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Time to air one of my most controversial opinions: I think transporting LNG by train is good. Hear me out. When you build a pipeline, it's good for exactly one

Time to air one of my most controversial opinions: I think transporting LNG by train is good. Hear me out. When you build a pipeline, it's good for exactly one thing. An LNG pipeline won't do for anything else, not even other types of oil products. But building a railroad on the other hand, that's good for just about anything from transporting bulk grain to truck frames to solid rocket motors. Even though they built the original rail network 150+ years ago, that doesn't define the limits of what it can be used for today (other than the physical dimensions of the carriage etc). If we stop shipping oil by rail we can just build new rail cars and ship other stuff. Obviously we have to consider safety. There are serious drawbacks of both ways to transport LNG, it's just inherently dangerous. Many people remember Lac Maganetic a few years ago, where a series of technical failures caused a high speed derailment that devastated a small town in rural Quebec. Many also remember the poorly maintained pipelines all over the world that dribble oil into the ground water 24 hours a day. The difference is that trains are comparatively very cheap and easy to inspect and retrofit with sensors. Rail transport is very visible when it goes wrong, but pipelines are far away and far under ground, most of the time buried beneath the 'under class'.

gruez 6y ago
>When you build a pipeline, it's good for exactly one thing. An LNG pipeline won't do for anything else, not even other types of oil products. But building a railroad on the other hand, that's good for just about anything from transporting bulk grain to truck frames to solid rocket motors. But doesn't that only make sense if there's going to be demand in the near future? Unused rail lines get abandoned all the time because they have maintenance costs, so it's not like we can build it, stop using it, and then resume using it a few decades later when demand picks up.
- Arnt 6y ago
  Those aren't the kind that are abandoned. The kind to carry natural gas goes from A to B. The ones that are typically abandoned go from B to hamlet-near-B, or to factory-near-B, or were obsoleted due to a change in the network. I see all three where I live. A new express route was built and bypasses some stations, so fewer trains stop at those stations, which makes local connections to those stations less valuable, and some X-to-hamlet tracks will probably be closed in the end. A new tunnel is being built and when it's done freight traffic will be routed differently than it is now, and it seems likely that one old route will be closed.

gruez 6y ago

>When you build a pipeline, it's good for exactly one thing. An LNG pipeline won't do for anything else, not even other types of oil products. But building a railroad on the other hand, that's good for just about anything from transporting bulk grain to truck frames to solid rocket motors. But doesn't that only make sense if there's going to be demand in the near future? Unused rail lines get abandoned all the time because they have maintenance costs, so it's not like we can build it, stop using it, and then resume using it a few decades later when demand picks up.

Arnt 6y ago
Those aren't the kind that are abandoned. The kind to carry natural gas goes from A to B. The ones that are typically abandoned go from B to hamlet-near-B, or to factory-near-B, or were obsoleted due to a change in the network. I see all three where I live. A new express route was built and bypasses some stations, so fewer trains stop at those stations, which makes local connections to those stations less valuable, and some X-to-hamlet tracks will probably be closed in the end. A new tunnel is being built and when it's done freight traffic will be routed differently than it is now, and it seems likely that one old route will be closed.