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Amtrak is streaming an empty railroad on Twitch

156 points by CrazedGeek 4y ago

ykevinator2 4y ago
I have always wondered why a startup never tried to build single car electric trains on the miles of idle already paid for track.
- mlindner 4y ago
  Because the track is already in use. Also private companies ARE now starting to run trains on the tracks and building their own. See the brightline service in Florida. Privately owned and run with a great service.
technick 4y ago
Stream is down... looks like Amtrak has already given up.
iso1210 4y ago
New Orleans has a population about 400k, Mobile 200k, it's 140 miles. That should be an hour long trip with 1-2 trains an hour
- sokoloff 4y ago
  Suppose you ran 20 trains per day each way between those city pairs. What do you guess the average passenger load would be on each of those trains? Could you average even 100 pax per train? Would whatever the average total fare collected be enough to cover just the direct operating costs of that service? I don’t see any non-stop airline flights between those cities for the smattering of dates I checked, suggesting that the airlines don’t find a lot of direct travel demand between that city pair.
  - hedora 4y ago
    By this logic, we should also stop allowing passenger cars on the freeways between those cities, and let shipping companies pay for road maintenance if they care.
    - sokoloff 4y ago
      When considering whether to run 4 or 20 round trips per day, it seems like the fundamental economics ought to come into play at some point. Otherwise, you eventually run out of other people’s money. As a reference, there are only 7 Acela trains per day (or at least on Monday 4/25) from Boston to New York, two cities with substantially higher population and apparent demand (as evidenced by the 59 non-stop flights from BOS to any of the NYC-3 airports on Monday 4/25)
      - Macha 4y ago
        If you can only fill 7 trains per day between cities with metro areas of 5 million and 20 million, there is something else wrong with your network beyond just how much people like to take trains or not. We manage to do that between a town of 20,000 and a city of 1 million for comparison. Or if you feel commuter routes are different enough to not count, a city of 60,000 and a city of 1 million with similar travel time as google maps quotes me for Boston to New York.
        sokoloff 4y ago
        Note that none of those are “full”. The most crowded of those 7 Acelas is showing ~50% full with the others split between the <20% and ~40% categories. And this is on the Northeast Acela, the crown jewel of the Amtrak network and between two cities with generally functioning public transit once you arrive. Most US city-pairs would be worse.
        ghaff 4y ago
        There are a lot of factors. - There are about double that number of trains if you count the Regional (which you should) so ~hourly trains. - A lot of people still fly. Especially if you live in Boston proper, flying means you can easily make a morning meeting without flying down the night before (which people with families etc. may prefer not to do) - Especially if you're south/west of Boston or in New York's Connecticut suburbs, it's probably cheaper/faster to just drive, something I really try to avoid when it comes to NYC but nonetheless for me taking Amtrak actually involves me driving for an hour in the wrong direction/
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  MegaBus has two buses each way on that route every day. If demand increased, adding another bus each way would be relatively trivial.
- ac29 4y ago
  Take a look at the current tracks from the article: https://i.imgur.com/7Tyt2Y3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7Tyt2Y3.jpg That is definitely not going to support trains that would have to average well over 140mph (there are 4 proposed stops between the 2 ends).
tannedNerd 4y ago
I think the easiest solution would be tie all infrastructure funds railroads receive with the delays Amtrak incurred on their tracks due to freight trains. Do it to many times and you lose out all funding for the rest of the year. Trying to block Amtrak from services should automatically incur a funding pause for those tracks.
- Mountain_Skies 4y ago
  The railroad lobbyists aren't who Congress would be afraid of if they passed such a law, it's the industries that make use of the freight rail system that would have Congress running for the hills. The US has an extraordinarily robust and high-capacity freight rail system. Anything that interferes is going to get extreme blowback from those who depend on it. Amtrak's very existence could be in danger if they started causing freight users logistics problems.
graupel 4y ago
But why Twitch? Seems like YouTube would be the place to get eyeballs on this, if not in place of Twitch, along with it.
- gambiting 4y ago
  Would it? Who watches streams on YouTube??
  - haunter 4y ago
    A lot of people? Youtube is streaming live sport events, concerts, political rallies, conferences etc. It has a far bigger reach and scope than Twitch. And not to say the actual videoplayer is also better, live rewind for example which still non-existent on Twitch
    - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
      Discoverability for streams is awful on Youtube. Twitch also has a very different culture surrounding channels and chat. This results in Twitch having a much smaller audience, but far higher engagement. Right now Youtube is having to write huge checks to lure away big streamers from Twitch. They'll probably do better with that than Mixer. Atm the optimal strategy is to livestream on twitch then pay an editor to create highlight videos on Youtube. Live rewind existed on Twitch until very recently, though it wasn't called out in the UX: you just have to click on the person's profile and go to the VOD page. However recently Twitch added a gate where they changed the default "automatically make VODs available immediately" from true to false, as a mitigation strategy against their DMCA volume (RIAA scrapes twitch VODs in volume).
  - e2le 4y ago
    Why not do both?
  - TigeriusKirk 4y ago
    I do, pretty much daily. Casino poker streams and stringers livestreaming their news chasing, for my evening entertainment. Sometimes other stuff if it surfaces in my feed.
UncleEntity 4y ago
Yep, try to catch an Amtrak out of Phoenix and you have to drive about an hour to Maricopa instead of the old train station downtown because of them not getting priority over freight traffic.
- hedora 4y ago
  Think that's bad? Drive on the 40 (route 66) from California to Texas sometime. All those abandoned train stations used to be Amtrak stops. Modern passenger trains could hit about 200 mph on that terrain. San Jose to Dallas is about 1400 miles, so a 8-9 hour trip would be enough to ride the entire line, with stops at the towns along the way. I'd definitely choose that instead over a 3.5 hour plane ride (good for that route), especially with sleeper cars. On top of that, there are abandoned train stations closer to my actual destination than the nearest airport. With drive time on the Texas side, the train would actually be faster, door to door.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    I used to make the trek from Dallas to LA a few times a year. I have tried flying, I have tried driving, but I've never taken the train. Travelling solo, the flying can have you in the other city within a few hours. Driving solo takes about 24 hours. Booking a train shows arrival in 48 hours. Just not even in a realistic time frame.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Last time I had a trip from Boston to Chicago, I briefly look a look at the train. It would have been a long overnight trip and cost about 3x the plane if I got a sleeping compartment. Just made no sense. Although I've done it, even doing the whole Northeast Corridor is a stretch. DC is a pretty short flight from Boston whereas it's a full day by train.
