7 ms·

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.

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 5y 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.
pirate787 5y ago
The United States already nationalized passenger rail-- Amtrak is the sorry result. We should privatize passenger rail, following the successful models in Germany and Japan. Amtrak should lose control of the nationalized Northeast Corridor and those timeslots awarded to bidding private companies.
- danhor 5y ago
  Germany has very little private competition in the longer distance sector (>2h) and almost no private infrastructure. Both are controlled by the state owned DB and there are ambitions to make the infrastructure part even less profit oriented and talks about moving it out completely into a separate, even less private, entity. In the regional rail sector there are more private actors, yes, but they work routes tendered by the state with pretty strict requirements as to frequency, vehicles and branding. It's a bit more like contractors in housing construction (and most of the infrastructure is still directly or indirectly state owned). One of the bigger issues with Amtrak is the lacklustre infrastructure, that is mostly owned by freight companies (with prominent exceptions like the NE corridor). I wont say that Amtrak is great, but infrastructure is the bigger problem. No freight company is interested in upgrading, electrifying, speed increases or even building new lines. There are few private actors interested in the passenger rail sector (with exceptions such as Texas Central and I wish them the best). I also can't imagine great results with new private actors, since non-high speed rail suffers even more from the competition with the car due to a lack of attractive or in many cases usable public transit option near the start or destination. And high speed rail is really expensive to build, so I have my doubts that private actors will be able to secure funding without any previous examples. To fix passenger rail in America, in my opinion, you have to at least have a major rework of how rail infrastructure works. Canada is also doing a lot better with rail than America, with a major priority being the independence from freight companies in regards to infrastructure.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Where even the regional operators are at least partially owned by the states in turn. Furthermore this is causing friction when the contract ends, and another bidder wins. Compared with how it has been before this, when it was all state run, much hilarity ensues on all levels of operation. Beginning with the engineers, now dispersed over different sub-contractors, not being able to assist when there is a shortage in another sub-contractor. Leading to delays, because available ones have to be brought in by taxi from over 100+ of km away. 'Streckenkunde' == knowledge of tracks, stations and switching/marshalling/maintenance yards is degraded, because the sub-contractors don't do it all, everywhere, anymore. Regarding maintenance, more empty movements to farther away, because not every shop can or will service everyones locos, trainsets. For some 'unexplainable' reason, during the slightest bad weather chaos ensues, every year, again and again. No matter if cold, heat, wind, wet. While aeons ago, they advertised with an engine plowing through the snow, caption: "Everybody is talking about the weather. We don't." [·] https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/68er-plakate-a-946587.html#fotostrecke-ef53430b-0001-0002-0000-000000106475 https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/68er-plakate-a-946587.html... [·] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo8l2qp2N8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo8l2qp2N8M [·] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGhJW5TvIuQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGhJW5TvIuQ This was the truth, at the time. What we have now are a few high-speed tracks connecting the larger centers, and regional mass transportation in and around these. Outside of that it's patchwork, or doesn't exist at all. (Though it did! Once.) In addition to that, it costs much more, and is inflexible to book. It's FUCKED! edit: Also 'type-ratings' for the engineers. Before pseudo-privatization and splitting in sub-groups, there was only distinction between Diesel(hydraulic) and electric locomotives, and passenger vs. freight rail. Those were about a dozen each, and they usually could drive all of them from their branch of diesel or electric. Today? Not anymore.
    - iggldiggl 5y ago
      > there was only distinction between Diesel(hydraulic) and electric locomotives, and passenger vs. freight rail That's oversimplifying things a little too much – type-ratings were a little more fine-grained than that even during the days of the Federal Railways.
- bastawhiz 5y ago
