25 ms·

“It Is Getting Worse. People Are Leaving”

560 points by mik3y 4y ago

mwattsun 4y ago
So if I understand this correctly, shorter trains are better because when they derail they take down less cars? Or are super long trains harder to control in varied terrain? Both probably.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  No: they are more manageable and rely less on crews working 12hr shifts regularly so less mistakes happen.
- w-j-w 4y ago
  Shorter trains are better because they are lighter and easier to control. The additional cars don't just make derailment worse, it causes the derailments to happen at all.
- yifanl 4y ago
  Based on my uninformed reading, these super trains are beyond what the existing rail infrastructure was designed for, and therefore are significantly more likely to derail, while also being more expensive to clean up when they do detail.
- saalweachter 4y ago
  Shorter trains are better on a lot of metrics except the number of crews you need driving trains around, basically. Except that everything ends up taking longer with the longer train, so you have a bit of a false economy, although I'm guessing it's not false enough to make it undesirable. To mention an issue that I don't think was well-touched upon in the article -- in a lot of places, you have single tracks running from point A to point B, with the occasional side track a train can park on to let another train past. But these side tracks may only be a mile or so long -- what happens when two three-mile trains need to pass each other using a 1 mile side track? A fun puzzle, but not very fun to implement the solution in real time.
  - m2fkxy 4y ago
    Well it's not really fun nor a puzzle, they simply can't pass each other, and the dispatcher will have to look for the next suitable sidings.
    - eesmith 4y ago
      As a puzzle, suppose ABC is going that way -> and and 123 is going <- that way, each 3 miles long, broken into segments A/B/C and 1/2/3, respectively. Let '-' be the siding, able to hold a mile-long set of cars. ABC ... 123 `-' Move C into _, uncouple from AB, and back AB to return to the mainline. AB ... 123 `C' Move AB and 123 to the left, past the siding: AB123 ... `C' Uncouple 1, move 23 into the siding to couple to C, and return C to the mainline: AB1 ... 23C `-' Uncouple 23 from C, pick up 1, and move back to the right side of the siding: AB ... 123.C `-' You've now gotten C past 123. Repeat with B then A, leaving the track as 123 ... ABC. This solution limits the maximum length to 3 miles. A 4 mile long solution would keep 1 coupled to 23 while moving C from the siding back to the mainline.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  - Shorter trains need less engines (or rather, they can be run with one or two locomotives). That means when one fails the conductor can immediately hear this and halt the train. When a mid- or end engine fails, it may escalate to catastrophic failure - long trains have issues with brake apply speed - remember, train cars are dumb. No electricity, all they have (at least here in Europe) is one main brake line where the transmission speed is the speed of sound - that means, for a 700m long train a drop in pressure at the front is only registered after 2 seconds at the last carriage. - long trains are a nightmare to shunt around. Not just because you have immense distance between the engine and the conductor at the end, but especially if the train has to run over a street level crossing. Old shunting yards simply were never estimated to run such long trains. - long trains are a nightmare for residents along the lines for the same reason - long and especially double stacked trains put up a hell of a lot more stress on the infrastructure than it was constructed for - remember again, this infra is sometimes well over a century old!
- hristov 4y ago
  Longer trains derail much much easier. For example consider the "straight lining" phenomenon. Straight lining is a major cause for derailments. The straight lining forces are pretty much proportional to the weight of the cars behind the car that is subject to the straight lining forces.
  - btbuildem 4y ago
    What is this "straight lining phenomenon"? Google yields nothing.
    - m2fkxy 4y ago
      It should read "stringline".
  - m2fkxy 4y ago
    This is the "stringline" phenomenon, not "straight line".
    - hristov 4y ago
      You are correct. I am after all only an amateur railroader.
- bombcar 4y ago
  Long trains don't "exist" in a way - because the couplers can't hold the weight, so you take a number of shorter trains and mash them together, and then "drive" it like that. It results in all sorts of "fun" that means if everything works perfectly; you save the cost of a crew or two - if anything goes wrong you have a derailment or worse.
deleted 4y ago
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foxyv 4y ago
The American workforce has been redlining on poorly staffed overworked jobs for decades. It's not surprising that we're losing workers left and right to fatigue. They treat the equipment better than the people who are doing the job and that is saying something because the equipment is poorly maintained as well. Nurses, doctors, teachers, railroad workers, truckers, clerks, salespeople, developers, builders, contractors, and everyone else. However, with our current political system, the solutions to these problems are nearly impossible to accomplish. Unions, socialized health care, workers rights, mandated vacation time, overtime limits, minimum wages, and UBI are all lightyears away. Instead our politicians are stripping women of their human rights and attacking children while placing migrants into concentration camps.
- aantix 4y ago
  You saw it with Covid. Trillions of dollars spent on U.S. healthcare, but hospitals are running hyper-efficient, lean staffs, with barely any ability to scale up to meet demand during a crisis.
  - ed25519FUUU 4y ago
    Millions of covid relief dollars sent to states just to be vacuumed up into poorly funded city and state pensions.
  - aantix 4y ago
    Wondering out loud - with non-profits, the IRS can enforce that status by forcing them to spend if they have too much money saved. Am I getting this correct? What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they are too profitable? I’m being purposefully vague to fill in the holes with discussion. Feel free to throw tomatoes at me if it’s a dumb idea. I’ve had dumber.
    - lowercased 4y ago
      > What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they are too profitable? Why do I suspect we'd see 'hollywood' accounting for medical if this ever were to be a 'thing'? 'Medical accounting' would become such a thing that we'd end up seeing every hospital running in the red all the time, to avoid this sort of thing. Someone would still be bringing in profits, but much much harder to spot.
ericmay 4y ago
The good thing about this particular problem is that it will be corrected by the market mechanic regardless of what the government does. Companies have to compete for labor now - the landscape has changed. Some will not adapt and they'll go out of business. That's not to say that we shouldn't also explore policy action, but when workers have the upper hand it's probably best to let the market just figure it out, and then come in with policy after that.
- swader999 4y ago
  Perhaps, but this doesn't give much to the people in Lac-Megantic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
- tgv 4y ago
  > it will be corrected by the market mechanic ... it's probably best to let the market just figure it out What evidence do you have for that? Let me guess: none, whatsoever. Just a religious belief in Adam Smith' invisible hand.
- advisedwang 4y ago
  The letter describes undisturbed market forces increasing this problem. Unless something changes, there's no reason to expect market equilibrium points to change.
- cheschire 4y ago
  Why do you think the workers have the upper hand? If anything, this letter sounds like workers have no recourse other than to find other employment. Based on historical trends, I suspect relying purely on the market mechanics will result in business failure, and then the policy action will be to save (bail out) the rail companies that are too big to fail. This will then lead to a bunch of strict controls so that bail outs never occur again, creating a regulatory moat further blocking future competition without significantly changing the corporate culture that led to the issue in the first place. Instead, an up-front regulatory limitation that prevents short term profiteering over long term sustainability seems required. How many trillionaires need to be minted on the backs of the population majority before significant regulatory limitations sound palatable? I guess I just don't understand the free market concept. It's like... sure it works great assuming you don't factor in the chaos components like greed, limitless ambition, explosive population growth, limited resources, natural disasters, international politics, etc etc etc etc etc.
stickfigure 4y ago
I'm struggling with the first paragraph: > A fellow engineer passed along information from another engineer, who I have never met, Mike, 17 years an engineer, like me, with a degree, like me (art, English), which has led to writing this body. Am I reading this right? The content of this article is hearsay twice removed?
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  I was much more offended by the abuse of commas.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - chefandy 4y ago
    I'm a bit rusty, but I think they are technically correctly placed— they separate many dependent clauses, interruptors and a time phrase from one independent clause at the beginning. The sentence is too structurally complex, though. My very strict undergraduate intro to expository writing class required using commas like this but it's definitely passé.
    - _Algernon_ 4y ago
      I have no opinion on the technical correctness of the sentence. But I know I would do a lot to avoid writing such sentence in my own writing, and that I would stop reading anything that hits me with such a monstrosity in the opening paragraph.
      - chefandy 4y ago
        Right. It's too structurally complex but it's not the comma's fault.
- deleted 4y ago
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- 4y ago
blkhp19 4y ago
What's with the early 20th / late 19th century style of English? Entertaining for a moment, but ultimately just frustrating for me to read. Is it done purposely because trains are an "old" piece of transportation infrastructure?
- JasonFruit 4y ago
  It didn't read like a Twitter 37/355 thread, but it didn't sound a bit old-fashioned to me — unless reasonably formal English is hopelessly out-of-date now.
