The Royal Scotsman
Posted on 05/09/2014 9:49:39 PM PDT by Cronos
AMERICA has by far the largest rail network in the world, with more than twice as much track as China. But it lags far behind other first-world countries in ridership. Instead of passengers, most of America's massive rail network is used to carry freight. Why don't Americans ride trains?
..the Japanese, the Swiss, the French, the Danes, the Russians, the Austrians, the Ukrainians, the Belarussians and the Belgians all accounted for more than 1,000 passenger-kilometres by rail in 2011; Americans accounted for 80. Amtrak carries 31m passengers per year. Mozambique's railways carried 108m passengers in 2011.
There are many reasons why Americans don't ride the rails as often as their European cousins. Most obviously, America is bigger than most European countries. Outside the northeast corridor, the central Texas megalopolis, California and the eastern Midwest, density is sometimes too low to support intercity train travel. Underinvestment, and a preference for shiny new visions over boring upgrades, has not helped. Most American passenger trains travel on tracks that are owned by freight companies. That means most trains have to defer to freight services, leading to lengthy delays that scare off passengers who want to arrive on time.
(Excerpt) Read more at economist.com ...
SERIOUSLY?
The METRA trains running into Chicago from the Western Suburbs are well used, and a lot of freight runs on these tracks as well. A five minute wait at a crossing is a familiar though intermittent occurrence, and on these occasions I curse my fate, but never the RR.
Wear a coat to dump coal slag.
“Private railroads rebuild roadbed all the time, especially to handle increased freight business; if the feds would get out of the way, they could do it with passenger trains too.”
Railroads rebuild roadbed all the time but not to the specs of the fast passenger era.
That era featured track that was tilted like a NASCAR oval to allow trains to fly around curves. Railroads could invest the money back then because they owned intercity travel.
Well that near monopoly vanished after WWII and there is no more economic rationale for maintaining such high speed track. Now only wastrel politicians will do something like that.
Modern-day Treno di Lusso is quite remarkable.
BNSF runz plenty o’ trainz across Montana (MRL) carry coal West and wheat west.
Yes; federal regulations don’t make it affordable to build tracks to the current high-speed standards. That’s why I keep saying that the feds need to get out of the way and stop micromanaging.
The “near monopoly” never existed; that’s propaganda. And it’s the federal government doing the “competing” against the railroads rather than private industry building highways and airports. Trust funds have to go; the highways and airports never should have been public works projects, because that gives the government power it doesn’t deserve, never mind inducing the public that accepts federal highway and airport control to call for public passenger rail on a greater scale too.
The best train rides I had were the Reading to Edinburgh, so I could get out of England.
I love the train system in Japan. It works here because Japan is small and all metropolises are within 30 minutes to one hour of another. The metro subway systems are simply bitchin’ and work extremely well. In the USA, not a freaking chance. I remember in the 80s when Sacramento put in light rail in the downtown area to shuttle people a few blocks between here and there. It was faster to walk.
My Diesel Carz can go >600 mi B4 a refueling.
The Royal Scotsman
There are gaps of 10 miles between The trains in Dupage County.
One time my car broke down and I tried the public transport.
First I had to take a bus to Downers Grove station. Then the train took me to downtown Chicago. Several blocks walk to another bus stop for bus to 85th street.
It was well over 2 hours commute time! Car ride was under an hour.
Going to work from somewhere on the edge of a metro area - 'in the country' from the point of view of the urban rats is less desirable and sustainable than walking out of an approved high rise development with no parking spaces and taking a train to a wage slave / landless serf job. Mass transit means a lower carbon footprint according to the propaganda robots.
The UN plan called Agenda 21 now implemented through ICLEI at the community level makes this all so possible!
Most Europeans and American academics are clueless about the real meaning of land ownership. Brainwashing against land ownership is easy - it's too much trouble to own land! Why pay high and punitive property taxes! Too much hassle and work! Cheap, plentiful land for ownership by 'the common man' is nearly a thing of the past. $14,000 an acre for Nebraska farm land!
UN Agenda 21 wants to remove our land and put it back into the common pot so all can share what they don't own. This is the sales pitch made by bureaucratic carnies to the landless serf marks who know no better.
Private property rights keep US citizens farther from serfdom than Europeans. Landless serfs populate Europe and are clueless as to their fragile, urban, government sponsored straight jacket existence. Visualize a post nuclear THX-1138 dystopian world. This is the end goal of forced urbanization - mass transit by trains are just one stop along the way to a cattle car human urban existence.
Unelected bureaucrats are grabbing federal dollars to build trains and trollies in metro areas. Federal dollars are the crack cocaine of politics.
Your post is exactly what I would have written were I not enjoying a beer in the park and reading this on my iphone. So Paddington is London? What was the Edinburgh station called then? I drove into London on once or twice too, to return the rental cars I kept clipping the side mirrors off of... ;)
15 gal tank and 45 mpg - Diesel car....
What do public roads funded by federal and state tax dollars have to do with private property rights, though?
It’s the highway and airport precedent that politicians are standing on to commit the abuses with state-run commuter rail and “light rail”.
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