6 ms·

> Especially if you consider the extra infrastructure that needs to be built at airports The thing with air travel vs. trains is that with air travel you only

by Aaargh20318 4y ago

> Especially if you consider the extra infrastructure that needs to be built at airports The thing with air travel vs. trains is that with air travel you only need infrastructure at the origin and destination. This makes it fairly easy to add new routes. By contrast, for a train you need infrastructure all the way from origin to destination, necessarily crossing other types of infrastructure (e.g. roads and canals) which requires the construction of bridges and/or tunnels. The land also needs to be acquired and, depending on length, will likely require dealing with hundreds or thousands of existing land owners. If there is an existing rail line, that may help, depending on spare capacity. Adding additional tracks may also be slightly less difficult than constructing an entirely new track, assuming the existing property is wide enough to accommodate the additional track(s). A port for an airship is probably even easier to realise than a normal airport, as you don't need a long runway.

smcl 4y ago
While it's true that if you are connecting a completely disconnected city to a network then you'll need to lay some new track to ensure you can get there to the intended destinations. But if you're connecting it to N cities you won't need to lay N new lines, you might get away with a couple. There may be reasons to add or update infrastucture, but not every pair of connected cities needs its own dedicated track
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > if you're connecting it to N cities you won't need to lay N new lines, you might get away with a couple Trains accelerate slowly. Adding stops non-linearly increases travel time [1]. A few extra stops might thus make total travel time by train meaningfully more than by air. [1] https://blog.bimajority.org/2018/10/20/interlude-physics-of-train-acceleration/ https://blog.bimajority.org/2018/10/20/interlude-physics-of-...
  - smcl 4y ago
    Well yeah it's not the case that one can add a single line to connect a completely new destination to an existing rail network and everything will scale perfectly, but I didn't claim that. And as long as we're talking in abstract we can construct scenarios where one is faster or better. However my read the original comment was that that adding a new connection involves adding new infrastructure, which isn't always true. See the new European overnight routes that opened up post-Covid and which operate on the existing track
sidewndr46 4y ago
That might be true in Europe, but in the US most of the rail is owned by freight lines. So passenger service can use those lines, but only as a secondary measure. This means that passenger service can never be rapid or even consistent as the freight trains always take priority. The single trip I took by rail in the US we spent most of our time just waiting on other freight trains to pass us.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  Probably for the best. The amount of extra energy we'd spend moving all the rail freight to trucks just so we could run good passenger service would be a net loss. Europe does have better passenger service, but is it really better for the environment?
  - tomschwiha 4y ago
    Looking back at my last trip to the US with everywhere SUVs I'm not sure if that is so environment friendly compared to Europe where "normal sized" cars are more common.
  - smcl 4y ago
    Is it really an either/or situation? Is there absolutely no way to ensure both can work a bit better on the rail that they share? I genuinely don't know, but it was mentioned that the freight gets priority over passenger rail which suffers as a result. So it definitely sounds like this is by design, and that there's room for improvement that would allow both coexist in cases where they absolutely cannot use separate rail.
    - bobthepanda 4y ago
      Freight does better when it is slow and cheap per ton mile. They also tend to be long to save on labor costs. Passenger rail is pretty much the direct opposite, requiring fast acceleration and speed. So the two do not mix well (freight trains will slow down passenger trains.) The only country that operates both high speed rail and freight successfully, by China, literally built a whole separate new high speed network to reserve for passenger trains and to leave freight the freed up space on legacy lines.

smcl 4y ago

While it's true that if you are connecting a completely disconnected city to a network then you'll need to lay some new track to ensure you can get there to the intended destinations. But if you're connecting it to N cities you won't need to lay N new lines, you might get away with a couple. There may be reasons to add or update infrastucture, but not every pair of connected cities needs its own dedicated track

JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> if you're connecting it to N cities you won't need to lay N new lines, you might get away with a couple Trains accelerate slowly. Adding stops non-linearly increases travel time [1]. A few extra stops might thus make total travel time by train meaningfully more than by air. [1] https://blog.bimajority.org/2018/10/20/interlude-physics-of-train-acceleration/ https://blog.bimajority.org/2018/10/20/interlude-physics-of-...
- smcl 4y ago
  Well yeah it's not the case that one can add a single line to connect a completely new destination to an existing rail network and everything will scale perfectly, but I didn't claim that. And as long as we're talking in abstract we can construct scenarios where one is faster or better. However my read the original comment was that that adding a new connection involves adding new infrastructure, which isn't always true. See the new European overnight routes that opened up post-Covid and which operate on the existing track

sidewndr46 4y ago

That might be true in Europe, but in the US most of the rail is owned by freight lines. So passenger service can use those lines, but only as a secondary measure. This means that passenger service can never be rapid or even consistent as the freight trains always take priority. The single trip I took by rail in the US we spent most of our time just waiting on other freight trains to pass us.

rootusrootus 4y ago
Probably for the best. The amount of extra energy we'd spend moving all the rail freight to trucks just so we could run good passenger service would be a net loss. Europe does have better passenger service, but is it really better for the environment?
- tomschwiha 4y ago
  Looking back at my last trip to the US with everywhere SUVs I'm not sure if that is so environment friendly compared to Europe where "normal sized" cars are more common.
- smcl 4y ago
  Is it really an either/or situation? Is there absolutely no way to ensure both can work a bit better on the rail that they share? I genuinely don't know, but it was mentioned that the freight gets priority over passenger rail which suffers as a result. So it definitely sounds like this is by design, and that there's room for improvement that would allow both coexist in cases where they absolutely cannot use separate rail.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Freight does better when it is slow and cheap per ton mile. They also tend to be long to save on labor costs. Passenger rail is pretty much the direct opposite, requiring fast acceleration and speed. So the two do not mix well (freight trains will slow down passenger trains.) The only country that operates both high speed rail and freight successfully, by China, literally built a whole separate new high speed network to reserve for passenger trains and to leave freight the freed up space on legacy lines.