to.

Brightline in Florida just started service between Orlando and Miami, with plans to expand to Tampa.

It is not in excellent shape. It is riding the coattails of investments made a century ago, optimizing profits through consolidation, relentless squeezing of costs, and minimal investment in growth. Freight rail companies have constantly reduced routes and cargo types while increasing latency, discarding just about everything in order to focus on low-cost bulk transportation of extremely high-tonnage regular loads like coal and grain, while becoming more and more uncompetitive and impractical for transportation of flexible or timely loads like containers, refrigerated products, and manufactured goods. The freight trains have meanwhile gotten longer and slower, and overgrown the rails that they run on. American freight rail is eating its seed corn without investing in the long term. It remains efficient at transporting the bulk goods that it is currently handling, but it's far below what freight rail's potential should be, or perhaps even what it once was. Trucking has taken up the difference, but that's not because trucks are better-suited to such jobs. It's because the highway investments are paid for by the government, and railway investments are not.

At the same time the infrastructure and their rolling stock is in horrible shape and in desperate need of upgrades and basic maintenance. Anybody who has ever taken an Amtrak knows all to well the hour long delays experienced because of a broken down freight train holding up the tracks further up. And those are on the shared tracks which are supposedly better maintained, I can only imagine how things are on the rest of the system.

Have you seen John Oliver lately? Here you go. https://youtu.be/AJ2keSJzYyY

You would want put in pure electric rail, since you don’t want to ventilate it to handle diesel fumes from the hybrid electric diesel turbine engines so common in the USA. Since the USA’s rail system is barely electrified at all, it would be a huge undertaking.

If you don't want to ventilate, it would likely need to be non-contact electric rail, unless you want the tunnels to have extremely high concentrations of ozone. The arcs from electric contact catenaries produce ozone, which is fine outdoors because of immediate dissipation and short half-life. Put it in a tunnel and you either have to invest in ventilation (what most subway systems do), or mitigation (via contactless power delivery, likely induction).

There are lots of tunnels that do electric rail in Europe and China. Even that very long one in Switzerland. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthard_Base_Tunnel

I think it is using overhead wires.

Yes, and that tunnel has massive ventilation systems, not just for emergencies like fires too. Fun trivia: the tunnel is so deep that without ventilation the temperature in it would be 40 centigrade.

It does, but the ventilation is still not designed for diesels. I guess we are just discussing boring, in that case, electric something is required, maybe battery would work out better than overhead or below lines. Or maybe the only way to do this right without any ventilation is via supercooled magnets or air pressure.

As I said earlier though, the problem with batteries is they're a PITA to extinguish if they catch fire and you don't want to have that problem deep underground unless you plan to flood entire parts of the tunnel (which brings its own problems not even considering cleanup itself).

As any emergency worker will tell you, the problem with batteries compared to ICE engines is that if the battery is on fire it doesn't just stop once you extinguish it. You need to keep at it until it has cooled down sufficiently to prevent spontaneous reignition and that takes a while. Plus the entire time it burns it generates large amounts of toxic fumes.

Compare that to an electric line that just needs to transmit electricity and just stops if you shut it off. Yeah, ozone accumulation is a problem but so is heat so you'll need some venting anyway (plus you probably want the air in the tunnels to be breathable because we're humans after all).

If they did the whole vacuum tube thing, you’d want to sealed anyways, and maybe propel it using maglev, although I’m not sure what the heat properties are of that. I’m guessing they have to expend energy to keep the magnets cool anyways.

Interestingly enough, even if you don’t have any arcing you still need to ventilate because there’s nowhere for heat to go, and eventually running enough trains over many years heats up the ground.