A different perspective on the state of American railroads.
The freight has been blowing through my NC town recently. We’re talking 100+ car trains with engines mid-line to pull and push the load. Truly a sight to see.
“As railroads are privatized in the U.S., we have constantly moved towards heavier axle loads over the last four decades.”
Funny thing is, railways in the UK are also privately owned unlike many of their continental counterparts yet they are shoddy compared to them and back when British Rail was a government monopoly. I’d love to know why privatisation seems to work in the US yet has made things much worse in the UK.
Because euroweenies are euroweenies?
Haven’t read the article yet. This is my pre-read guess.
Another reason our economy kicks butt - people will find a way to get to work (we're fiercely independent), but factories must have steady inputs and outputs. That's rail, baby.
Not gonna say it...
Sounds like Europe runs passenger and freight trains on the same track. I thought maybe they used different tracks because Europe’s passenger trains are usually on schedule and there are a lot of them.
Here in America freight and passenger trains also run on the same tracks and the freight trains always get high priority meaning passenger trains have to wait on sidetracks for freight trains to pass.
Great article! Thanks for posting. Key take-always:
• The European train system is passenger-oriented. In the U.S. trains are designed to haul freight.
• European freight trains are short compared to the U.S. Typical max train length in Europe is 40% of U.S. The longest U.S. trains are NINE TIMES longer than the maximum permitted European trains.
• European axle loads are two-thirds of U.S. axle loads.
• The max height of U.S. cars is 23 feet and can carry double-stacked containers. European max height is 15-16 feet and can only carry single containers.
My conclusion is:
1. the U.S. separately optimized rail transport for freight and air transport for passengers.
2. Europe has dual-use railroads optimized rail for passengers but grossly sub-optimized for freight.
3. From an overall freight/passenger transportation SYSTEM perspective, the U.S. is much better optimized than Europe.
This thoroughly debunks the liberal notion that European trains are far superior to U.S. trains. You need to look at the overall optimization of the passenger AND freight transportation SYSTEM, not just passenger traffic.
The europeons can move a lot of people to prison camps in the next war efficiently.....
Maybe their demand for cheap sh*t from China isn’t as high as ours.
This article ignores important distinctions between Europe and USA. Two obvious ones are the immense distances in the US that allow unit trains and container trains to be efficient. It makes no sense to load up a huge train to travel to Frankfurt or Zurich.
Also, the dispersed destinations of Europe cause the use of smaller trains that end closer to the final user to make more economic sense. Our system has slowly excluded small feeder lines and industrial users, who have now turned to truck transport. That’s a trade-off Europe has not been willing to make, and we may yet regret.
Europe has a vast network of water canals to ship product.
For the same reason the US is so “backwards” with passenger rail: geography.
You can’t find a Western/Central European city more than 400 miles from an excellent port.