- folkrav 4y ago
  Hmm, funny how as a non-native speaker, it didn't strike me as having a particularly notable style.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- opan 4y ago
  All that's sticking out to me is a lack of contractions and overly formal or dramatic text, but probably because it's written as a letter to someone.
- kar1181 4y ago
  I get the feeling the person that wrote it is not of the generation many here are. I really enjoyed the style personally (millennial...).
- throwanem 4y ago
  The writer may himself be far from young.
- alfor 4y ago
  Yes the style is overly complex. It distract from the message. It feel like the opposite of a PG essay.
- jcpst 4y ago
  It is mentioned that this letter was commentary in a hearing with the CEOs of BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific. I imagine they wanted to use a more formal style to address these business leaders.
kodah 4y ago
> For myself: I believe it is Wall Street greed and investor demands. 16,450-foot trains weighing more than 42 million pounds are gratifying someone with power. Someone who wants it all and more. I believe it is those few, who live nowhere near here, who own their own private islands and jets. This is far removed from laissez faire economics, or the neo liberal model, coming out of the 1980s. This was an incredibly common economic outlook coming from the Midwest and South. It's both tickling and sad to hear. I do love the way this was written, and those PSR trains sound like a nightmare. When I worked the network engineering desk for a Class I railroad we took derails seriously to the extent of pulling anyone who made changes to infra to the dispatchers themselves. That wasn't that long ago either but it sounds like a lot has changed.
- mwint 4y ago
  > pulling anyone who made changes to infra to the dispatchers themselves. I’m not up on railway lingo, can you expand on this?
  - kodah 4y ago
    Yeah, tracks have little huts every so often next to the track. These huts provide an uplink and various routing equipment that connects to track side safety equipment eg: there's big microphone arrays that listen to the wheels and brakes for deformities, automated switches will generally link into these if there's a switch nearby. Any change could influence a derailment, for instance if the track didn't switch and the train was going too fast for it's new destination. Therefore, anyone with their name on a change within a radius of the crash site gets interviewed, the dispatcher is removed and interviewed immediately.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  Help me understand why Wall Street greed would prefer trains that derail to ones that don’t? (The machismo argument, sure, I get, though it’s unsubstantiated; one could just as easily try to pin it on urban environmentalists.)
  - 4y ago
DrBoring 4y ago
Trains derailing regularly is consider acceptable and to be expected, infrastructure being tasked with jobs for which it was not designed, calls for more resources ignored, policy makers prioritizing profit over safe and efficient transportation of goods. This sounds like something from a fictional dystopian novel.
orwin 4y ago
During the first covid summer, with a friend, we studied two interesting points for the future: oil consumption relative to GDP (irrelevant here), and what is sometime called demographic dividend, or how infrastructure spending during time of growth will allow an aging population an easier life in the future. Since we thought western countries to be all the same, we studied France and its infrastructure cost, then China, then the other Brics, plus Turkey and some ex-colonial nation that got f*cked off their own demographic dividend by the west. What we are sure off: maintenance is immensly cheaper than construction, three to five order of magnitude in most cases, and improvement upon existing infrastructure is one to two order of magnitude cheaper. From this, we also concluded that subsidizing an almost empty line on the west coast during more than twenty year actually was a net positive operation for the French government, and killing small train tracks is in 99% of case a mistake. My really friendly advice to americans, whatever their political leaning: do not kill your rail, improve on it even. This will be a net positive for your country, even if atm it seems like it is loosing you money. You can't afford to not maintain your infrastructure, or to forget about it.
- sheepybloke 4y ago
  There's also a really good Freakanomics on this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance/
varispeed 4y ago
> I have given up enormous amounts of home and family life for insurance, for a living wage, for a trade that is respectable. I think this is the problem - paying people in respect that you can't make a meal of. And what does the living wage mean? That you can come back from work, eat a meal and have somewhere to sleep? It's interesting that people are happy to be taxed to teeth, having very little in exchange and do nothing about the fact that corporations their work for don't pay much and if their bosses pay taxes, then it means they got lame accountants.
orangepurple 4y ago
- adbachman 4y ago
  Because they use public infrastructure and in their passing almost exclusively move through spaces we share with them. This is a story, in part, about those externalities. As this author describes, linking extremely dangerous chemical cars onto an already overwhelmed structure means it's not if you will have another mass-casualty event[1], it's when. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1997246/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1997246/
  - orangepurple 4y ago
    Your response and the sibling response is much more concise and sensical than the rambling article. Thank you.
- jabroni_salad 4y ago
  As mentioned in the article, any one of these railcars is capable of destroying an entire town. You, presumably, may live in such a town.
- 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  You're getting flagged because it's hard to tell if you're a troll or just, ehm.... what's the hacker news euphemism for stupid? A startup dev with no equity?
photochemsyn 4y ago
A side-by-side study of American and Chinese railways, perhaps a compare-and-contrast investigative journalism article, would make for interesting reading. China seems well ahead of the USA here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_China > "China's railways are the busiest in the world. In 2019, railways in China delivered 3.660 billion passenger trips, generating 1,470.66 billion passenger-kilometres and carried 4.389 billion tonnes of freight, generating 3,018 billion cargo tonne-kilometres. Freight traffic turnover has increased more than fivefold over the period 1980-2013 and passenger traffic turnover has increased more than sevenfold over the same period. During the five years 2016-2020, China's railway network handled 14.9 billion passenger trips, 9 billion of which were completed by bullet trains, the remaining 5.9 billion by conventional rail." I'm assuming that in the USA the major rail owners don't want to invest in infrastructure upgrades, and longer trains mean lower labor costs? The US government doesn't want to raise taxes to pay for massive infrastructure projects (FDR New Deal programs are not on the horizon for either party), so nobody will pick up the required bill and infrastructure will just continue degrading to Third World status? The only new rail development being backed by the federal government looks like oil export trains in Utah... not exactly in line with Biden rhetoric on climate and renewable energy. https://grist.org/politics/an-oil-train-is-set-to-destroy-pristine-utah-mountains-why-wont-biden-stop-it/ https://grist.org/politics/an-oil-train-is-set-to-destroy-pr...
- jhugo 4y ago
  > nobody will pick up the required bill and infrastructure will just continue degrading to Third World status? Laos, the poorest country in South East Asia which I guess would qualify as Third World, has a brand new Chinese-built high-speed railway. So I guess US railways are already worse than "Third World status".
- m0llusk 4y ago
  There is evidence that Chinese rail operators have deliberately hidden accidents and their costs. That makes Chinese rail transport extremely difficult to compare to American rail transport especially when the specific subject is the accumulated cost of accidents.
alkaloid 4y ago
Speaking with railroader friends changed my mind on train unions. To an outsider, they sound terribly unreasonable, but speaking with people in the trenches has made me a believer in these unions, for whatever that is worth.
- whatisthiseven 4y ago
  Could you give examples of any kind? At the end you say "for whatever that is worth", but its worthiness is low given there are no specifics and I don't know you.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - alkaloid 4y ago
    Sure, a couple different ones. The first involved an engineer friend who literally "went off the rails" with one of these big trains. The union went to bat for him for six months or a year or something to try and protect his job. Ultimately they determined that he was at fault, but without the union he would have had no representation or recourse against the train company at all. A number of others involve injury: the unions make it difficult to terminate employees who are injured on the job; we don't really hear about how dangerous train work is. The article mentions that the conductor is "two" or "three miles" down the track at the end of train. That is a big deal, because the engineer doesn't necessarily have immediate feedback on when to stop. I've seen with my own eyes guys on the ground trying to guide one of these super-long trains into the yard to connect to other cars and that is some scary stuff. Finally, furloughs. I've had friends who were furloughed from their jobs at the train companies for years and had to go get a job at a grocery store stocking shelves. The train industry seems so have some regulation games going on at the governmental level and the union level. I'm not sure these guys would ever get their jobs back, with seniority, without union bargaining and playing interference with government.
- rejectfinite 4y ago
  > To an outsider, they sound terribly unreasonable ? To someone in the EU, it sounds bizarre that they would NOT have a union.
thebetatester 4y ago
While I don't disagree with anything mentioned here, it reads a little like Atlas Shrugged fanfiction
- fennecfoxen 4y ago