  Sounds a lot like the argument against a public USPS: put it in a position where it can't succeed and has no leverage, then point at it and say that a public model can't possibly work and that it needs to be privatized. Privatization does essentially nothing to fix the issue of rail ownership or use. Making the service privately owned gives it no leverage to operate efficiently: that comes from regulation, which is a separate problem. The biggest difference with a privatized service is that a private service can be bullied out of existence.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    USPS is awesome. But there are other examples of extreme incompetence in Government from local to Federal. SSA, USCIS, DMV (state), etc. So both sides cherry picking their favorite gov agencies does disservice to improving things and doubling down on what works, and criticizing what doesn't.
- dr_dshiv 5y ago
  How does it work in the Netherlands? They do such an awesome job I can’t believe it. I think it is semi privatized. But I don’t know the details.
  - crote 5y ago
    The rail infrastructure is owned, managed, and maintained by ProRail: a private company but its sole shareholder is the Government. Everyone running trains pays them a usage fee. The vast majority of passenger trains and all railway stations are owned and operated by NS: again a private company with the Government as sole shareholder. Various other private companies are running local services, and all freight traffic is done by private companies too.
- chrisandchris 5y ago
  I think the answer is more complex. In Switzerland, it's mostly state-owned (with a few local concessions) and it runs very smooth and we have one of the most punctual railroads in the world. So just saying "state owned is bad" may no be the full answer, just a part of it. There are many factors that play a role and may lead to a different answer for a different country.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  Well, Amtrak was the nationalization of the services. The main issues with Amtrak today are that they do not run the tracks as well, so despite laws with contrary intent they never have priority on the rails. That, and the requirements for high speed rail are pretty much opposite of the host freight railroads, which are content to have slow, low-standard track because it’s cheaper. The NEC is decently run. The rail conditions are so bad that if we were to privatize rail pretty much everything outside the NEC would dry up.
  - pirate787 5y ago
    Incorrect. Amtrak owns and operates the most valuable and viable stretch of rail in the United States, the Northeast corridor stretching from DC - Baltimore - Philly - New York City - Boston.
    - bobthepanda 5y ago
      Hm. I meant to say that "The Amtrak-run NEC is decently run." Is it true high speed rail, no, but at this point the startup costs of actual high speed rail are so high that private entities pretty much never take it on. (Brightline in Florida is not actually high speed rail due to the speed, Texas Central is floundering due to lawsuits, Las Vegas to LA is on constant life support, etc.) The only profitable private railroads are the ones that started off with cheap property to develop near stations and never sold it off, essentially becoming landlords/property developers in their own right. But the horse has left the barn for that in the US and nearly all city center property is expensive for a singular entity to just buy up and redevelop.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  As a German I wouldn't call it successful. Maybe seen through pink glasses while stoned or drunken. Otherwise? Meh...
jhgb 5y ago
> America has a decent rail network According to what metrics? For example my country has over five times greater length of railway network per unit of area. For electrified rail, which is increasingly important for sustainability reasons, that advantage goes up to a factor of 200 (!).
- sixstringtheory 5y ago
  America has huge swathes of undeveloped and uninhabited land. Maybe over five times as much as your country. What would the multiple be if you compared your country’s metrics to just the northeast corridor?
  - jhgb 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure we also don't have equal rail density in all regions. So this is just the average. Nevertheless I'm not sure how this can swing a factor of two hundred. (If I use rail length per capita instead, which somewhat compensates for unpopulated regions, the advantage is still ~1.4x for non-electrified and ~50x for electrified rail.) Also, is there any statistics for this northeast corridor, regarding region area, electrified, and non-electrified rail length? I only know where to get national statistics, so that doesn't help me a lot here.
    - ghaff 5y ago
      The Northeast Corridor where the Acela runs is all electrified. In fact the electrification of the tracks north of New Haven (so an engine switch was no longer needed) was one of the big benefits Acela brought to even the non-Acela trains. I don't know what it looks like north (basically Portland) and south of the northeast corridor--or the non-coastal routes in New England.