  - coredog64 4y ago
    Which parts are they going to hit 200mph on? I have driven extensively on 8, 10, and 40 into and out of California, and I can't recall a path that doesn't transit the North American Cordillera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Cordillera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Cordillera On 8 heading out of San Diego, you go from sea level to 4000 feet, down to (IIRC) 3000, and then back up to 4000 before going back down to sea level. Once over the Arizona border, you pretty quickly go from sea level up to about 2000 feet. 40 goes through Flagstaff, the elevation of which is almost 7000 feet. Albuquerque is at 5000 feet. So, where in the world do you find HSR that transits not one, but three or four 4000 foot passes?
superdisk 4y ago
Isn't Amtrak a government-run operation? Why is it "beefing?" Why is everything so stupidly infantilized these days?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Amtrak, like the post office, is given impossible tasks by congress and then yelled at when they fail to complete them. In the areas where Amtrak is separated from freight traffic or owns the rails, it performs well enough, if not great. The "late trains get later" problem kills the major interstate routes, leaving them as land cruise ships for vacationers.
  - hedora 4y ago
    It's not just congress. On the west coast, they also answer to the state legislatures and multiple municipalities. Example insanity: Capitol Corridor trains have 4 cars. Two are handicap accessible on the bottom level and/or also bike cars. The Berkeley station has two platforms on one of two tracks. (The other track has four platforms). In practice, very few handicap people use the train, since the stations are basically only accessible via bike, car or corporate shuttle. However, many people ride bikes to the train. This causes a shortage of bike slots, so people would bungee their bikes to rails, etc in the handicap area, always leaving a few seats for wheelchairs. (The conductors would make a bicyclist move their bike in the vanishingly rare scenario when the handicap spaces filled up. This wouldn't even delay the train in practice.) The liberal politicians got wind of this, deemed it discriminatory, and forced the conductors to crack down on bike bungees, potentially stranding commuters even though the train was mostly empty. Amtrak responded by adding bike slots and redesigned the cars. The conservatives deemed this unacceptable, since the new cars don't contain gun lockers. You see, you're allowed to carry a gun on Amtrak, but it must be secured in a locker. So, Amtrak retrofitted the bike spaces so one closet (for three bikes) had a sliding metal door that could be locked. The door partially blocked one of the three bike slots (so road bikes fit, usually, but not mountain bikes), and if (and I don't think this ever happened, even once) someone brought a handgun on to a full train, they'd kick 2-3 cyclists off the train. Why did I mention the Berkeley station, you ask? Well, with the lower bike storage density in the cars, sometimes (1 of ten rides), the train would have departing bikes in a car without a platform. The "platform" is a concrete pad that sits about 6 inches above the gravel. For liability reasons, allowing a bicyclist to disembark on gravel was a firable offence. Instead, the bikes were supposed to move to the correct car one station earlier (though it was not always known which car was correct). Failing that, they could attempt to take the bike upstairs then downstairs to move cars, or be dropped one station later (downtown Richmond), then bike back to Berkeley. It would have cost a few hundred in concrete to add two platforms, but it would have required coordination between multiple bureaucracies. Also, they were forcing cyclists into dangerous situations to avoid liability. I'd love to be on the jury if something ever happened!
hedora 4y ago
For the specific case of the Capitol Corridor (Sacramento - San Jose), the government should just sieze the line from the freight companies, and use imminent domain to run freight lines from the port of Oakland out to less densely populated areas. As it is, freight trains run through the pedestrian areas of Jack London Square. The should also straighten the lines in the areas near Fremont so the train could run at at least 180mph. Then, they should run the Amtrak every 15 minutes within metro areas. Instead, they did the BART extension.
- carapace 4y ago
  Your ideas would be political suicide, and cost a bajillion dollars too. Port of Oakland is a pretty major port, your would disrupt service there for years, for what? And how would surface Amtrak trains be better than BART? BART's pretty solid as regional transport. BART moves more people per year than the SFO airport!
  - hedora 4y ago
    The freight trains are regularly delayed by issues along that line. It runs through pedestrian plazas, marshland, hairpin turns in hills, etc. A straight shot east for a few miles would land it in flat, unpopulated areas. They'd lose freight access to the salt evaporation plant north of milpitas, which seems to be the remaining freight stop on that corridor (it is being decommissioned for environmental reasons, so by the time the rail rework was done, it wouldn't matter) Surface Amtrak trains have a much higher top speed than BART, and are nicer. If the freight lines were owned by Amtrak, and maintained to commuter rail standards (instead of freight standards), the existing trains could roughly double their cruising speed for most of the miles of that line, and be much faster than BART. Also, the Amtrak trains have bars and restrooms. They are quiet and don't stink. Edit: Also, building out a multilane freight rail from the port to east of Oakland would allow the port operator the option to increase port capacity. They could move containers by rail to a rail yard outside of the bay area commuting zone. They could load trucks there, cutting hours of stop and go truck drive time during commute hours.
    - 4y ago
throwanem 4y ago
> By law, Amtrak’s passenger trains also have priority over freight traffic. But in practice this doesn’t happen... Yeah, no kidding! I've always understood the relevant law to be the other way around - granted, this based mostly on what I've heard from other Northeast Regional passengers while we're sitting at a dead stop waiting for a load of orange juice or something to get the hell out of the way, as seems reliably to happen at least once per trip.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The key is they have scheduling priority - and if they arrive at the segment on time, they get to go - but the moment there's any delay, they lose their slot and the freights are now in priority. Combined with how much of the USA doesn't even have passing sidings let alone double tracks it ends up with "late trains get later".
carapace 4y ago
First of all, I love trains. I've taken more than one trip across the continent (N. Am.) and it's incredibly fun, and you see so much of the country, and meet so many interesting (and annoying sometimes, sure) people. I recommend it wholeheartedly. That said, passenger train travel makes about as much economic sense as riding in a horse-and-carriage. It's romantic but it's technologically obsolete. That's why freight trains get priority over passenger trains (despite what the law says on the books) because there's no economic incentive and little political will to do otherwise.
- gaadd33 4y ago