  Huh. People who find themselves abused and at risk on a job, walking away from the job, is now "Atlas Shrugged fanfiction"? I'll be sure to notify all the labor unions of their new patron.
  - thebetatester 4y ago
    Have you read Atlas Shrugged? In the end it talks about how the corporations that weren't run ethically ended up failing (literally rail operators) and they were having issues keeping their lines maintained and engineers employed. I didn't mean it derogatorily, so many people hate on Ayn Rand I just get an automatic downvote.
- mgdev 4y ago
  Came to say this. When life imitates art.
brundolf 4y ago
Unionize, unionize, unionize.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  BNSF already has a union, but they can't strike due to a federal court's ruling [1], so more creative solutions will be required. [1] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/federal-court-rules-unions-cant-strike-over-bnsf-attendance-policy https://www.freightwaves.com/news/federal-court-rules-unions...
  - mywittyname 4y ago
    Sounds like their "creative solution" is quit. Of course, this is predicated on the idea that the thirteen amendment will stand, and exceptions won't be carved out to force these people back to work. I acknowledge that recent events may have people questioning that supposition.
  - euroderf 4y ago
    Cops have always had "the blue flu". Why is there not more co-ordinated "sickness" ? Does it invite some kind of RICO prosecution ?
mumblemumble 4y ago
I can't help but wonder if this sort of stuff would already be banned in the USA had the Lac-Mégantic disaster happened 35km or so further south. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste... https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/891/bande-dessinee-lac-megantic-la-derniere-nuit https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/891/bande-dessin...
- Pxtl 4y ago
  Okay but Lac Megantic had nothing to do with "monster trains" iirc. Understaffing maybe, but not monster trains. AFAIK, the Lac Megantic disaster happened like this: A train was parked at the top of a hill, the locomotive that was powering the pneumatic brake was failing and smoking, and the conductor did not manually set enough of the manual back-up hand-brakes to keep the train in place if the failing locomotive was shut off and brake-pressure was lost, and he failed to properly test the hand brakes before leaving for the night. The brakes failed and so it went down hill while trying to break, which naturally led to sparks, fire, derailment, and ultimately explosion. More manpower or supervision could've prevented the disaster, or better maintenance on the locomotive. Or better automation on brakes. But it was not a matter of length, which seems to be the main thrust of this article.
teekert 4y ago
Ah well, who is John Galt?
- Finnucane 4y ago
  Just this guy, you know.
TrispusAttucks 4y ago
It's a shame this type of operation is so common. The people at the top that have no experience of work on the ground making decisions that affect people doing that important work.
mediaman 4y ago
The government data I am able to find does not seem to support the idea that there is a massive (or any) increase in derailments. And this letter never provides any data supporting the premise either. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there were 1,056 train derailments (both cargo and passenger) in the US in 2021. This was the lowest number in the dataset going back to 1975. Ten years ago, it was 1,470 derailments. In the year 2000, it was over 2,000 derailments. In reality, the data suggest we are on a strong downward trend in derailments per year. Is this government data wrong? Or is this writer trying out a career in fiction? Data: https://www.bts.gov/content/train-fatalities-injuries-and-accidents-type-accidenta https://www.bts.gov/content/train-fatalities-injuries-and-ac...
- beamatronic 4y ago
  Perhaps there are different definitions of “derailed”. After all one of the communication problems in this pandemic was that even technical, medical professionals could not agree on the definition of “airborne” as it relates to the public’s best interest.
- simulate-me 4y ago
  Isn’t there a third option that both your interpretation of the data and the letter are wrong? The letter specifically mentions the derailment of monster trains. These trains have more cargo and so one derailment can lead to a more severe delay in shipping times.
  - maxmcd 4y ago
    You can see the ratio here: https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles. Breaks down car miles vs train miles. I hope the third option is a bit more of just trying to take the situation in. This is someone sharing their experience, the executives running the show have their perspective as well. I'm not sure why we have to jump so quickly to "I found data that refutes this, is this person lying or is the data wrong?". Just seems to leave out so much nuance. Feels like a very tech industry "see the data and make a decision". This situation is so human, it's about fear and whether those fears are being considered.
phgn 4y ago
This reads like it's straight out of Atlas Shrugged.
- Finnucane 4y ago
  Except that for Rand, this is utopia.
  - javert 4y ago
    I would encourage people to read Rand on their own instead of going by untrue comments like this one.
    - evandale 4y ago
      Hah, had to chime in here. Unfortunately everyone is so poisoned by untrue things about Rand that people still come out at the end of the day thinking she's a libertarian. Or complaining that the characters are totally unrealistic without realizing the characters are meant to represent ideological extremes rather than real people.
      - javert 4y ago
        The characters are not meant to represent ideological extremes. Rand was a novelist primarily and a philosopher only secondarily. She got into philosophy because she wanted to figure out what humans at their best would look like and be like---so that she could put them into a novel. In Atlas Shrugged, the characters do come across as ideological extremes and not real people, if you go into the book expecting them to be that way. The book has a lot of depth that is missed by people who go into it for the philosophy. Within philosophy, Rand was least concerned about politics and the economy, and most concerned about man's mind and emotions and man's relationship to reality and to other men. Sure, you can read Atlas as some kind of political treatise, and the characters will come across as flat, because you are missing the point entirely and not picking up on 95% of what's in the book. In The Fountainhead, the characters don't come across as representing ideological extremes regardless of your approach to the book, IMHO. Anyway I'd recommend The Fountainhead over Atlas for someone new to Rand. Agreed that Rand is not a libertarian.
markhahn 4y ago
I've always been puzzled by the rail industry, since in spite of having incredible potential for efficiency, it seems stuck in so many ways by history. In this case, the impression I get is that we're seeing the result of too much hands-off self-organization. Sure, it's capitalism, but the Invisible Hand has never been conceived as the only factor driving behavior. Perhaps we should be reluctant to involve government, at least in making standards. But all industries have endo-regulation - internally decided protocols. Does this industry just need encouragement in that direction? Something like the ISO/ECMA/IETF bodies that have produced so much computer-related standardization? Three-mile trains sound like a problem - but surely this is an empirical issue. I think part of what's missing is a clear, full-throated statement about where the industry is going. That it's not obsolete (which many people assume), and that it could use some further development in basics. Too often, public discussion on trains devolves into finger-pointing about why the country has no fast commuter routes (and the prodigious amounts of cash that have been poured onto that issue...) Containerization was one of the best things to happen to the rail industry. But surely this sort of evolution would benefit from stewardship across industry, institutional and governmental groups. I'd love to know what the state of the industry is with respect to things like tracking, logistical responsiveness, smart/iot instrumentation, human interfaces, etc.
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Capitalism struggles when there are shared resources like geographies. In the UK they just assigned a private rail operator to each region, and measured them. Not exactly an environment in which capitalism can do well.
blueatlas 4y ago
The advancements in equipment to clean up after a large and/or complicated derailments contributes to these "acceptable" number of derailments. This includes roadbed, rail, and specialized equipment to move cars and locomotives. There are even 3rd party companies that specialize in railroad derailments. Large wrecks can be cleaned up in 24 hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkui84o6rNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkui84o6rNA
sullivanmatt 4y ago
I also live in Ames, Iowa, where the author resides. I live less than a mile from the track segment he is talking about, owned and operated by Union Pacific. While I'm pretty skeptical of this author's individual concerns given the twice-removed nature of the statements from their "source", trains have unmistakably gotten longer during my 15 years near these tracks, and they are moving faster. A hazmat situation impacting only a one-mile radius around the tracks could effect up to 30 to 40 thousand people here. I interned for Union Pacific while in college, and yes, the company will state that safety is their number one priority, but it was very clear that their business was to profit by optimizing every single little part of their business for maximum efficiency. The company has an open distain for regulations, especially safety-related regulations, and did not shy away from sharing those views internally. I would not be at all surprised if crews are being abused, and safety sidelined, for the sake of maximizing profit.
- curiousllama 4y ago
  That’s super interesting to me. It’ll take a disaster to fix it. I worked in oil and gas for a while, and they were pathologically obsessed with safety. Like, “you’ll be fired for not using the handrail in the HQ stairwell” pathological. It was good! There was never a question about how to value a trade off. Open disdain for safety regulations seems like a recipe for disaster.
  - taurath 4y ago
    In the modern world, it’ll take a disaster for anyone to pay any attention at all, but all they have to do is wait a few weeks for everyone to pay attention to something else.