  - danhor 5y ago
    Adding up the metropolitan areas around the NE corridor, there are ~40 Million people living there, around half of Germany. The NE corridor includes 611km of electrified track (or 1500km for all electrified rail in the US, adding up all the numbers mentioned in the Wikipedia page). In Germany 20000 km are electrified, so around 25cm per inhabitant. In comparison to the NE corridor with a number of 1.5cm per inhabitant, this is a huge difference. To account for other railways inside the NE corridor, we can also just use all electrified rail as a reference and arrive at 3.7cm per inhabitant). And Germany hasn't been great about electrifying it's rail.
bluGill 5y ago
The us has the best freight railroad in the world handling much more freight than countries that have nationalized rail. Freight and passenger rail rail do not mix. Amtrak needs to build their own track instead of complaining
- throwaheyy 5y ago
  This is American rail transportation’s learned helplessness. Freigh and passenger rail mixes just fine in other countries.
  - makomk 5y ago
    As far as I know, the UK is about the only country that's made this work reasonably well, and that's with pretty much all routes double-tracked or quad-track for the major ones, and much less freight rail than the US and worse passenger rail than Europe.
    - throwaheyy 5y ago
      The exurban areas of Australia’s three largest capital cities. For example, the Central Coast line north of Sydney has half-hourly electric intercity trains interoperating with freight on a line that extends 165km from the city. Melbourne and Brisbane have similar lines radiating out to regional areas. Within the Sydney metropolitan area, commuter trains are operating among freight trains at 5-15 minute frequencies, though with dedicated freight bypass lines in some places. One issue in the USA, alongside private ownership of the rail lines, is oversized freight trains and resulting overbuilding required of passenger trains for crash safety. Unfortunately that rules out high-performance EMU designs as used in other countries. I believe Caltrain had to get an exemption for their ongoing electrification upgrades.
      - bluGill 5y ago
        Those overbuild passenger trains rules are no longer in effect, though the rules didn't change too long ago Longer trains are more efficient. That is why we run them
mlindner 5y ago
America's freight transport is cheaper than anywhere else in the developed world. Nationalizing it would increase that cost, not lower it. It would also push a lot more freight on to the roads instead of rail because road transport would get closer to the price of rail transport.
- TheDong 5y ago
  What is the mechanism that causes nationalized rail to inherently be more expensive? I can see the argument for nationalized being cheaper due to not being for-profit, due to having larger negotiation power (via the government), etc. What's the argument for nationalizing it increasing cost? Is it just "look at all these anecdotes?" or is there some fundamental economic reason.
  - mlindner 5y ago
    > What is the mechanism that causes nationalized rail to inherently be more expensive? A management that is not incentivized to reduce costs, or a the very least, following the operating policies set by politicians coming first before reducing costs. (It's hard to reduce costs when how you operate is decided by politicians.) The same problem that plagues government run systems all over the world. A great post on just a few of the silly policies is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263
    - TheDong 5y ago
      > A management that is not incentivized to reduce costs This argument doesn't seem to me as if it's fundamental. Politicians are at least in theory incentivized to reduce costs since citizens would rather not pay more taxes, and in theory a politician who enacts wasteful policies would not be elected. On the flip side, companies are only incentivized to reduce the cost charged to consumers (or in this case, companies shipping freight) in the face of competition, and long-haul freight has a massive up-front investment cost of building out rails, so there won't ever really be that many choices. This is akin to the highway robbery ISPs can still charge, even though they are private companies and the moat of laying fiber isn't nearly as extreme as that of laying rail > following the operating policies set by politicians coming first before reducing costs Won't it be equally true that private and public corporations will have to follow laws? That seems identical. > A great post on just a few of the silly policies is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263 I'm trying to ask if there's a fundamental reason here, not a bag of anecdotes, and we were also talking about freight, not commuter trains, so that comment isn't particularly relevant to the comment tree you started about freight specifically.