  To fly from NYC to Philly will take at least an hour on the plane, plus about an hour to go from Manhattan to the airport, plus 30 mins or so to go from the Philadelphia Airport to Philadelphia...the train takes an hour and departs/drops you in the center of both cities. How is that technologically obsolete?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Short-range intercity can be usable, but cross-country travel in the USA is honestly just impractical by rail. Should it be kept operational? Certainly! Should it be seriously considered as a competitor for airlines? Unlikely. The only way it will come back is if the intercity travel keeps getting better and better, and even then routes on the coast may work but once you hit the midwest the distances get unreasonably far. Chicago to Los Angeles would be ten hours at Nozomi speeds assuming zero stops. Even the proposed California high-speed corridor doesn't have much to offer.
    - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
      You don't have to even look that far afield. I did a ride between NY Penn and Rochester NY that took longer than the 6 hour drive because of delays.
      - bombcar 4y ago
politelemon 4y ago
'is streaming' is a bit generous or premature; at present Amtrak have only posted 3 videos, 30-60 seconds each, all 4 days ago.
- freemint 4y ago
  I am not sure if you are aware how twitch works. Not all streams are published as video on demand. Those videos are clips viewers generated from the stream.
protomyth 4y ago
The government should build its own line. Its no joke to delay a cargo shipment, there are tons of penalties built into those contracts. As a railroad, you have a very specific timing on when your train needs to arrive, and the people doing the loading need to have it loaded in a set time period. Frankly, given diesel prices, cargo is much more important than people at this point. Perhaps the government will be looking to add some tracks or dedicated bus lines the next time it funds a highway project. This demonizing of cargo when its absolutely needed in the US is just stupid.
- rhino369 4y ago
  Especially since Amtrak (aside from the NE regional line) doesn't provide any service that Greyhound or Megabus don't already provide.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    Amtrak has an extensive bus line to extend their reach - and they can't sell you a ticket on it unless it includes a train segment.
    - rhino369 4y ago
      We don't need a subsidized government run bus line, the private ones work fine.
      - bombcar 4y ago
        To be fair, all bus lines are government subsidized, unless one somewhere has built their own roads - maybe the Disney shuttle?
        Mountain_Skies 4y ago
        In theory fuel taxes and registration taxes on the buses should cover their share of that cost but the math becomes tricky when you start trying to calculate the time and space value of different road segments.
tialaramex 4y ago
For comparison, the Elizabeth line (Crossrail) under London will launch with 12 trains per hour (one every five minutes) and will eventually go to 24 trains per hour during peaks. CSX says 8-10 through trains per day use this route, plus 1-3 "coal and grain" trains and "numerous" local services. The reported scarcity of trains on the stream matches this. Now of course much of the route Amtrak wants to use is single track, which is especially a problem for freight trains since they're so long that only very long purpose made sidings can possibly allow them to pass. But on the other hand it's also notable that CSX insists daytime is "peak" for freight and that doesn't make much sense. Since passengers mostly want to travel in daytime, it makes sense to shift freight to the night, not schedule all the freight for daytime and then insist that passengers be re-scheduled instead.
- ars 4y ago
  That's not a comparison. Amtrak trains travel at like double the speed of cargo trains. It's makes it much harder to schedule, since you have to clear half the track before Amtrak can enter it, otherwise it would reach the back of the freight train.
- thot_experiment 4y ago
  Maybe we should just nationalize the existing rail network. America has a decent rail network but unfortunately much of it is private leading to this bullshit. Here's a fun rule of thumb for ya: Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of weight per wheel. A truck moving things does something like 400-600x as much damage to roads as a car. Also tire dust is bad for you and other living things, train wheels have much less rolling resistance.
  - pstuart 4y ago
    Thank you for putting that out there -- I've been saying the same thing. Then invest in increasing the traffic capacity and enforce Positive Train Control on all rolling stock -- https://www.aar.org/campaigns/ptc/ https://www.aar.org/campaigns/ptc/ Add in electrification where possible and allow for other "carriers" to utilize the lines to maximize utility.
trenning 4y ago
How screwed are commercial rail companies going to be when coal finally phases out? What will replace that space or will their revenue just slowly drop?
- missedthecue 4y ago
  I saw Amazon branded shipping containers on a freight train just the other week
  - tshaddox 4y ago
    Could those have been intermodal containers, each of which will eventually be hauled on a tractor trailer?
    - toast0 4y ago
      Some containers go right from boat to rail, or maybe moved around the yard at the port to go from the boat to rail. Amazon may also have warehouses serviced by rail spurs, and not have to use trucking to get their containers from a rail terminal. I don't know if they do, but certainly some containers don't see any road on the way from the shipper to the receiver.
- kube-system 4y ago
  Coal transport by rail is already way down: https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AAR-Coal-Fact-Sheet.pdf https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AAR-Coal-Fact... I suspect intermodal rail transport will probably do well as long as we keep buying cargo from Asia on post-Panamax ships.
- pg_bot 4y ago
  Coal accounts for ~11.5% of rail volume[0], so they won't be screwed. (obviously not great to lose that much business) You might see prices drop due to a lack of demand, but other products will still be shipped via rail. Intermodal containers have been increasing in volume recently and I could see that taking up some excess supply. [0] https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AAR-Coal-Fact-Sheet.pdf https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AAR-Coal-Fact...
tru3_power 4y ago
Dumb question but why can’t they just tack on passenger carts to freight trains?
- ch4s3 4y ago
  No, the freight trains don't make frequent stops or start and end in places you would want to travel to/from.
- ghaff 4y ago
  Because freight trains can be really really slow. (I suspect there are a ton of other issues as well--including that you probably wouldn't even cut costs very much.)
- bombcar 4y ago
  The freight railroads fought for years to get Amtrak setup so they could ditch their unprofitable passenger rail. Freight trains also don't travel in the same way passenger rail wants to, and rarely stops, and is slow. The solution is to build parallel lines and more passing sidings and dual track, but that's expensive and nobody involved wants to. For comparison, the double tracking of Los Angeles to San Diego has been in progress for 20+ years now and is at about 2/3s double track. https://www.sandag.org/index.asp?projectid=260&fuseaction=projects.detail https://www.sandag.org/index.asp?projectid=260&fuseaction=pr... And if you really want freight and passenger to coexist you build entirely separate lines (or quad track allowing overtaking).
xg15 4y ago