  - ohyoutravel 4y ago
    Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally to add handrails to the stairwell between the first and second floors of my office.
    - 4y ago
redshirtrob 4y ago
I worked in this industry for many years. The railroads were always hyper-focused on increasing throughput. I left the industry about ten years ago, but back then derailments were considered the most significant risk to average network speed. At the time, average network speed was roughly correlated with profit. The rule of thumb was a 1 mph increase in average network speed was worth about $100MM in profit. That was 15 years ago. There were a lot of systems in place to monitor rolling stock: - Wheel Impact Detectors - Hotbox detectors - Acoustic bearing detectors - Truck performance detectors To name just a few. There were also efforts to monitor the railway infrastructure. The things I remember: - Rail stress management (rails need to be under the right amount of stress, which of course varies with temperature) - Top of rail friction management - Rail profile management (the name eludes me, but the idea is you want the interface between the rail and wheel to meet certain parameters) I worked on the rolling stock side measuring wheel impacts, overloads, imbalances, and a handful of more esoteric metrics. One of the outputs of these measurements was a train consist. For each of our locations we were able to build up the consist of the entire train (which was a fun CS problem in itself). I stared at a lot of consists over the years. In North America I never saw anything longer than about 100 cars and 2-4 locos. However, in Northwest Australia they routinely ran 300 car trains meeting the description in this article. But, the reason they could get away with that is they were running a straight shot from the heart of the Pilbara to one of the port towns on the north west shoulder (Karratha and Port Hedland). I need to check in with my old colleagues and see if things have changed. It wouldn't surprise me if train lengths have gotten longer, but I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on average network speed and thus profit. As someone mentioned elsewhere on this thread, there are a lot of single track corridors. It's bad enough when one train has to sidetrack. It's really bad when a train takes out the whole corridor. These aren't packet switched networks. It's not easy to reroute. And it's really expensive and difficult to lay new rail.
- brnaftr361 4y ago
  They have and it is slowing them down, but they're using different metrics to define and track productivity. If you're interested in hearing about it this guy has a pretty good perspective on the overall issues: https://youtu.be/Q0rk5tnrFqA?t=9300 https://youtu.be/Q0rk5tnrFqA?t=9300
AlbertCory 4y ago
I don't know the facts, but I do know a few WSJ reporters and read their paper every day. Unlike most of what passes as "journalism" these days, these people actually do still practice journalism. So if monster trains are derailing, or even causing major delays, they will be on it. And people in Congress all read the WSJ.
volkl48 4y ago
The most concrete thing I read in the article seems to be: "These trains exceed the coupler and drawbar limits of the very cars themselves." This seems like something that can be explicitly proven true or false, so I would be interested to see whether that claim is true on investigation.
mywittyname 4y ago
This letter/article raises some great points. However, the writing style is kind of obtuse. The whole commentary-on-a-letter-I-received shtick makes this difficult to follow. It doesn't add anything either; you can read only the quoted paragraphs and understand the entire message while reading only half the article.
sheepybloke 4y ago
People are also leaving because the schedules they have to keep are unpredictable and horrible. My brother-in-law worked for a bit as an engineer, and as a person low on the totem pole, got bad assignments (all of the more senior people took the decent ones) and often didn't have a schedule until a day or two before the train was scheduled to leave. It hurt his social life substantially, because he couldn't plan on anything. Then COVID hit, and even though the company has hurting for people to run the trains, he was furloughed "until further notice" with no potential return date. Honestly, the companies are doing this to themselves with poor management.
clarge1120 4y ago
There are several hot takes on the accuracy of various numbers (train derailment, for example), but that is not the most striking point of the article. The article is raising alarms about labor shortages and the effect on safety and deliverability of large loads (monster trains). It is another data point to bolster the idea that the US supply chain is under a lot of stress.
Johnny555 4y ago
To run even a, say, “simple” traditional grain train—6,700 feet, 28 million pounds—through the ice fog of a late February night, applying the physics of the horsepower and weight to a landscape you cannot see, but must know—every inch of, every hill and dip, every crossing, every signal mast is something no office worker can imagine. Why are train engineers expected to know every nuance of the route, when it should be trivial to do fine-grained GPS maps of the tracks and provide moving map displays that could show every hill and dip, every crossing, every signal mast. This shouldn't be left up to the memory of the engineers. There's already automation that could enforce speed limits, but for some reason it relies on track-side equipment so isn't universally available: https://www.businessinsider.com/amtrak-derail-washington-positive-train-control-tech-2017-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/amtrak-derail-washington-pos...
ROTMetro 4y ago
This calls for (not really) malicious compliance. There is a phone number at all train crossings (at least in my state) to call and let them know if there are issues or if a train made you wait too long. The amount of time you can be made to wait at a crossing varies by state. Find out that time, and call the number posted at the crossing or look it up in advance and complain every time your wait violates the law/rules. You will get train size reduced. Get everyone you know to call in and enforce the rules. I call every time I have to wait longer than the rule.
- cogman10 4y ago
  Idaho law says so long as the train is moving, it can take as long as it likes :( [1] They put up a 15 minute limit, but then put in "Oh, but so long as the train is doing 'SOMETHING' then that limit doesn't count". [1] https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/title49/t49ch14/sect49-1425/ https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/title49/t...
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Definitions matter for laws. Switching in this context is not yard switching, as that is limited to the yard. It is only for actual trains switching tracks. The railroad often abuses the yard switching with stopped trains blocking intersections for long periods of time. That violates both the definition of switching (because yard switching is only done within a yard by definition and definition is what matters for legal statutes) and normal switching only applies "when the train is in motion" for the Idaho statute. Either way, call the number and complain. Malicious compliance has power.
cybadger 4y ago
This just in: the Surface Transportation Board is requesting additional data from the Class Is for reasons that sound highly relevant to the original article. https://www.progressiverailroading.com/federal_legislation_regulation/news/STB-to-require-railroads-to-report-more-rail-service-employment-data--66526 https://www.progressiverailroading.com/federal_legislation_r... My time in rail was all related to positive train control (PTC), which is a safety overlay that stops the train before anything bad happens, at least in theory. The railroads generally despised the idea because it would slow down overall network velocity. It was only when it was mandated that they really got started with it beyond science projects. I'm pretty far from rail these days, so I know I'm out of date. But as I recall, the prediction algorithms didn't work as well with distributed power (locomotive in the middle of the train, almost required for trains this long). So it's entirely possible that these super-long trains aren't able to predict unsafe conditions. I also vaguely recall they didn't predict anything to do with buff and draft forces (or other in-train forces) that could lead to the kind of derailments the article discussed. This seems odd given the safety culture of railroads (every meeting I attended as a vendor, even if it was just a handful of people who had known each other for years, started with a safety briefing that included evacuation instructions and who was CPR qualified, along with tripping hazards and such). But around the time I was leaving the industry, CSX was spending lots of millions of dollars to bring the (now-late) Hunter Harrison in to implement Precision Scheduled Railroading. That led to a rush for other roads to implement it, to the point where I believe BNSF is the only Class I that does not do PSR. And PSR is all about reducing costs, cutting manpower, mothballing locomotives—which absolutely could lead to the sort of stuff this article is about. And, because it is (at least was) so fashionable in the industry, a road moving away from PSR (whether announced or just in practice) would likely see a stock price plunge and a CEO change. Makes me wonder if, stuck between a rock and a hard place (ballast and the rail?), the roads are hoping the STB steps in and makes a rule to stop their game of chicken.
joko42 4y ago
Atlas shrugged, it's happening!
8bitsrule 4y ago
Recently made video summarizes the current situation (for those of us not familiar with it) : "Freight Trains in the US Are a Disaster Waiting to Happen" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9cc4Et-3Ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9cc4Et-3Ck] I was once chewed-out by an employer for arriving a few minutes late after waiting for a mile-long coal train to crawl past the only entrance to the town at 15mph. (A rarity at the time.) 16,450 feet? Wuf-da.
xpe 4y ago
What innovations or ideas have been presented to reduce derailments? What would it take to build a train that could sacrifice one car (i.e. let it derail) to save the rest of the train from the same fate? Start by instrumenting each car and coupling with inertial and spatial sensors. Gather some stability control engineers from the automotive industry perhaps. What could be done?
MrDresden 4y ago
That is an impressively written letter.

