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I did a deep dive into passenger train service at one time when I too was advocating for such a venture (although I don't have billions so it wasn't something I

I did a deep dive into passenger train service at one time when I too was advocating for such a venture (although I don't have billions so it wasn't something I could just start). One huge hurdle to successful passenger rail are the rails. They are "owned" by the two or three massive freight companies. So using them with a passenger service gives the passenger service second billing. If we could convince the US to build the National Interstate Rail system (as we did for the highway system) and used taxes to build and maintain the rails, and then allowed anyone to use them with just the investment in the train equipment, it would change the market hugely. And taxing the trains like we do with highways (more weight means higher tax), would create an entirely different situation. But to do that, we have to dislodge the Rail industry lobby which is literally over a hundred years entrenched.

kbenson 8y ago
Don't you then run into the quagmire of land rights that the California high speed rail initiative has/had to deal with? I guess it's alleviated somewhat by being able to run less populated areas much of the time, but it seems like the kind of thing that's hard to get done when there's already some infrastructure present.
- ChuckMcM 8y ago
  Absolutely. And while that is the sort of thing that Eminent Domain was designed for, most recent use in the Bay Area I remember was when the completed Highway 85, it is time consuming and someone "loses".
  - chiph 8y ago
    One reason that high-speed rail in Texas failed was because Central Texas Railroad assumed they could use Eminent Domain to acquire land. Maybe elsewhere, but not in Texas - the legislators lined up against the plan after it hit the news.
  - DoubleCribble 8y ago
    IIRC, much of the land for the 85 was never developed when they were building the suburbs in the 60's & 70's. The southern portion was planned decades before it was built. There were these long swaths of old orchards and empty lots that ran between otherwise fully developed neighborhoods that have since been transformed into the highway.
pathseeker 8y ago
Would that really work as well as the interstate though? Just letting anybody on the interstate is mostly fine because if they run slow or way behind or breakdown you just go around them. When someone runs shitty trains that breakdown and block the whole track though...
- wnevets 8y ago
  >When someone runs shitty trains that breakdown and block the whole track though... sounds like a chance to ticket that company just like we ticket people riding a bicycle on the highway.
- jboles 8y ago
  This is easily solved by charging the users of the shared infrastructure a rate based on their usage, with penalties for breakdowns. Australia had a similar problem when the rail infrastructure part was split off into ARTC. Some dodgy operators started up with clapped out old locomotives that often broke down. Those operators didn’t last long when they had to pay fines for blocking the track.
ryandrake 8y ago
If you could dislodge the rail lobby, why waste time and money building a parallel national rail system when there perfectly serviceable existing tracks that can be converted to be operated for the public good? This is one of the things Eminent Domain would be good for, as opposed to seizing people’s homes and giving them away to property developers.
- tomatotomato37 8y ago
  The pre-existing rails are currently at capacity with freight trains, and for good reason. We can't replace that without harming the logistical system that keeps the central US at something approximating the first world. It's better just to build more capacity and reserve it for passenger.
  - jcranmer 8y ago
    HSR for passenger already requires dedicated tracks. Mixing 220mph trains and 75mph trains tends not to work very well. (Not to mention the curvature requirements precluding a lot of existing right of way). The real problem is the lack of demand for passenger traffic. HSR ridership falls off a cliff around 2-3 hours; in practice, you're limited to looking at city pairs within around 500-700mi max, ideally all in a nice line, and outside the NEC, there's just too few of these pairs.
    - bobthepanda 8y ago
      The pairs are more numerous than you'd think. Put 560 mile circles around Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle and you basically cover most major metro areas in the US.
      - jcranmer 8y ago
        A single pair by itself is not enough to make the investment cost worth it. (This is the Midwest conundrum--there's actually a decent selection of third tier cities, but no three of them are close to collinear).
mikepurvis 8y ago
It's the same thing in Canada— we took a sleeper train (The Canadian) out west a few years ago and it felt like we spent half the journey sitting on sidings. It was great not to have to drive, but it was a similar total amount of time in transit, and many times more expensive than driving or flying. In fact, it's so bad in Canada that we can't even get our commuter rail story together, much less long distance passenger rail. The Waterloo-Toronto tech corridor has just a handful of packed trains each way (on weekdays only) because a short segment of the track is also CN's major link to the US, and talks to get more access to it have been deadlocked for over a decade. The recently-elected Conservative government just canceled a long-planned freight rail bypass as "too expensive", loudly claiming that they'll have all day service rolled out in the next 18 months without it, sigh.
jcranmer 8y ago
The US has more miles of track than the next two countries (Russia and China, 2/3 of the countries larger than the US in area!) combined. This is actually a decline from the peak in the 1910s, as a result of the consolidation in the industry to the present day 7 Class I railroads (UP, BNSF, CSX, NS, CP, CN, KCS). We don't need any more rails. The US's freight rail industry is generally praised throughout the world in terms of its capabilities to move lots of freight--countries like Germany want to bring their freight rail up to US standards. Trying to reconfigure the system to be up to European standards in passenger movement is going to come largely at the expense of freight movement, and the geography of the US is such that said transition is going to be a net negative.
- craftyguy 8y ago
  GP didn't say that we should usurp freight rails for passenger trains, they said we should build rails for passenger trains..
bluGill 8y ago
Passenger service on the rails could work just fine if Amtrak got serious about schedule. I know people who shipped by rail - there were big fines if the train engine showed up and all cars were not loaded - they were always ready at least half an hour beforehand to ensure that wasn't a problem. Amtrak regularly doesn't leave on time, and then they miss their window to get on the track and have to take whatever time is left after all the scheduled trains that run on schedule are there. The real problem is in the US rail travel doesn't make sense. Other than trips up the coasts we are too spread out. Flying from city to city is a better use of human time.
- Analemma_ 8y ago
  Amtrak literally can’t “get serious about schedule” no matter how much they want to, because apart from the Northeast corridor, they don’t own the rails they run on. They are using the rails of the big freight companies and so can only run in the spaces in between the freight trains that have priority. Which is why the GP said that Amtrak can’t get better until it has its own rail network.
  - bluGill 8y ago
    The freight companies schedule their trains in advance, and Amtrak is part of that schedule. The only issue is if Amtrak isn't running on time, once there is a delay all the scheduled trains (freight trains) run and those late get the spaces that are not filled. One delay adds up because they miss not only that opening, but the next one. If Amtrak was serious they wouldn't miss their scheduled times and things would run better.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
cmurf 8y ago
Fully building out a 2nd set of dedicated infrastructure doesn't seem efficient. I think it would be far less expensive to have a neutral 3rd party of engineers, economists, and finance folks figure out a way to compute the cost of demoting freight to 2nd billing. And then by law require passenger service to have priority, and to pay for it, while having safeguards for either party to game the system, with on-going audits. This might be a kind of taking of private property for public use, which is allowed by the fifth amendment so long as there's just compensation. Whether sections are leased or bought can be a point of the negotiation. But using existing infrastructure is inherently more efficient so long as there aren't already congestion problems. And where there are congestion problems it makes sense to mitigate those locations.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  This is actually what China did; their rapid growth was causing both passenger and rail traffic to skyrocket, so they essentially built a second rail network to shove passengers onto and make room for freight, which doesn't really need to travel at 200MPH. US rail infrastructure is so old, curvy and degraded that after accounting for the work so you could run passenger rail at a respectable speed (~110MPH) you'd probably spend the same amount of money as just buying new.