> Between 8 a.m. and 12:49 Central Time, Amtrak says it counted three trains on CSX’s tracks. > After publication, in response to a Motherboard request for comment, CSX dismissed the Amtrak stunt. “It takes a freight train about 8-10 hours to travel between New Orleans and Mobile,” a CSX spokesperson said in a statement. “Focusing on one point of a line that traverses approximately 138 single track miles, major ports and Interchange points and then purporting that it is indicative of the operational realities of the entire line is grossly misleading. Anyone that understands railroad operations, including Amtrak, would know that.” So CSX argues the entire 138 mile track would be blocked if there is a single train travelling anywhere on it? Efficiency!
- ars 4y ago
  It's not quite as silly as it sounds - Amtrak trains travel at twice the speed of cargo ones. So you have to clear at least half the track before an Amtrak train can enter. But there's no problem running a cargo train after the Amtrak one.
  - zeckalpha 4y ago
    Maybe some lines, but here they travel at the same speeds.
- makomk 4y ago
  It's probably not quite that bad, but if there's a single train anywhere on any single track section that means the entire section is effctively blocked off to traffic in the other direction, it sounds like there's a lot more than a single freight train on it at any given time, and Amtrak wants to run round trips down the entire 138-mile track a couple of times a day.
pvsukale3 4y ago
In India both freight and train services are government owned and are part of same network. Revenue from freight subsidises passenger services which run in losses [1]. But in general passenger service is given preference over freight every day. Hence there are some serious delays in freight service. So government is building these special double electric lines across country especially designed for freight called as dedicated freight corridors [2]. [1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/railways-earning-from-freight-movement-sees-24-increase/articleshow/89025564.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/railways-earning-f... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSsRmbUnvK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSsRmbUnvK4
AuthorizedCust 4y ago
Most of the leading comments are justified with an implicit tautology: “passenger rail is needed so badly because passenger rail”. This suggests a belief that typical Americans are dumbasses for preferring other forms of transportation, so they need elites to force them into what’s best for them. The American rail system is focusing on what rail does best: haul heavy freight. When you emphasize passenger rail use, you’ve switched to an inefficient use of rail to appease hardliners.
- wetmore 4y ago
  > This suggests a belief that typical Americans are dumbasses for preferring other forms of transportation, so they need elites to force them into what’s best for them. I think this is an unfair characterization. The belief is that rail is currently _not_ great in the US and that's why people don't choose it. The theory is that if we make passenger rail better, then consumers will be more willing to choose it over alternate, less environmentally efficient methods like driving or flying.
  - AuthorizedCust 4y ago
    Sounds like an opportunity for a private company to test the market!
    - bluGill 4y ago
      No sane private company would do a private railroad in the US. NYC in the 1920 put in laws to ensure private rails cannot compete and by the 1950s forced the private companies to give their system to the city. Note that I just made a statement about the sanity of Texas Central and Brightline.
  - ceeplusplus 4y ago
    > The theory is that if we make passenger rail better, then consumers will be more willing to choose it I think there are other (unacknowledged by public transport advocates) concerns people have with passenger rail. Namely that every light rail car in every major city smells like piss already and feels much more unsafe than your own car. Until that reality is addressed and mentally ill people are not permitted to share the same space as normal, functioning members of society, people will continue to choose their own private transportation whenever possible. If you don't think this is a reality then you should take a look at some of the shit that happens on BART and NYC subways. My chance of getting pushed off the platform or being the victim of a racially motivated hate crime is 0 in my own car.
mlindner 4y ago
This whole thing kind of ignores the fact that the rail companies own these lines and Amtrak doesn't want to pay them enough to make it worth their while.
- hehebdbdwjeb 4y ago
  And your whole comment ignores the fact that government subsidized those rail lines under the condition that the companies run passenger rail. They failed to do so, and government gave them a free pass. Government should have stripped them of their rights due to breach of contract
  - mlindner 4y ago
    Except they weren't subsidized. They were built from the very beginning by private companies.
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  The article addresses the fact that, while the freight industry owns the track, Amtrak by law have priority. So either the law is being carefully tiptoed around, or the freight industry is breaking the law. >Amtrak, a government-chartered corporation, was created in 1971 from the ashes of private carrier passenger service. As part of the deal, freight rail companies generally retained ownership of the tracks, along with the responsibility of maintaining them and running service. Amtrak received the rights to run trains along those tracks. By law, Amtrak’s passenger trains also have priority over freight traffic.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    It's the first time I've ever heard of this law and isn't true in the general case or entirely not enforced. I've ridden Amtrak (outside major corridors) several times and every time the train has had to stop to let freight trains pass. It's never had priority.
Tempest1981 4y ago
The tracks that Caltrain uses between San Francisco and San Jose are shared with Union Pacific freight trains, and that works. Does anyone know what kind of freight Union Pacific hauls to/from San Francisco? Mostly late at night?
- toast0 4y ago
  Last time I rode Caltrain, nearly all of the spurs to nearby buildings were blocked by fences, presumably trying to reduce 'trespasser incidents'. IIRC, UP would generally only operate on the tracks outside of the hours Caltrain was scheduled; and that's part of why Caltrain to Gilroy isn't scheduled often (there's a lot more frieght activity south of San Jose Diridon).
mlindner 4y ago
What Amtrak should actually be doing is closing down all it's long distance routes followed by privatizing it so it can profitably run it's short haul lines.
binarymax 4y ago
I’ve got an absolutely bonkers idea: add two or three passenger cars to the freight trains Edit: Not sure why I’m being downvoted. This was a thing for a long time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_train https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_train
- shortstuffsushi 4y ago
  Cargo trains are usually quite long, slow to accelerate, and stop infrequently (comparatively, at least). Adding "two or three cars" would mean adding a very small amount of human capacity while forcing the cargo portion of the train to make many slow starts, and transporting people very slowly. While it is possible, it's a lose-lose for both cargo movers and potential passengers.
formerkrogemp 4y ago
I really don't see rail expanding in the US in my lifetime for many reasons, including our national debt, the loss of the dollar's reserve status, the similar functionality provided by trucking (negative externalities like pollution, shared cost of road upkeep, and employment levels notwithstanding), the right of way vs NIMBYISM of expanding rail and running extra lines, and finally the inability to complete infrastructure projects in the US on time, in budget, and with quality. I am just not optimistic about any of this.