560 points by mik3y 4y ago

So if I understand this correctly, shorter trains are better because when they derail they take down less cars? Or are super long trains harder to control in varied terrain? Both probably.

advisedwang 4y ago
No: they are more manageable and rely less on crews working 12hr shifts regularly so less mistakes happen.
w-j-w 4y ago
Shorter trains are better because they are lighter and easier to control. The additional cars don't just make derailment worse, it causes the derailments to happen at all.
yifanl 4y ago
Based on my uninformed reading, these super trains are beyond what the existing rail infrastructure was designed for, and therefore are significantly more likely to derail, while also being more expensive to clean up when they do detail.
saalweachter 4y ago
Shorter trains are better on a lot of metrics except the number of crews you need driving trains around, basically. Except that everything ends up taking longer with the longer train, so you have a bit of a false economy, although I'm guessing it's not false enough to make it undesirable. To mention an issue that I don't think was well-touched upon in the article -- in a lot of places, you have single tracks running from point A to point B, with the occasional side track a train can park on to let another train past. But these side tracks may only be a mile or so long -- what happens when two three-mile trains need to pass each other using a 1 mile side track? A fun puzzle, but not very fun to implement the solution in real time.
- m2fkxy 4y ago
  Well it's not really fun nor a puzzle, they simply can't pass each other, and the dispatcher will have to look for the next suitable sidings.
  - eesmith 4y ago
    As a puzzle, suppose ABC is going that way -> and and 123 is going <- that way, each 3 miles long, broken into segments A/B/C and 1/2/3, respectively. Let '-' be the siding, able to hold a mile-long set of cars. ABC ... 123 `-' Move C into _, uncouple from AB, and back AB to return to the mainline. AB ... 123 `C' Move AB and 123 to the left, past the siding: AB123 ... `C' Uncouple 1, move 23 into the siding to couple to C, and return C to the mainline: AB1 ... 23C `-' Uncouple 23 from C, pick up 1, and move back to the right side of the siding: AB ... 123.C `-' You've now gotten C past 123. Repeat with B then A, leaving the track as 123 ... ABC. This solution limits the maximum length to 3 miles. A 4 mile long solution would keep 1 coupled to 23 while moving C from the siding back to the mainline.
mschuster91 4y ago
- Shorter trains need less engines (or rather, they can be run with one or two locomotives). That means when one fails the conductor can immediately hear this and halt the train. When a mid- or end engine fails, it may escalate to catastrophic failure - long trains have issues with brake apply speed - remember, train cars are dumb. No electricity, all they have (at least here in Europe) is one main brake line where the transmission speed is the speed of sound - that means, for a 700m long train a drop in pressure at the front is only registered after 2 seconds at the last carriage. - long trains are a nightmare to shunt around. Not just because you have immense distance between the engine and the conductor at the end, but especially if the train has to run over a street level crossing. Old shunting yards simply were never estimated to run such long trains. - long trains are a nightmare for residents along the lines for the same reason - long and especially double stacked trains put up a hell of a lot more stress on the infrastructure than it was constructed for - remember again, this infra is sometimes well over a century old!
hristov 4y ago
Longer trains derail much much easier. For example consider the "straight lining" phenomenon. Straight lining is a major cause for derailments. The straight lining forces are pretty much proportional to the weight of the cars behind the car that is subject to the straight lining forces.
- btbuildem 4y ago
  What is this "straight lining phenomenon"? Google yields nothing.
  - m2fkxy 4y ago
    It should read "stringline".
- m2fkxy 4y ago
  This is the "stringline" phenomenon, not "straight line".
  - hristov 4y ago
    You are correct. I am after all only an amateur railroader.
bombcar 4y ago
Long trains don't "exist" in a way - because the couplers can't hold the weight, so you take a number of shorter trains and mash them together, and then "drive" it like that. It results in all sorts of "fun" that means if everything works perfectly; you save the cost of a crew or two - if anything goes wrong you have a derailment or worse.

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foxyv 4y ago

The American workforce has been redlining on poorly staffed overworked jobs for decades. It's not surprising that we're losing workers left and right to fatigue. They treat the equipment better than the people who are doing the job and that is saying something because the equipment is poorly maintained as well. Nurses, doctors, teachers, railroad workers, truckers, clerks, salespeople, developers, builders, contractors, and everyone else. However, with our current political system, the solutions to these problems are nearly impossible to accomplish. Unions, socialized health care, workers rights, mandated vacation time, overtime limits, minimum wages, and UBI are all lightyears away. Instead our politicians are stripping women of their human rights and attacking children while placing migrants into concentration camps.

aantix 4y ago
You saw it with Covid. Trillions of dollars spent on U.S. healthcare, but hospitals are running hyper-efficient, lean staffs, with barely any ability to scale up to meet demand during a crisis.
- ed25519FUUU 4y ago
  Millions of covid relief dollars sent to states just to be vacuumed up into poorly funded city and state pensions.
- aantix 4y ago
  Wondering out loud - with non-profits, the IRS can enforce that status by forcing them to spend if they have too much money saved. Am I getting this correct? What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they are too profitable? I’m being purposefully vague to fill in the holes with discussion. Feel free to throw tomatoes at me if it’s a dumb idea. I’ve had dumber.
  - lowercased 4y ago
    > What about forcing hospitals to spend on staff if they are too profitable? Why do I suspect we'd see 'hollywood' accounting for medical if this ever were to be a 'thing'? 'Medical accounting' would become such a thing that we'd end up seeing every hospital running in the red all the time, to avoid this sort of thing. Someone would still be bringing in profits, but much much harder to spot.

ericmay 4y ago

The good thing about this particular problem is that it will be corrected by the market mechanic regardless of what the government does. Companies have to compete for labor now - the landscape has changed. Some will not adapt and they'll go out of business. That's not to say that we shouldn't also explore policy action, but when workers have the upper hand it's probably best to let the market just figure it out, and then come in with policy after that.

swader999 4y ago
Perhaps, but this doesn't give much to the people in Lac-Megantic. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
tgv 4y ago
> it will be corrected by the market mechanic ... it's probably best to let the market just figure it out What evidence do you have for that? Let me guess: none, whatsoever. Just a religious belief in Adam Smith' invisible hand.
advisedwang 4y ago
The letter describes undisturbed market forces increasing this problem. Unless something changes, there's no reason to expect market equilibrium points to change.
cheschire 4y ago
Why do you think the workers have the upper hand? If anything, this letter sounds like workers have no recourse other than to find other employment. Based on historical trends, I suspect relying purely on the market mechanics will result in business failure, and then the policy action will be to save (bail out) the rail companies that are too big to fail. This will then lead to a bunch of strict controls so that bail outs never occur again, creating a regulatory moat further blocking future competition without significantly changing the corporate culture that led to the issue in the first place. Instead, an up-front regulatory limitation that prevents short term profiteering over long term sustainability seems required. How many trillionaires need to be minted on the backs of the population majority before significant regulatory limitations sound palatable? I guess I just don't understand the free market concept. It's like... sure it works great assuming you don't factor in the chaos components like greed, limitless ambition, explosive population growth, limited resources, natural disasters, international politics, etc etc etc etc etc.

stickfigure 4y ago

I'm struggling with the first paragraph: > A fellow engineer passed along information from another engineer, who I have never met, Mike, 17 years an engineer, like me, with a degree, like me (art, English), which has led to writing this body. Am I reading this right? The content of this article is hearsay twice removed?

_Algernon_ 4y ago
I was much more offended by the abuse of commas.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- chefandy 4y ago
  I'm a bit rusty, but I think they are technically correctly placed— they separate many dependent clauses, interruptors and a time phrase from one independent clause at the beginning. The sentence is too structurally complex, though. My very strict undergraduate intro to expository writing class required using commas like this but it's definitely passé.
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    I have no opinion on the technical correctness of the sentence. But I know I would do a lot to avoid writing such sentence in my own writing, and that I would stop reading anything that hits me with such a monstrosity in the opening paragraph.
    - chefandy 4y ago
      Right. It's too structurally complex but it's not the comma's fault.
deleted 4y ago
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4y ago

blkhp19 4y ago

What's with the early 20th / late 19th century style of English? Entertaining for a moment, but ultimately just frustrating for me to read. Is it done purposely because trains are an "old" piece of transportation infrastructure?