kbenson 8y ago

Don't you then run into the quagmire of land rights that the California high speed rail initiative has/had to deal with? I guess it's alleviated somewhat by being able to run less populated areas much of the time, but it seems like the kind of thing that's hard to get done when there's already some infrastructure present.

ChuckMcM 8y ago
Absolutely. And while that is the sort of thing that Eminent Domain was designed for, most recent use in the Bay Area I remember was when the completed Highway 85, it is time consuming and someone "loses".
- chiph 8y ago
  One reason that high-speed rail in Texas failed was because Central Texas Railroad assumed they could use Eminent Domain to acquire land. Maybe elsewhere, but not in Texas - the legislators lined up against the plan after it hit the news.
- DoubleCribble 8y ago
  IIRC, much of the land for the 85 was never developed when they were building the suburbs in the 60's & 70's. The southern portion was planned decades before it was built. There were these long swaths of old orchards and empty lots that ran between otherwise fully developed neighborhoods that have since been transformed into the highway.

pathseeker 8y ago

Would that really work as well as the interstate though? Just letting anybody on the interstate is mostly fine because if they run slow or way behind or breakdown you just go around them. When someone runs shitty trains that breakdown and block the whole track though...

wnevets 8y ago
>When someone runs shitty trains that breakdown and block the whole track though... sounds like a chance to ticket that company just like we ticket people riding a bicycle on the highway.
jboles 8y ago
This is easily solved by charging the users of the shared infrastructure a rate based on their usage, with penalties for breakdowns. Australia had a similar problem when the rail infrastructure part was split off into ARTC. Some dodgy operators started up with clapped out old locomotives that often broke down. Those operators didn’t last long when they had to pay fines for blocking the track.

ryandrake 8y ago

If you could dislodge the rail lobby, why waste time and money building a parallel national rail system when there perfectly serviceable existing tracks that can be converted to be operated for the public good? This is one of the things Eminent Domain would be good for, as opposed to seizing people’s homes and giving them away to property developers.