156 points by CrazedGeek 4y ago

I have always wondered why a startup never tried to build single car electric trains on the miles of idle already paid for track.

mlindner 4y ago
Because the track is already in use. Also private companies ARE now starting to run trains on the tracks and building their own. See the brightline service in Florida. Privately owned and run with a great service.

technick 4y ago

Stream is down... looks like Amtrak has already given up.

iso1210 4y ago

New Orleans has a population about 400k, Mobile 200k, it's 140 miles. That should be an hour long trip with 1-2 trains an hour

sokoloff 4y ago
Suppose you ran 20 trains per day each way between those city pairs. What do you guess the average passenger load would be on each of those trains? Could you average even 100 pax per train? Would whatever the average total fare collected be enough to cover just the direct operating costs of that service? I don’t see any non-stop airline flights between those cities for the smattering of dates I checked, suggesting that the airlines don’t find a lot of direct travel demand between that city pair.
- hedora 4y ago
  By this logic, we should also stop allowing passenger cars on the freeways between those cities, and let shipping companies pay for road maintenance if they care.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    When considering whether to run 4 or 20 round trips per day, it seems like the fundamental economics ought to come into play at some point. Otherwise, you eventually run out of other people’s money. As a reference, there are only 7 Acela trains per day (or at least on Monday 4/25) from Boston to New York, two cities with substantially higher population and apparent demand (as evidenced by the 59 non-stop flights from BOS to any of the NYC-3 airports on Monday 4/25)
    - Macha 4y ago
      If you can only fill 7 trains per day between cities with metro areas of 5 million and 20 million, there is something else wrong with your network beyond just how much people like to take trains or not. We manage to do that between a town of 20,000 and a city of 1 million for comparison. Or if you feel commuter routes are different enough to not count, a city of 60,000 and a city of 1 million with similar travel time as google maps quotes me for Boston to New York.
      - sokoloff 4y ago
        Note that none of those are “full”. The most crowded of those 7 Acelas is showing ~50% full with the others split between the <20% and ~40% categories. And this is on the Northeast Acela, the crown jewel of the Amtrak network and between two cities with generally functioning public transit once you arrive. Most US city-pairs would be worse.
        ghaff 4y ago
        There are a lot of factors. - There are about double that number of trains if you count the Regional (which you should) so ~hourly trains. - A lot of people still fly. Especially if you live in Boston proper, flying means you can easily make a morning meeting without flying down the night before (which people with families etc. may prefer not to do) - Especially if you're south/west of Boston or in New York's Connecticut suburbs, it's probably cheaper/faster to just drive, something I really try to avoid when it comes to NYC but nonetheless for me taking Amtrak actually involves me driving for an hour in the wrong direction/
Mountain_Skies 4y ago
MegaBus has two buses each way on that route every day. If demand increased, adding another bus each way would be relatively trivial.
ac29 4y ago
Take a look at the current tracks from the article: https://i.imgur.com/7Tyt2Y3.jpg https://i.imgur.com/7Tyt2Y3.jpg That is definitely not going to support trains that would have to average well over 140mph (there are 4 proposed stops between the 2 ends).

tannedNerd 4y ago

I think the easiest solution would be tie all infrastructure funds railroads receive with the delays Amtrak incurred on their tracks due to freight trains. Do it to many times and you lose out all funding for the rest of the year. Trying to block Amtrak from services should automatically incur a funding pause for those tracks.

Mountain_Skies 4y ago
The railroad lobbyists aren't who Congress would be afraid of if they passed such a law, it's the industries that make use of the freight rail system that would have Congress running for the hills. The US has an extraordinarily robust and high-capacity freight rail system. Anything that interferes is going to get extreme blowback from those who depend on it. Amtrak's very existence could be in danger if they started causing freight users logistics problems.

graupel 4y ago

But why Twitch? Seems like YouTube would be the place to get eyeballs on this, if not in place of Twitch, along with it.

gambiting 4y ago
Would it? Who watches streams on YouTube??
- haunter 4y ago
  A lot of people? Youtube is streaming live sport events, concerts, political rallies, conferences etc. It has a far bigger reach and scope than Twitch. And not to say the actual videoplayer is also better, live rewind for example which still non-existent on Twitch
  - jasonwatkinspdx 4y ago
    Discoverability for streams is awful on Youtube. Twitch also has a very different culture surrounding channels and chat. This results in Twitch having a much smaller audience, but far higher engagement. Right now Youtube is having to write huge checks to lure away big streamers from Twitch. They'll probably do better with that than Mixer. Atm the optimal strategy is to livestream on twitch then pay an editor to create highlight videos on Youtube. Live rewind existed on Twitch until very recently, though it wasn't called out in the UX: you just have to click on the person's profile and go to the VOD page. However recently Twitch added a gate where they changed the default "automatically make VODs available immediately" from true to false, as a mitigation strategy against their DMCA volume (RIAA scrapes twitch VODs in volume).
- e2le 4y ago
  Why not do both?
- TigeriusKirk 4y ago
  I do, pretty much daily. Casino poker streams and stringers livestreaming their news chasing, for my evening entertainment. Sometimes other stuff if it surfaces in my feed.

UncleEntity 4y ago

Yep, try to catch an Amtrak out of Phoenix and you have to drive about an hour to Maricopa instead of the old train station downtown because of them not getting priority over freight traffic.

hedora 4y ago
Think that's bad? Drive on the 40 (route 66) from California to Texas sometime. All those abandoned train stations used to be Amtrak stops. Modern passenger trains could hit about 200 mph on that terrain. San Jose to Dallas is about 1400 miles, so a 8-9 hour trip would be enough to ride the entire line, with stops at the towns along the way. I'd definitely choose that instead over a 3.5 hour plane ride (good for that route), especially with sleeper cars. On top of that, there are abandoned train stations closer to my actual destination than the nearest airport. With drive time on the Texas side, the train would actually be faster, door to door.
- dylan604 4y ago
  I used to make the trek from Dallas to LA a few times a year. I have tried flying, I have tried driving, but I've never taken the train. Travelling solo, the flying can have you in the other city within a few hours. Driving solo takes about 24 hours. Booking a train shows arrival in 48 hours. Just not even in a realistic time frame.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Last time I had a trip from Boston to Chicago, I briefly look a look at the train. It would have been a long overnight trip and cost about 3x the plane if I got a sleeping compartment. Just made no sense. Although I've done it, even doing the whole Northeast Corridor is a stretch. DC is a pretty short flight from Boston whereas it's a full day by train.
- coredog64 4y ago
  Which parts are they going to hit 200mph on? I have driven extensively on 8, 10, and 40 into and out of California, and I can't recall a path that doesn't transit the North American Cordillera: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Cordillera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Cordillera On 8 heading out of San Diego, you go from sea level to 4000 feet, down to (IIRC) 3000, and then back up to 4000 before going back down to sea level. Once over the Arizona border, you pretty quickly go from sea level up to about 2000 feet. 40 goes through Flagstaff, the elevation of which is almost 7000 feet. Albuquerque is at 5000 feet. So, where in the world do you find HSR that transits not one, but three or four 4000 foot passes?