JasonFruit 4y ago
It didn't read like a Twitter 37/355 thread, but it didn't sound a bit old-fashioned to me — unless reasonably formal English is hopelessly out-of-date now.
folkrav 4y ago
Hmm, funny how as a non-native speaker, it didn't strike me as having a particularly notable style.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
opan 4y ago
All that's sticking out to me is a lack of contractions and overly formal or dramatic text, but probably because it's written as a letter to someone.
kar1181 4y ago
I get the feeling the person that wrote it is not of the generation many here are. I really enjoyed the style personally (millennial...).
throwanem 4y ago
The writer may himself be far from young.
alfor 4y ago
Yes the style is overly complex. It distract from the message. It feel like the opposite of a PG essay.
jcpst 4y ago
It is mentioned that this letter was commentary in a hearing with the CEOs of BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific. I imagine they wanted to use a more formal style to address these business leaders.

kodah 4y ago

> For myself: I believe it is Wall Street greed and investor demands. 16,450-foot trains weighing more than 42 million pounds are gratifying someone with power. Someone who wants it all and more. I believe it is those few, who live nowhere near here, who own their own private islands and jets. This is far removed from laissez faire economics, or the neo liberal model, coming out of the 1980s. This was an incredibly common economic outlook coming from the Midwest and South. It's both tickling and sad to hear. I do love the way this was written, and those PSR trains sound like a nightmare. When I worked the network engineering desk for a Class I railroad we took derails seriously to the extent of pulling anyone who made changes to infra to the dispatchers themselves. That wasn't that long ago either but it sounds like a lot has changed.

mwint 4y ago
> pulling anyone who made changes to infra to the dispatchers themselves. I’m not up on railway lingo, can you expand on this?
- kodah 4y ago
  Yeah, tracks have little huts every so often next to the track. These huts provide an uplink and various routing equipment that connects to track side safety equipment eg: there's big microphone arrays that listen to the wheels and brakes for deformities, automated switches will generally link into these if there's a switch nearby. Any change could influence a derailment, for instance if the track didn't switch and the train was going too fast for it's new destination. Therefore, anyone with their name on a change within a radius of the crash site gets interviewed, the dispatcher is removed and interviewed immediately.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
Help me understand why Wall Street greed would prefer trains that derail to ones that don’t? (The machismo argument, sure, I get, though it’s unsubstantiated; one could just as easily try to pin it on urban environmentalists.)
- 4y ago

DrBoring 4y ago

Trains derailing regularly is consider acceptable and to be expected, infrastructure being tasked with jobs for which it was not designed, calls for more resources ignored, policy makers prioritizing profit over safe and efficient transportation of goods. This sounds like something from a fictional dystopian novel.

orwin 4y ago

During the first covid summer, with a friend, we studied two interesting points for the future: oil consumption relative to GDP (irrelevant here), and what is sometime called demographic dividend, or how infrastructure spending during time of growth will allow an aging population an easier life in the future. Since we thought western countries to be all the same, we studied France and its infrastructure cost, then China, then the other Brics, plus Turkey and some ex-colonial nation that got f*cked off their own demographic dividend by the west. What we are sure off: maintenance is immensly cheaper than construction, three to five order of magnitude in most cases, and improvement upon existing infrastructure is one to two order of magnitude cheaper. From this, we also concluded that subsidizing an almost empty line on the west coast during more than twenty year actually was a net positive operation for the French government, and killing small train tracks is in 99% of case a mistake. My really friendly advice to americans, whatever their political leaning: do not kill your rail, improve on it even. This will be a net positive for your country, even if atm it seems like it is loosing you money. You can't afford to not maintain your infrastructure, or to forget about it.

sheepybloke 4y ago
There's also a really good Freakanomics on this: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance/ https://freakonomics.com/podcast/in-praise-of-maintenance/

varispeed 4y ago

> I have given up enormous amounts of home and family life for insurance, for a living wage, for a trade that is respectable. I think this is the problem - paying people in respect that you can't make a meal of. And what does the living wage mean? That you can come back from work, eat a meal and have somewhere to sleep? It's interesting that people are happy to be taxed to teeth, having very little in exchange and do nothing about the fact that corporations their work for don't pay much and if their bosses pay taxes, then it means they got lame accountants.

orangepurple 4y ago

adbachman 4y ago
Because they use public infrastructure and in their passing almost exclusively move through spaces we share with them. This is a story, in part, about those externalities. As this author describes, linking extremely dangerous chemical cars onto an already overwhelmed structure means it's not if you will have another mass-casualty event[1], it's when. [1]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1997246/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1997246/
- orangepurple 4y ago
  Your response and the sibling response is much more concise and sensical than the rambling article. Thank you.
jabroni_salad 4y ago
As mentioned in the article, any one of these railcars is capable of destroying an entire town. You, presumably, may live in such a town.
0xbadcafebee 4y ago
You're getting flagged because it's hard to tell if you're a troll or just, ehm.... what's the hacker news euphemism for stupid? A startup dev with no equity?

photochemsyn 4y ago

A side-by-side study of American and Chinese railways, perhaps a compare-and-contrast investigative journalism article, would make for interesting reading. China seems well ahead of the USA here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_China > "China's railways are the busiest in the world. In 2019, railways in China delivered 3.660 billion passenger trips, generating 1,470.66 billion passenger-kilometres and carried 4.389 billion tonnes of freight, generating 3,018 billion cargo tonne-kilometres. Freight traffic turnover has increased more than fivefold over the period 1980-2013 and passenger traffic turnover has increased more than sevenfold over the same period. During the five years 2016-2020, China's railway network handled 14.9 billion passenger trips, 9 billion of which were completed by bullet trains, the remaining 5.9 billion by conventional rail." I'm assuming that in the USA the major rail owners don't want to invest in infrastructure upgrades, and longer trains mean lower labor costs? The US government doesn't want to raise taxes to pay for massive infrastructure projects (FDR New Deal programs are not on the horizon for either party), so nobody will pick up the required bill and infrastructure will just continue degrading to Third World status? The only new rail development being backed by the federal government looks like oil export trains in Utah... not exactly in line with Biden rhetoric on climate and renewable energy. https://grist.org/politics/an-oil-train-is-set-to-destroy-pristine-utah-mountains-why-wont-biden-stop-it/ https://grist.org/politics/an-oil-train-is-set-to-destroy-pr...

jhugo 4y ago
> nobody will pick up the required bill and infrastructure will just continue degrading to Third World status? Laos, the poorest country in South East Asia which I guess would qualify as Third World, has a brand new Chinese-built high-speed railway. So I guess US railways are already worse than "Third World status".
m0llusk 4y ago
There is evidence that Chinese rail operators have deliberately hidden accidents and their costs. That makes Chinese rail transport extremely difficult to compare to American rail transport especially when the specific subject is the accumulated cost of accidents.

alkaloid 4y ago

Speaking with railroader friends changed my mind on train unions. To an outsider, they sound terribly unreasonable, but speaking with people in the trenches has made me a believer in these unions, for whatever that is worth.

whatisthiseven 4y ago
Could you give examples of any kind? At the end you say "for whatever that is worth", but its worthiness is low given there are no specifics and I don't know you.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- alkaloid 4y ago
  Sure, a couple different ones. The first involved an engineer friend who literally "went off the rails" with one of these big trains. The union went to bat for him for six months or a year or something to try and protect his job. Ultimately they determined that he was at fault, but without the union he would have had no representation or recourse against the train company at all. A number of others involve injury: the unions make it difficult to terminate employees who are injured on the job; we don't really hear about how dangerous train work is. The article mentions that the conductor is "two" or "three miles" down the track at the end of train. That is a big deal, because the engineer doesn't necessarily have immediate feedback on when to stop. I've seen with my own eyes guys on the ground trying to guide one of these super-long trains into the yard to connect to other cars and that is some scary stuff. Finally, furloughs. I've had friends who were furloughed from their jobs at the train companies for years and had to go get a job at a grocery store stocking shelves. The train industry seems so have some regulation games going on at the governmental level and the union level. I'm not sure these guys would ever get their jobs back, with seniority, without union bargaining and playing interference with government.
rejectfinite 4y ago
> To an outsider, they sound terribly unreasonable ? To someone in the EU, it sounds bizarre that they would NOT have a union.