tomatotomato37 8y ago
The pre-existing rails are currently at capacity with freight trains, and for good reason. We can't replace that without harming the logistical system that keeps the central US at something approximating the first world. It's better just to build more capacity and reserve it for passenger.
- jcranmer 8y ago
  HSR for passenger already requires dedicated tracks. Mixing 220mph trains and 75mph trains tends not to work very well. (Not to mention the curvature requirements precluding a lot of existing right of way). The real problem is the lack of demand for passenger traffic. HSR ridership falls off a cliff around 2-3 hours; in practice, you're limited to looking at city pairs within around 500-700mi max, ideally all in a nice line, and outside the NEC, there's just too few of these pairs.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    The pairs are more numerous than you'd think. Put 560 mile circles around Atlanta, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and Seattle and you basically cover most major metro areas in the US.
    - jcranmer 8y ago
      A single pair by itself is not enough to make the investment cost worth it. (This is the Midwest conundrum--there's actually a decent selection of third tier cities, but no three of them are close to collinear).

mikepurvis 8y ago

It's the same thing in Canada— we took a sleeper train (The Canadian) out west a few years ago and it felt like we spent half the journey sitting on sidings. It was great not to have to drive, but it was a similar total amount of time in transit, and many times more expensive than driving or flying. In fact, it's so bad in Canada that we can't even get our commuter rail story together, much less long distance passenger rail. The Waterloo-Toronto tech corridor has just a handful of packed trains each way (on weekdays only) because a short segment of the track is also CN's major link to the US, and talks to get more access to it have been deadlocked for over a decade. The recently-elected Conservative government just canceled a long-planned freight rail bypass as "too expensive", loudly claiming that they'll have all day service rolled out in the next 18 months without it, sigh.

jcranmer 8y ago

The US has more miles of track than the next two countries (Russia and China, 2/3 of the countries larger than the US in area!) combined. This is actually a decline from the peak in the 1910s, as a result of the consolidation in the industry to the present day 7 Class I railroads (UP, BNSF, CSX, NS, CP, CN, KCS). We don't need any more rails. The US's freight rail industry is generally praised throughout the world in terms of its capabilities to move lots of freight--countries like Germany want to bring their freight rail up to US standards. Trying to reconfigure the system to be up to European standards in passenger movement is going to come largely at the expense of freight movement, and the geography of the US is such that said transition is going to be a net negative.

craftyguy 8y ago
GP didn't say that we should usurp freight rails for passenger trains, they said we should build rails for passenger trains..

bluGill 8y ago

Passenger service on the rails could work just fine if Amtrak got serious about schedule. I know people who shipped by rail - there were big fines if the train engine showed up and all cars were not loaded - they were always ready at least half an hour beforehand to ensure that wasn't a problem. Amtrak regularly doesn't leave on time, and then they miss their window to get on the track and have to take whatever time is left after all the scheduled trains that run on schedule are there. The real problem is in the US rail travel doesn't make sense. Other than trips up the coasts we are too spread out. Flying from city to city is a better use of human time.

Analemma_ 8y ago
Amtrak literally can’t “get serious about schedule” no matter how much they want to, because apart from the Northeast corridor, they don’t own the rails they run on. They are using the rails of the big freight companies and so can only run in the spaces in between the freight trains that have priority. Which is why the GP said that Amtrak can’t get better until it has its own rail network.
- bluGill 8y ago
  The freight companies schedule their trains in advance, and Amtrak is part of that schedule. The only issue is if Amtrak isn't running on time, once there is a delay all the scheduled trains (freight trains) run and those late get the spaces that are not filled. One delay adds up because they miss not only that opening, but the next one. If Amtrak was serious they wouldn't miss their scheduled times and things would run better.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

cmurf 8y ago

Fully building out a 2nd set of dedicated infrastructure doesn't seem efficient. I think it would be far less expensive to have a neutral 3rd party of engineers, economists, and finance folks figure out a way to compute the cost of demoting freight to 2nd billing. And then by law require passenger service to have priority, and to pay for it, while having safeguards for either party to game the system, with on-going audits. This might be a kind of taking of private property for public use, which is allowed by the fifth amendment so long as there's just compensation. Whether sections are leased or bought can be a point of the negotiation. But using existing infrastructure is inherently more efficient so long as there aren't already congestion problems. And where there are congestion problems it makes sense to mitigate those locations.

bobthepanda 8y ago
This is actually what China did; their rapid growth was causing both passenger and rail traffic to skyrocket, so they essentially built a second rail network to shove passengers onto and make room for freight, which doesn't really need to travel at 200MPH. US rail infrastructure is so old, curvy and degraded that after accounting for the work so you could run passenger rail at a respectable speed (~110MPH) you'd probably spend the same amount of money as just buying new.