superdisk 4y ago

Isn't Amtrak a government-run operation? Why is it "beefing?" Why is everything so stupidly infantilized these days?

bombcar 4y ago
Amtrak, like the post office, is given impossible tasks by congress and then yelled at when they fail to complete them. In the areas where Amtrak is separated from freight traffic or owns the rails, it performs well enough, if not great. The "late trains get later" problem kills the major interstate routes, leaving them as land cruise ships for vacationers.
- hedora 4y ago
  It's not just congress. On the west coast, they also answer to the state legislatures and multiple municipalities. Example insanity: Capitol Corridor trains have 4 cars. Two are handicap accessible on the bottom level and/or also bike cars. The Berkeley station has two platforms on one of two tracks. (The other track has four platforms). In practice, very few handicap people use the train, since the stations are basically only accessible via bike, car or corporate shuttle. However, many people ride bikes to the train. This causes a shortage of bike slots, so people would bungee their bikes to rails, etc in the handicap area, always leaving a few seats for wheelchairs. (The conductors would make a bicyclist move their bike in the vanishingly rare scenario when the handicap spaces filled up. This wouldn't even delay the train in practice.) The liberal politicians got wind of this, deemed it discriminatory, and forced the conductors to crack down on bike bungees, potentially stranding commuters even though the train was mostly empty. Amtrak responded by adding bike slots and redesigned the cars. The conservatives deemed this unacceptable, since the new cars don't contain gun lockers. You see, you're allowed to carry a gun on Amtrak, but it must be secured in a locker. So, Amtrak retrofitted the bike spaces so one closet (for three bikes) had a sliding metal door that could be locked. The door partially blocked one of the three bike slots (so road bikes fit, usually, but not mountain bikes), and if (and I don't think this ever happened, even once) someone brought a handgun on to a full train, they'd kick 2-3 cyclists off the train. Why did I mention the Berkeley station, you ask? Well, with the lower bike storage density in the cars, sometimes (1 of ten rides), the train would have departing bikes in a car without a platform. The "platform" is a concrete pad that sits about 6 inches above the gravel. For liability reasons, allowing a bicyclist to disembark on gravel was a firable offence. Instead, the bikes were supposed to move to the correct car one station earlier (though it was not always known which car was correct). Failing that, they could attempt to take the bike upstairs then downstairs to move cars, or be dropped one station later (downtown Richmond), then bike back to Berkeley. It would have cost a few hundred in concrete to add two platforms, but it would have required coordination between multiple bureaucracies. Also, they were forcing cyclists into dangerous situations to avoid liability. I'd love to be on the jury if something ever happened!

hedora 4y ago

For the specific case of the Capitol Corridor (Sacramento - San Jose), the government should just sieze the line from the freight companies, and use imminent domain to run freight lines from the port of Oakland out to less densely populated areas. As it is, freight trains run through the pedestrian areas of Jack London Square. The should also straighten the lines in the areas near Fremont so the train could run at at least 180mph. Then, they should run the Amtrak every 15 minutes within metro areas. Instead, they did the BART extension.

carapace 4y ago
Your ideas would be political suicide, and cost a bajillion dollars too. Port of Oakland is a pretty major port, your would disrupt service there for years, for what? And how would surface Amtrak trains be better than BART? BART's pretty solid as regional transport. BART moves more people per year than the SFO airport!
- hedora 4y ago
  The freight trains are regularly delayed by issues along that line. It runs through pedestrian plazas, marshland, hairpin turns in hills, etc. A straight shot east for a few miles would land it in flat, unpopulated areas. They'd lose freight access to the salt evaporation plant north of milpitas, which seems to be the remaining freight stop on that corridor (it is being decommissioned for environmental reasons, so by the time the rail rework was done, it wouldn't matter) Surface Amtrak trains have a much higher top speed than BART, and are nicer. If the freight lines were owned by Amtrak, and maintained to commuter rail standards (instead of freight standards), the existing trains could roughly double their cruising speed for most of the miles of that line, and be much faster than BART. Also, the Amtrak trains have bars and restrooms. They are quiet and don't stink. Edit: Also, building out a multilane freight rail from the port to east of Oakland would allow the port operator the option to increase port capacity. They could move containers by rail to a rail yard outside of the bay area commuting zone. They could load trucks there, cutting hours of stop and go truck drive time during commute hours.
  - 4y ago

throwanem 4y ago

> By law, Amtrak’s passenger trains also have priority over freight traffic. But in practice this doesn’t happen... Yeah, no kidding! I've always understood the relevant law to be the other way around - granted, this based mostly on what I've heard from other Northeast Regional passengers while we're sitting at a dead stop waiting for a load of orange juice or something to get the hell out of the way, as seems reliably to happen at least once per trip.

bombcar 4y ago
The key is they have scheduling priority - and if they arrive at the segment on time, they get to go - but the moment there's any delay, they lose their slot and the freights are now in priority. Combined with how much of the USA doesn't even have passing sidings let alone double tracks it ends up with "late trains get later".

carapace 4y ago

First of all, I love trains. I've taken more than one trip across the continent (N. Am.) and it's incredibly fun, and you see so much of the country, and meet so many interesting (and annoying sometimes, sure) people. I recommend it wholeheartedly. That said, passenger train travel makes about as much economic sense as riding in a horse-and-carriage. It's romantic but it's technologically obsolete. That's why freight trains get priority over passenger trains (despite what the law says on the books) because there's no economic incentive and little political will to do otherwise.

