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Yes - it doesn't have to be either-or, if you're really committed you can lay extra tracks so passenger trains can overtake the freight trains. Especially in th
by rob74 4y ago
Yes - it doesn't have to be either-or, if you're really committed you can lay extra tracks so passenger trains can overtake the freight trains. Especially in the US, where there tends to be a lot of space, this shouldn't be an insurmountable obstacle. Or run freight trains mostly during the night, as they do in Europe. However, of course we're talking of different scales here: a domestic flight in the US can be twice as long as a flight from say Rome to London.
- aidenn0 4y agoMost of the places in the US where passenger rail would have the highest utility are the same places where there isn't a lot of space. That being said, it's still possible to make happen with high enough density (e.g. the Northeast megalopolis, which has usable, if expensive, passenger rail).
- ghaff 4y ago>usable, if expensive, passenger rail Part of it is that the Northeast Corridor has to pay for basically the entire rest of the country where Amtrak almost universally loses money. The other is that Acela specifically is priced to be more or less just competitive with air on the BOS-NYC and NYC-DC legs. (Acela doesn't really work for the most part to travel the entire length of the corridor.) I almost never take Acela if I'm paying myself because the electrification work done for Acela made the regular regional train only about an hour slower for the BOS-NYC leg. (They used to have to switch engines in New Haven.)