pstuart 5y 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.

pirate787 5y ago

The United States already nationalized passenger rail-- Amtrak is the sorry result. We should privatize passenger rail, following the successful models in Germany and Japan. Amtrak should lose control of the nationalized Northeast Corridor and those timeslots awarded to bidding private companies.

danhor 5y ago
Germany has very little private competition in the longer distance sector (>2h) and almost no private infrastructure. Both are controlled by the state owned DB and there are ambitions to make the infrastructure part even less profit oriented and talks about moving it out completely into a separate, even less private, entity. In the regional rail sector there are more private actors, yes, but they work routes tendered by the state with pretty strict requirements as to frequency, vehicles and branding. It's a bit more like contractors in housing construction (and most of the infrastructure is still directly or indirectly state owned). One of the bigger issues with Amtrak is the lacklustre infrastructure, that is mostly owned by freight companies (with prominent exceptions like the NE corridor). I wont say that Amtrak is great, but infrastructure is the bigger problem. No freight company is interested in upgrading, electrifying, speed increases or even building new lines. There are few private actors interested in the passenger rail sector (with exceptions such as Texas Central and I wish them the best). I also can't imagine great results with new private actors, since non-high speed rail suffers even more from the competition with the car due to a lack of attractive or in many cases usable public transit option near the start or destination. And high speed rail is really expensive to build, so I have my doubts that private actors will be able to secure funding without any previous examples. To fix passenger rail in America, in my opinion, you have to at least have a major rework of how rail infrastructure works. Canada is also doing a lot better with rail than America, with a major priority being the independence from freight companies in regards to infrastructure.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Where even the regional operators are at least partially owned by the states in turn. Furthermore this is causing friction when the contract ends, and another bidder wins. Compared with how it has been before this, when it was all state run, much hilarity ensues on all levels of operation. Beginning with the engineers, now dispersed over different sub-contractors, not being able to assist when there is a shortage in another sub-contractor. Leading to delays, because available ones have to be brought in by taxi from over 100+ of km away. 'Streckenkunde' == knowledge of tracks, stations and switching/marshalling/maintenance yards is degraded, because the sub-contractors don't do it all, everywhere, anymore. Regarding maintenance, more empty movements to farther away, because not every shop can or will service everyones locos, trainsets. For some 'unexplainable' reason, during the slightest bad weather chaos ensues, every year, again and again. No matter if cold, heat, wind, wet. While aeons ago, they advertised with an engine plowing through the snow, caption: "Everybody is talking about the weather. We don't." [·] https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/68er-plakate-a-946587.html#fotostrecke-ef53430b-0001-0002-0000-000000106475 https://www.spiegel.de/geschichte/68er-plakate-a-946587.html... [·] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo8l2qp2N8M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eo8l2qp2N8M [·] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGhJW5TvIuQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGhJW5TvIuQ This was the truth, at the time. What we have now are a few high-speed tracks connecting the larger centers, and regional mass transportation in and around these. Outside of that it's patchwork, or doesn't exist at all. (Though it did! Once.) In addition to that, it costs much more, and is inflexible to book. It's FUCKED! edit: Also 'type-ratings' for the engineers. Before pseudo-privatization and splitting in sub-groups, there was only distinction between Diesel(hydraulic) and electric locomotives, and passenger vs. freight rail. Those were about a dozen each, and they usually could drive all of them from their branch of diesel or electric. Today? Not anymore.
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    > there was only distinction between Diesel(hydraulic) and electric locomotives, and passenger vs. freight rail That's oversimplifying things a little too much – type-ratings were a little more fine-grained than that even during the days of the Federal Railways.
bastawhiz 5y ago
Sounds a lot like the argument against a public USPS: put it in a position where it can't succeed and has no leverage, then point at it and say that a public model can't possibly work and that it needs to be privatized. Privatization does essentially nothing to fix the issue of rail ownership or use. Making the service privately owned gives it no leverage to operate efficiently: that comes from regulation, which is a separate problem. The biggest difference with a privatized service is that a private service can be bullied out of existence.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  USPS is awesome. But there are other examples of extreme incompetence in Government from local to Federal. SSA, USCIS, DMV (state), etc. So both sides cherry picking their favorite gov agencies does disservice to improving things and doubling down on what works, and criticizing what doesn't.
dr_dshiv 5y ago
How does it work in the Netherlands? They do such an awesome job I can’t believe it. I think it is semi privatized. But I don’t know the details.
- crote 5y ago
  The rail infrastructure is owned, managed, and maintained by ProRail: a private company but its sole shareholder is the Government. Everyone running trains pays them a usage fee. The vast majority of passenger trains and all railway stations are owned and operated by NS: again a private company with the Government as sole shareholder. Various other private companies are running local services, and all freight traffic is done by private companies too.
chrisandchris 5y ago
I think the answer is more complex. In Switzerland, it's mostly state-owned (with a few local concessions) and it runs very smooth and we have one of the most punctual railroads in the world. So just saying "state owned is bad" may no be the full answer, just a part of it. There are many factors that play a role and may lead to a different answer for a different country.
bobthepanda 5y ago
Well, Amtrak was the nationalization of the services. The main issues with Amtrak today are that they do not run the tracks as well, so despite laws with contrary intent they never have priority on the rails. That, and the requirements for high speed rail are pretty much opposite of the host freight railroads, which are content to have slow, low-standard track because it’s cheaper. The NEC is decently run. The rail conditions are so bad that if we were to privatize rail pretty much everything outside the NEC would dry up.
- pirate787 5y ago
  Incorrect. Amtrak owns and operates the most valuable and viable stretch of rail in the United States, the Northeast corridor stretching from DC - Baltimore - Philly - New York City - Boston.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    Hm. I meant to say that "The Amtrak-run NEC is decently run." Is it true high speed rail, no, but at this point the startup costs of actual high speed rail are so high that private entities pretty much never take it on. (Brightline in Florida is not actually high speed rail due to the speed, Texas Central is floundering due to lawsuits, Las Vegas to LA is on constant life support, etc.) The only profitable private railroads are the ones that started off with cheap property to develop near stations and never sold it off, essentially becoming landlords/property developers in their own right. But the horse has left the barn for that in the US and nearly all city center property is expensive for a singular entity to just buy up and redevelop.
LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
As a German I wouldn't call it successful. Maybe seen through pink glasses while stoned or drunken. Otherwise? Meh...

jhgb 5y ago

> America has a decent rail network According to what metrics? For example my country has over five times greater length of railway network per unit of area. For electrified rail, which is increasingly important for sustainability reasons, that advantage goes up to a factor of 200 (!).