gaadd33 4y ago
To fly from NYC to Philly will take at least an hour on the plane, plus about an hour to go from Manhattan to the airport, plus 30 mins or so to go from the Philadelphia Airport to Philadelphia...the train takes an hour and departs/drops you in the center of both cities. How is that technologically obsolete?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Short-range intercity can be usable, but cross-country travel in the USA is honestly just impractical by rail. Should it be kept operational? Certainly! Should it be seriously considered as a competitor for airlines? Unlikely. The only way it will come back is if the intercity travel keeps getting better and better, and even then routes on the coast may work but once you hit the midwest the distances get unreasonably far. Chicago to Los Angeles would be ten hours at Nozomi speeds assuming zero stops. Even the proposed California high-speed corridor doesn't have much to offer.
  - kevin_thibedeau 4y ago
    You don't have to even look that far afield. I did a ride between NY Penn and Rochester NY that took longer than the 6 hour drive because of delays.
    - bombcar 4y ago

politelemon 4y ago

'is streaming' is a bit generous or premature; at present Amtrak have only posted 3 videos, 30-60 seconds each, all 4 days ago.

freemint 4y ago
I am not sure if you are aware how twitch works. Not all streams are published as video on demand. Those videos are clips viewers generated from the stream.

protomyth 4y ago

The government should build its own line. Its no joke to delay a cargo shipment, there are tons of penalties built into those contracts. As a railroad, you have a very specific timing on when your train needs to arrive, and the people doing the loading need to have it loaded in a set time period. Frankly, given diesel prices, cargo is much more important than people at this point. Perhaps the government will be looking to add some tracks or dedicated bus lines the next time it funds a highway project. This demonizing of cargo when its absolutely needed in the US is just stupid.

rhino369 4y ago
Especially since Amtrak (aside from the NE regional line) doesn't provide any service that Greyhound or Megabus don't already provide.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Amtrak has an extensive bus line to extend their reach - and they can't sell you a ticket on it unless it includes a train segment.
  - rhino369 4y ago
    We don't need a subsidized government run bus line, the private ones work fine.
    - bombcar 4y ago
      To be fair, all bus lines are government subsidized, unless one somewhere has built their own roads - maybe the Disney shuttle?
      - Mountain_Skies 4y ago
        In theory fuel taxes and registration taxes on the buses should cover their share of that cost but the math becomes tricky when you start trying to calculate the time and space value of different road segments.

tialaramex 4y ago

For comparison, the Elizabeth line (Crossrail) under London will launch with 12 trains per hour (one every five minutes) and will eventually go to 24 trains per hour during peaks. CSX says 8-10 through trains per day use this route, plus 1-3 "coal and grain" trains and "numerous" local services. The reported scarcity of trains on the stream matches this. Now of course much of the route Amtrak wants to use is single track, which is especially a problem for freight trains since they're so long that only very long purpose made sidings can possibly allow them to pass. But on the other hand it's also notable that CSX insists daytime is "peak" for freight and that doesn't make much sense. Since passengers mostly want to travel in daytime, it makes sense to shift freight to the night, not schedule all the freight for daytime and then insist that passengers be re-scheduled instead.

ars 4y ago
That's not a comparison. Amtrak trains travel at like double the speed of cargo trains. It's makes it much harder to schedule, since you have to clear half the track before Amtrak can enter it, otherwise it would reach the back of the freight train.
thot_experiment 4y ago
Maybe we should just nationalize the existing rail network. America has a decent rail network but unfortunately much of it is private leading to this bullshit. Here's a fun rule of thumb for ya: Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of weight per wheel. A truck moving things does something like 400-600x as much damage to roads as a car. Also tire dust is bad for you and other living things, train wheels have much less rolling resistance.
- pstuart 4y ago
  Thank you for putting that out there -- I've been saying the same thing. Then invest in increasing the traffic capacity and enforce Positive Train Control on all rolling stock -- https://www.aar.org/campaigns/ptc/ https://www.aar.org/campaigns/ptc/ Add in electrification where possible and allow for other "carriers" to utilize the lines to maximize utility.

trenning 4y ago

How screwed are commercial rail companies going to be when coal finally phases out? What will replace that space or will their revenue just slowly drop?

missedthecue 4y ago
I saw Amazon branded shipping containers on a freight train just the other week
- tshaddox 4y ago
  Could those have been intermodal containers, each of which will eventually be hauled on a tractor trailer?
  - toast0 4y ago
    Some containers go right from boat to rail, or maybe moved around the yard at the port to go from the boat to rail. Amazon may also have warehouses serviced by rail spurs, and not have to use trucking to get their containers from a rail terminal. I don't know if they do, but certainly some containers don't see any road on the way from the shipper to the receiver.
kube-system 4y ago
Coal transport by rail is already way down: https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AAR-Coal-Fact-Sheet.pdf https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AAR-Coal-Fact... I suspect intermodal rail transport will probably do well as long as we keep buying cargo from Asia on post-Panamax ships.
pg_bot 4y ago
Coal accounts for ~11.5% of rail volume[0], so they won't be screwed. (obviously not great to lose that much business) You might see prices drop due to a lack of demand, but other products will still be shipped via rail. Intermodal containers have been increasing in volume recently and I could see that taking up some excess supply. [0] https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AAR-Coal-Fact-Sheet.pdf https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/AAR-Coal-Fact...

tru3_power 4y ago

Dumb question but why can’t they just tack on passenger carts to freight trains?

ch4s3 4y ago
No, the freight trains don't make frequent stops or start and end in places you would want to travel to/from.
ghaff 4y ago
Because freight trains can be really really slow. (I suspect there are a ton of other issues as well--including that you probably wouldn't even cut costs very much.)
bombcar 4y ago
The freight railroads fought for years to get Amtrak setup so they could ditch their unprofitable passenger rail. Freight trains also don't travel in the same way passenger rail wants to, and rarely stops, and is slow. The solution is to build parallel lines and more passing sidings and dual track, but that's expensive and nobody involved wants to. For comparison, the double tracking of Los Angeles to San Diego has been in progress for 20+ years now and is at about 2/3s double track. https://www.sandag.org/index.asp?projectid=260&fuseaction=projects.detail https://www.sandag.org/index.asp?projectid=260&fuseaction=pr... And if you really want freight and passenger to coexist you build entirely separate lines (or quad track allowing overtaking).