thebetatester 4y ago

While I don't disagree with anything mentioned here, it reads a little like Atlas Shrugged fanfiction

fennecfoxen 4y ago
Huh. People who find themselves abused and at risk on a job, walking away from the job, is now "Atlas Shrugged fanfiction"? I'll be sure to notify all the labor unions of their new patron.
- thebetatester 4y ago
  Have you read Atlas Shrugged? In the end it talks about how the corporations that weren't run ethically ended up failing (literally rail operators) and they were having issues keeping their lines maintained and engineers employed. I didn't mean it derogatorily, so many people hate on Ayn Rand I just get an automatic downvote.
mgdev 4y ago
Came to say this. When life imitates art.

brundolf 4y ago

Unionize, unionize, unionize.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
BNSF already has a union, but they can't strike due to a federal court's ruling [1], so more creative solutions will be required. [1] https://www.freightwaves.com/news/federal-court-rules-unions-cant-strike-over-bnsf-attendance-policy https://www.freightwaves.com/news/federal-court-rules-unions...
- mywittyname 4y ago
  Sounds like their "creative solution" is quit. Of course, this is predicated on the idea that the thirteen amendment will stand, and exceptions won't be carved out to force these people back to work. I acknowledge that recent events may have people questioning that supposition.
- euroderf 4y ago
  Cops have always had "the blue flu". Why is there not more co-ordinated "sickness" ? Does it invite some kind of RICO prosecution ?

mumblemumble 4y ago

I can't help but wonder if this sort of stuff would already be banned in the USA had the Lac-Mégantic disaster happened 35km or so further south. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste... https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/891/bande-dessinee-lac-megantic-la-derniere-nuit https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/891/bande-dessin...

Pxtl 4y ago
Okay but Lac Megantic had nothing to do with "monster trains" iirc. Understaffing maybe, but not monster trains. AFAIK, the Lac Megantic disaster happened like this: A train was parked at the top of a hill, the locomotive that was powering the pneumatic brake was failing and smoking, and the conductor did not manually set enough of the manual back-up hand-brakes to keep the train in place if the failing locomotive was shut off and brake-pressure was lost, and he failed to properly test the hand brakes before leaving for the night. The brakes failed and so it went down hill while trying to break, which naturally led to sparks, fire, derailment, and ultimately explosion. More manpower or supervision could've prevented the disaster, or better maintenance on the locomotive. Or better automation on brakes. But it was not a matter of length, which seems to be the main thrust of this article.

teekert 4y ago

Ah well, who is John Galt?

Finnucane 4y ago
Just this guy, you know.

TrispusAttucks 4y ago

It's a shame this type of operation is so common. The people at the top that have no experience of work on the ground making decisions that affect people doing that important work.

mediaman 4y ago

The government data I am able to find does not seem to support the idea that there is a massive (or any) increase in derailments. And this letter never provides any data supporting the premise either. According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there were 1,056 train derailments (both cargo and passenger) in the US in 2021. This was the lowest number in the dataset going back to 1975. Ten years ago, it was 1,470 derailments. In the year 2000, it was over 2,000 derailments. In reality, the data suggest we are on a strong downward trend in derailments per year. Is this government data wrong? Or is this writer trying out a career in fiction? Data: https://www.bts.gov/content/train-fatalities-injuries-and-accidents-type-accidenta https://www.bts.gov/content/train-fatalities-injuries-and-ac...

beamatronic 4y ago
Perhaps there are different definitions of “derailed”. After all one of the communication problems in this pandemic was that even technical, medical professionals could not agree on the definition of “airborne” as it relates to the public’s best interest.
simulate-me 4y ago
Isn’t there a third option that both your interpretation of the data and the letter are wrong? The letter specifically mentions the derailment of monster trains. These trains have more cargo and so one derailment can lead to a more severe delay in shipping times.
- maxmcd 4y ago
  You can see the ratio here: https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles. Breaks down car miles vs train miles. I hope the third option is a bit more of just trying to take the situation in. This is someone sharing their experience, the executives running the show have their perspective as well. I'm not sure why we have to jump so quickly to "I found data that refutes this, is this person lying or is the data wrong?". Just seems to leave out so much nuance. Feels like a very tech industry "see the data and make a decision". This situation is so human, it's about fear and whether those fears are being considered.

phgn 4y ago

This reads like it's straight out of Atlas Shrugged.

Finnucane 4y ago
Except that for Rand, this is utopia.
- javert 4y ago
  I would encourage people to read Rand on their own instead of going by untrue comments like this one.
  - evandale 4y ago
    Hah, had to chime in here. Unfortunately everyone is so poisoned by untrue things about Rand that people still come out at the end of the day thinking she's a libertarian. Or complaining that the characters are totally unrealistic without realizing the characters are meant to represent ideological extremes rather than real people.
    - javert 4y ago
      The characters are not meant to represent ideological extremes. Rand was a novelist primarily and a philosopher only secondarily. She got into philosophy because she wanted to figure out what humans at their best would look like and be like---so that she could put them into a novel. In Atlas Shrugged, the characters do come across as ideological extremes and not real people, if you go into the book expecting them to be that way. The book has a lot of depth that is missed by people who go into it for the philosophy. Within philosophy, Rand was least concerned about politics and the economy, and most concerned about man's mind and emotions and man's relationship to reality and to other men. Sure, you can read Atlas as some kind of political treatise, and the characters will come across as flat, because you are missing the point entirely and not picking up on 95% of what's in the book. In The Fountainhead, the characters don't come across as representing ideological extremes regardless of your approach to the book, IMHO. Anyway I'd recommend The Fountainhead over Atlas for someone new to Rand. Agreed that Rand is not a libertarian.

markhahn 4y ago

I've always been puzzled by the rail industry, since in spite of having incredible potential for efficiency, it seems stuck in so many ways by history. In this case, the impression I get is that we're seeing the result of too much hands-off self-organization. Sure, it's capitalism, but the Invisible Hand has never been conceived as the only factor driving behavior. Perhaps we should be reluctant to involve government, at least in making standards. But all industries have endo-regulation - internally decided protocols. Does this industry just need encouragement in that direction? Something like the ISO/ECMA/IETF bodies that have produced so much computer-related standardization? Three-mile trains sound like a problem - but surely this is an empirical issue. I think part of what's missing is a clear, full-throated statement about where the industry is going. That it's not obsolete (which many people assume), and that it could use some further development in basics. Too often, public discussion on trains devolves into finger-pointing about why the country has no fast commuter routes (and the prodigious amounts of cash that have been poured onto that issue...) Containerization was one of the best things to happen to the rail industry. But surely this sort of evolution would benefit from stewardship across industry, institutional and governmental groups. I'd love to know what the state of the industry is with respect to things like tracking, logistical responsiveness, smart/iot instrumentation, human interfaces, etc.

robertlagrant 4y ago
Capitalism struggles when there are shared resources like geographies. In the UK they just assigned a private rail operator to each region, and measured them. Not exactly an environment in which capitalism can do well.

blueatlas 4y ago

The advancements in equipment to clean up after a large and/or complicated derailments contributes to these "acceptable" number of derailments. This includes roadbed, rail, and specialized equipment to move cars and locomotives. There are even 3rd party companies that specialize in railroad derailments. Large wrecks can be cleaned up in 24 hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkui84o6rNA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkui84o6rNA

sullivanmatt 4y ago

I also live in Ames, Iowa, where the author resides. I live less than a mile from the track segment he is talking about, owned and operated by Union Pacific. While I'm pretty skeptical of this author's individual concerns given the twice-removed nature of the statements from their "source", trains have unmistakably gotten longer during my 15 years near these tracks, and they are moving faster. A hazmat situation impacting only a one-mile radius around the tracks could effect up to 30 to 40 thousand people here. I interned for Union Pacific while in college, and yes, the company will state that safety is their number one priority, but it was very clear that their business was to profit by optimizing every single little part of their business for maximum efficiency. The company has an open distain for regulations, especially safety-related regulations, and did not shy away from sharing those views internally. I would not be at all surprised if crews are being abused, and safety sidelined, for the sake of maximizing profit.