sixstringtheory 5y ago
America has huge swathes of undeveloped and uninhabited land. Maybe over five times as much as your country. What would the multiple be if you compared your country’s metrics to just the northeast corridor?
- jhgb 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure we also don't have equal rail density in all regions. So this is just the average. Nevertheless I'm not sure how this can swing a factor of two hundred. (If I use rail length per capita instead, which somewhat compensates for unpopulated regions, the advantage is still ~1.4x for non-electrified and ~50x for electrified rail.) Also, is there any statistics for this northeast corridor, regarding region area, electrified, and non-electrified rail length? I only know where to get national statistics, so that doesn't help me a lot here.
  - ghaff 5y ago
    The Northeast Corridor where the Acela runs is all electrified. In fact the electrification of the tracks north of New Haven (so an engine switch was no longer needed) was one of the big benefits Acela brought to even the non-Acela trains. I don't know what it looks like north (basically Portland) and south of the northeast corridor--or the non-coastal routes in New England.
- danhor 5y ago
  Adding up the metropolitan areas around the NE corridor, there are ~40 Million people living there, around half of Germany. The NE corridor includes 611km of electrified track (or 1500km for all electrified rail in the US, adding up all the numbers mentioned in the Wikipedia page). In Germany 20000 km are electrified, so around 25cm per inhabitant. In comparison to the NE corridor with a number of 1.5cm per inhabitant, this is a huge difference. To account for other railways inside the NE corridor, we can also just use all electrified rail as a reference and arrive at 3.7cm per inhabitant). And Germany hasn't been great about electrifying it's rail.

bluGill 5y ago

The us has the best freight railroad in the world handling much more freight than countries that have nationalized rail. Freight and passenger rail rail do not mix. Amtrak needs to build their own track instead of complaining

throwaheyy 5y ago
This is American rail transportation’s learned helplessness. Freigh and passenger rail mixes just fine in other countries.
- makomk 5y ago
  As far as I know, the UK is about the only country that's made this work reasonably well, and that's with pretty much all routes double-tracked or quad-track for the major ones, and much less freight rail than the US and worse passenger rail than Europe.
  - throwaheyy 5y ago
    The exurban areas of Australia’s three largest capital cities. For example, the Central Coast line north of Sydney has half-hourly electric intercity trains interoperating with freight on a line that extends 165km from the city. Melbourne and Brisbane have similar lines radiating out to regional areas. Within the Sydney metropolitan area, commuter trains are operating among freight trains at 5-15 minute frequencies, though with dedicated freight bypass lines in some places. One issue in the USA, alongside private ownership of the rail lines, is oversized freight trains and resulting overbuilding required of passenger trains for crash safety. Unfortunately that rules out high-performance EMU designs as used in other countries. I believe Caltrain had to get an exemption for their ongoing electrification upgrades.
    - bluGill 5y ago
      Those overbuild passenger trains rules are no longer in effect, though the rules didn't change too long ago Longer trains are more efficient. That is why we run them

mlindner 5y ago

America's freight transport is cheaper than anywhere else in the developed world. Nationalizing it would increase that cost, not lower it. It would also push a lot more freight on to the roads instead of rail because road transport would get closer to the price of rail transport.

TheDong 5y ago
What is the mechanism that causes nationalized rail to inherently be more expensive? I can see the argument for nationalized being cheaper due to not being for-profit, due to having larger negotiation power (via the government), etc. What's the argument for nationalizing it increasing cost? Is it just "look at all these anecdotes?" or is there some fundamental economic reason.
- mlindner 5y ago
  > What is the mechanism that causes nationalized rail to inherently be more expensive? A management that is not incentivized to reduce costs, or a the very least, following the operating policies set by politicians coming first before reducing costs. (It's hard to reduce costs when how you operate is decided by politicians.) The same problem that plagues government run systems all over the world. A great post on just a few of the silly policies is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263
  - TheDong 5y ago
    > A management that is not incentivized to reduce costs This argument doesn't seem to me as if it's fundamental. Politicians are at least in theory incentivized to reduce costs since citizens would rather not pay more taxes, and in theory a politician who enacts wasteful policies would not be elected. On the flip side, companies are only incentivized to reduce the cost charged to consumers (or in this case, companies shipping freight) in the face of competition, and long-haul freight has a massive up-front investment cost of building out rails, so there won't ever really be that many choices. This is akin to the highway robbery ISPs can still charge, even though they are private companies and the moat of laying fiber isn't nearly as extreme as that of laying rail > following the operating policies set by politicians coming first before reducing costs Won't it be equally true that private and public corporations will have to follow laws? That seems identical. > A great post on just a few of the silly policies is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978263 I'm trying to ask if there's a fundamental reason here, not a bag of anecdotes, and we were also talking about freight, not commuter trains, so that comment isn't particularly relevant to the comment tree you started about freight specifically.