xg15 4y ago

> Between 8 a.m. and 12:49 Central Time, Amtrak says it counted three trains on CSX’s tracks. > After publication, in response to a Motherboard request for comment, CSX dismissed the Amtrak stunt. “It takes a freight train about 8-10 hours to travel between New Orleans and Mobile,” a CSX spokesperson said in a statement. “Focusing on one point of a line that traverses approximately 138 single track miles, major ports and Interchange points and then purporting that it is indicative of the operational realities of the entire line is grossly misleading. Anyone that understands railroad operations, including Amtrak, would know that.” So CSX argues the entire 138 mile track would be blocked if there is a single train travelling anywhere on it? Efficiency!

ars 4y ago
It's not quite as silly as it sounds - Amtrak trains travel at twice the speed of cargo ones. So you have to clear at least half the track before an Amtrak train can enter. But there's no problem running a cargo train after the Amtrak one.
- zeckalpha 4y ago
  Maybe some lines, but here they travel at the same speeds.
makomk 4y ago
It's probably not quite that bad, but if there's a single train anywhere on any single track section that means the entire section is effctively blocked off to traffic in the other direction, it sounds like there's a lot more than a single freight train on it at any given time, and Amtrak wants to run round trips down the entire 138-mile track a couple of times a day.

pvsukale3 4y ago

In India both freight and train services are government owned and are part of same network. Revenue from freight subsidises passenger services which run in losses [1]. But in general passenger service is given preference over freight every day. Hence there are some serious delays in freight service. So government is building these special double electric lines across country especially designed for freight called as dedicated freight corridors [2]. [1] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/railways-earning-from-freight-movement-sees-24-increase/articleshow/89025564.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/railways-earning-f... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSsRmbUnvK4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSsRmbUnvK4

AuthorizedCust 4y ago

Most of the leading comments are justified with an implicit tautology: “passenger rail is needed so badly because passenger rail”. This suggests a belief that typical Americans are dumbasses for preferring other forms of transportation, so they need elites to force them into what’s best for them. The American rail system is focusing on what rail does best: haul heavy freight. When you emphasize passenger rail use, you’ve switched to an inefficient use of rail to appease hardliners.

wetmore 4y ago
> This suggests a belief that typical Americans are dumbasses for preferring other forms of transportation, so they need elites to force them into what’s best for them. I think this is an unfair characterization. The belief is that rail is currently _not_ great in the US and that's why people don't choose it. The theory is that if we make passenger rail better, then consumers will be more willing to choose it over alternate, less environmentally efficient methods like driving or flying.
- AuthorizedCust 4y ago
  Sounds like an opportunity for a private company to test the market!
  - bluGill 4y ago
    No sane private company would do a private railroad in the US. NYC in the 1920 put in laws to ensure private rails cannot compete and by the 1950s forced the private companies to give their system to the city. Note that I just made a statement about the sanity of Texas Central and Brightline.
- ceeplusplus 4y ago
  > The theory is that if we make passenger rail better, then consumers will be more willing to choose it I think there are other (unacknowledged by public transport advocates) concerns people have with passenger rail. Namely that every light rail car in every major city smells like piss already and feels much more unsafe than your own car. Until that reality is addressed and mentally ill people are not permitted to share the same space as normal, functioning members of society, people will continue to choose their own private transportation whenever possible. If you don't think this is a reality then you should take a look at some of the shit that happens on BART and NYC subways. My chance of getting pushed off the platform or being the victim of a racially motivated hate crime is 0 in my own car.

mlindner 4y ago

This whole thing kind of ignores the fact that the rail companies own these lines and Amtrak doesn't want to pay them enough to make it worth their while.

hehebdbdwjeb 4y ago
And your whole comment ignores the fact that government subsidized those rail lines under the condition that the companies run passenger rail. They failed to do so, and government gave them a free pass. Government should have stripped them of their rights due to breach of contract
- mlindner 4y ago
  Except they weren't subsidized. They were built from the very beginning by private companies.
wildrhythms 4y ago
The article addresses the fact that, while the freight industry owns the track, Amtrak by law have priority. So either the law is being carefully tiptoed around, or the freight industry is breaking the law. >Amtrak, a government-chartered corporation, was created in 1971 from the ashes of private carrier passenger service. As part of the deal, freight rail companies generally retained ownership of the tracks, along with the responsibility of maintaining them and running service. Amtrak received the rights to run trains along those tracks. By law, Amtrak’s passenger trains also have priority over freight traffic.
- mlindner 4y ago
  It's the first time I've ever heard of this law and isn't true in the general case or entirely not enforced. I've ridden Amtrak (outside major corridors) several times and every time the train has had to stop to let freight trains pass. It's never had priority.

Tempest1981 4y ago

The tracks that Caltrain uses between San Francisco and San Jose are shared with Union Pacific freight trains, and that works. Does anyone know what kind of freight Union Pacific hauls to/from San Francisco? Mostly late at night?

toast0 4y ago
Last time I rode Caltrain, nearly all of the spurs to nearby buildings were blocked by fences, presumably trying to reduce 'trespasser incidents'. IIRC, UP would generally only operate on the tracks outside of the hours Caltrain was scheduled; and that's part of why Caltrain to Gilroy isn't scheduled often (there's a lot more frieght activity south of San Jose Diridon).

mlindner 4y ago

What Amtrak should actually be doing is closing down all it's long distance routes followed by privatizing it so it can profitably run it's short haul lines.

binarymax 4y ago

I’ve got an absolutely bonkers idea: add two or three passenger cars to the freight trains Edit: Not sure why I’m being downvoted. This was a thing for a long time. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_train https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_train

shortstuffsushi 4y ago
Cargo trains are usually quite long, slow to accelerate, and stop infrequently (comparatively, at least). Adding "two or three cars" would mean adding a very small amount of human capacity while forcing the cargo portion of the train to make many slow starts, and transporting people very slowly. While it is possible, it's a lose-lose for both cargo movers and potential passengers.

formerkrogemp 4y ago

I really don't see rail expanding in the US in my lifetime for many reasons, including our national debt, the loss of the dollar's reserve status, the similar functionality provided by trucking (negative externalities like pollution, shared cost of road upkeep, and employment levels notwithstanding), the right of way vs NIMBYISM of expanding rail and running extra lines, and finally the inability to complete infrastructure projects in the US on time, in budget, and with quality. I am just not optimistic about any of this.