4 ms·

There's no reason that high speed rail couldn't work for both, however

• jacquesm 9y ago
  There is relatively little economic incentive to make high speed rail work for cargo. Cargo that's large enough to go by rail tends to go for the lowest price per ton that can be found, it competes with long haul trucks, barges and oceangoing ships. It does not compete with air cargo (which tends to focus on high value and light stuff).
• masklinn 9y ago
  There are plenty of reasons: * the weight of freight significantly impacts the track's lifecycle, and HSR tend to be on the "light cargo" side with a train being about 10% cargo by weight * the bulk and varying shape makes it impossible to build high-speed trains with any interesting flexibility and capability as they need to be highly profiled * and you don't want your high-speed passenger traffic to be held up by freight. * the cost/benefit calculation makes no sense, it's much more price-efficient to carry freight using gigantic regular-speed trainsets than using small high-speed ones, and what little freight is so time-sensitive that you need to put it on an HSR can be put there as a special case None of the big HSR countries use it for anything resembling serious freight, the only one which came even remotely close was France which had 3.5 mail trainsets, which were wound down and ultimately retired in 2015: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_La_Poste https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SNCF_TGV_La_Poste
  • gsnedders 9y ago
    China has some freight going on HSR nowadays, though they are mostly on slower lines (i.e., 200-250km/h, so 125-155mph IIRC) that were opened on new routes. But yes, weight is a big deal: the LGV in France, for example, have a maximum axle loading of 17 tons. Much of the US freight network is over 35 tons, from memory.
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