curiousllama 4y ago
That’s super interesting to me. It’ll take a disaster to fix it. I worked in oil and gas for a while, and they were pathologically obsessed with safety. Like, “you’ll be fired for not using the handrail in the HQ stairwell” pathological. It was good! There was never a question about how to value a trade off. Open disdain for safety regulations seems like a recipe for disaster.
- taurath 4y ago
  In the modern world, it’ll take a disaster for anyone to pay any attention at all, but all they have to do is wait a few weeks for everyone to pay attention to something else.
- ohyoutravel 4y ago
  Funny you mention this. Shell was an angel funder at one of my first startup and one of their demands was quite literally to add handrails to the stairwell between the first and second floors of my office.
  - 4y ago

redshirtrob 4y ago

I worked in this industry for many years. The railroads were always hyper-focused on increasing throughput. I left the industry about ten years ago, but back then derailments were considered the most significant risk to average network speed. At the time, average network speed was roughly correlated with profit. The rule of thumb was a 1 mph increase in average network speed was worth about $100MM in profit. That was 15 years ago. There were a lot of systems in place to monitor rolling stock: - Wheel Impact Detectors - Hotbox detectors - Acoustic bearing detectors - Truck performance detectors To name just a few. There were also efforts to monitor the railway infrastructure. The things I remember: - Rail stress management (rails need to be under the right amount of stress, which of course varies with temperature) - Top of rail friction management - Rail profile management (the name eludes me, but the idea is you want the interface between the rail and wheel to meet certain parameters) I worked on the rolling stock side measuring wheel impacts, overloads, imbalances, and a handful of more esoteric metrics. One of the outputs of these measurements was a train consist. For each of our locations we were able to build up the consist of the entire train (which was a fun CS problem in itself). I stared at a lot of consists over the years. In North America I never saw anything longer than about 100 cars and 2-4 locos. However, in Northwest Australia they routinely ran 300 car trains meeting the description in this article. But, the reason they could get away with that is they were running a straight shot from the heart of the Pilbara to one of the port towns on the north west shoulder (Karratha and Port Hedland). I need to check in with my old colleagues and see if things have changed. It wouldn't surprise me if train lengths have gotten longer, but I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on average network speed and thus profit. As someone mentioned elsewhere on this thread, there are a lot of single track corridors. It's bad enough when one train has to sidetrack. It's really bad when a train takes out the whole corridor. These aren't packet switched networks. It's not easy to reroute. And it's really expensive and difficult to lay new rail.

brnaftr361 4y ago
They have and it is slowing them down, but they're using different metrics to define and track productivity. If you're interested in hearing about it this guy has a pretty good perspective on the overall issues: https://youtu.be/Q0rk5tnrFqA?t=9300 https://youtu.be/Q0rk5tnrFqA?t=9300

AlbertCory 4y ago

I don't know the facts, but I do know a few WSJ reporters and read their paper every day. Unlike most of what passes as "journalism" these days, these people actually do still practice journalism. So if monster trains are derailing, or even causing major delays, they will be on it. And people in Congress all read the WSJ.

volkl48 4y ago

The most concrete thing I read in the article seems to be: "These trains exceed the coupler and drawbar limits of the very cars themselves." This seems like something that can be explicitly proven true or false, so I would be interested to see whether that claim is true on investigation.

mywittyname 4y ago

This letter/article raises some great points. However, the writing style is kind of obtuse. The whole commentary-on-a-letter-I-received shtick makes this difficult to follow. It doesn't add anything either; you can read only the quoted paragraphs and understand the entire message while reading only half the article.

sheepybloke 4y ago

People are also leaving because the schedules they have to keep are unpredictable and horrible. My brother-in-law worked for a bit as an engineer, and as a person low on the totem pole, got bad assignments (all of the more senior people took the decent ones) and often didn't have a schedule until a day or two before the train was scheduled to leave. It hurt his social life substantially, because he couldn't plan on anything. Then COVID hit, and even though the company has hurting for people to run the trains, he was furloughed "until further notice" with no potential return date. Honestly, the companies are doing this to themselves with poor management.

clarge1120 4y ago

There are several hot takes on the accuracy of various numbers (train derailment, for example), but that is not the most striking point of the article. The article is raising alarms about labor shortages and the effect on safety and deliverability of large loads (monster trains). It is another data point to bolster the idea that the US supply chain is under a lot of stress.

Johnny555 4y ago

To run even a, say, “simple” traditional grain train—6,700 feet, 28 million pounds—through the ice fog of a late February night, applying the physics of the horsepower and weight to a landscape you cannot see, but must know—every inch of, every hill and dip, every crossing, every signal mast is something no office worker can imagine. Why are train engineers expected to know every nuance of the route, when it should be trivial to do fine-grained GPS maps of the tracks and provide moving map displays that could show every hill and dip, every crossing, every signal mast. This shouldn't be left up to the memory of the engineers. There's already automation that could enforce speed limits, but for some reason it relies on track-side equipment so isn't universally available: https://www.businessinsider.com/amtrak-derail-washington-positive-train-control-tech-2017-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/amtrak-derail-washington-pos...

ROTMetro 4y ago

This calls for (not really) malicious compliance. There is a phone number at all train crossings (at least in my state) to call and let them know if there are issues or if a train made you wait too long. The amount of time you can be made to wait at a crossing varies by state. Find out that time, and call the number posted at the crossing or look it up in advance and complain every time your wait violates the law/rules. You will get train size reduced. Get everyone you know to call in and enforce the rules. I call every time I have to wait longer than the rule.

cogman10 4y ago
Idaho law says so long as the train is moving, it can take as long as it likes :( [1] They put up a 15 minute limit, but then put in "Oh, but so long as the train is doing 'SOMETHING' then that limit doesn't count". [1] https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/title49/t49ch14/sect49-1425/ https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/title49/t...
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Definitions matter for laws. Switching in this context is not yard switching, as that is limited to the yard. It is only for actual trains switching tracks. The railroad often abuses the yard switching with stopped trains blocking intersections for long periods of time. That violates both the definition of switching (because yard switching is only done within a yard by definition and definition is what matters for legal statutes) and normal switching only applies "when the train is in motion" for the Idaho statute. Either way, call the number and complain. Malicious compliance has power.

cybadger 4y ago

This just in: the Surface Transportation Board is requesting additional data from the Class Is for reasons that sound highly relevant to the original article. https://www.progressiverailroading.com/federal_legislation_regulation/news/STB-to-require-railroads-to-report-more-rail-service-employment-data--66526 https://www.progressiverailroading.com/federal_legislation_r... My time in rail was all related to positive train control (PTC), which is a safety overlay that stops the train before anything bad happens, at least in theory. The railroads generally despised the idea because it would slow down overall network velocity. It was only when it was mandated that they really got started with it beyond science projects. I'm pretty far from rail these days, so I know I'm out of date. But as I recall, the prediction algorithms didn't work as well with distributed power (locomotive in the middle of the train, almost required for trains this long). So it's entirely possible that these super-long trains aren't able to predict unsafe conditions. I also vaguely recall they didn't predict anything to do with buff and draft forces (or other in-train forces) that could lead to the kind of derailments the article discussed. This seems odd given the safety culture of railroads (every meeting I attended as a vendor, even if it was just a handful of people who had known each other for years, started with a safety briefing that included evacuation instructions and who was CPR qualified, along with tripping hazards and such). But around the time I was leaving the industry, CSX was spending lots of millions of dollars to bring the (now-late) Hunter Harrison in to implement Precision Scheduled Railroading. That led to a rush for other roads to implement it, to the point where I believe BNSF is the only Class I that does not do PSR. And PSR is all about reducing costs, cutting manpower, mothballing locomotives—which absolutely could lead to the sort of stuff this article is about. And, because it is (at least was) so fashionable in the industry, a road moving away from PSR (whether announced or just in practice) would likely see a stock price plunge and a CEO change. Makes me wonder if, stuck between a rock and a hard place (ballast and the rail?), the roads are hoping the STB steps in and makes a rule to stop their game of chicken.

joko42 4y ago

Atlas shrugged, it's happening!

8bitsrule 4y ago

Recently made video summarizes the current situation (for those of us not familiar with it) : "Freight Trains in the US Are a Disaster Waiting to Happen" [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9cc4Et-3Ck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9cc4Et-3Ck] I was once chewed-out by an employer for arriving a few minutes late after waiting for a mile-long coal train to crawl past the only entrance to the town at 15mph. (A rarity at the time.) 16,450 feet? Wuf-da.

xpe 4y ago

What innovations or ideas have been presented to reduce derailments? What would it take to build a train that could sacrifice one car (i.e. let it derail) to save the rest of the train from the same fate? Start by instrumenting each car and coupling with inertial and spatial sensors. Gather some stability control engineers from the automotive industry perhaps. What could be done?

MrDresden 4y ago

That is an impressively written letter.