11 ms·

Chicago’s Railroad Problem

129 points by gok 3y ago

lbriner 3y ago
I love this kind of stuff, now if Netflix want to make a documentary out of this, that would be amazing! We had this sort of operation in the UK before WW2 when there were separate companies running trains and even more so pre WW1 when there were 10s/100s of companies running everything from a single short line through to main lines up and down the country. It was, of course, very inefficient for the reasons that the OP discusses, the need to send a wagon anywhere from anywhere meant 1000s of "trip freights", although these would almost entirely have been made by trains. You also had stopping freight services that collected and set down at each station so you can imagine the shunting/marshalling was very time-intensive but, of course, in the early days, a day or 2 was still faster than most alternatives. What happened in the 70s in the UK with Speedlink was that they realised the best way to utilise capacity was to try and create fixed freights that travelled good distances at relatively high speeds between a small number of very large yards where it could be broken down into smaller ongoing services or go onto trucks. Of course, this only suited certain customers and would not work for a small business shipping a small volume but it worked well enough that it became the standard pattern by which all freights now run in the UK. I guess the issue in the US is that the distances are so long, you don't want lots of smaller specific trains but a few much larger trains with an enormous mix of destinations.
- rob74 3y ago
  Not sure if it's mainstream enough for Netflix, but some enterprising Youtuber could?
  - stuaxo 3y ago
    For the London Underground Jago Hazzard covers a lot of the history.
  - faitswulff 3y ago
    Speaking of trains and YouTube, "Tunnel Vision: An Unauthorized BART Ride" came out this week and is pretty enjoyable to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Jrp6it9Ss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Jrp6it9Ss
    - em-bee 3y ago
      it's worth adding that during the video you can listen to an interview with former BART Director of Media Michael C. Healy who wrote a book about BART at 10:40 for about 10 minutes and at 44:10 you can hear State Senator Scott Wiener about funding BART. there are more interviews and commentary throughout the video.
- KirillPanov 3y ago
  Richard White's book _Railroaded_ is an excellent read: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393342376 https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393342376
masklinn 3y ago
> Unlike in much of the rest of the world, the United States’ rail network is fragmented. Rather than having a national railroad, or tracks open to use by any company, our railroads are vertically integrated—they own, maintain, and run their own lines, and compete largely on the strengths and weaknesses of their networks. For what that's worth, that used to be the case in many countries, it was certainly the case in most of europe before the inter-war period (e.g. the ancestor of Deutsche Bahn was created after WWI, the french SNCF in 1938, and British Railways after WWII). And numerous traces of that remain if you know how to look. Paris has several major railway stations each serving a slice of the country (and inconveniently disconnected requiring connecting transit through the city) because each of these slices used to be handled by a different company, each with its own terminus station in Paris.
- duxup 3y ago
  There was a BBC article (I think) about a guy who travels via train all over Europe and finds these odd disconnections and routes that don't make sense, take too long. Often due to a lack of cooperation between various government imaginations. It was an interesting read, as a tourist I generally can get where I need to go, and that's no small accomplishment, but traveling otherwise seems to present more complications than I assumed.
- qwezxcrty 3y ago
  Having more than one railway terminals for a city as big as Paris is not unreasonable. There are technical difficulty with connecting the stations as it's not easy to build lines through/beneath the city. A single reasonably sized station also may not have the capacity to handle all the passengers. In China, most long range railway services are centrally planned (this is not necessary a bad thing here.), but Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. all end up with more than one terminal.
  - em-bee 3y ago
    all the terminals are historical. you really want trains to go through the city. in china apart from the historical stations there is usually only one new station for high speed trains. the problem in china is that the cities are huge and their high speed tracks are new and independent from the historical infrastructure so they are usually not upgrading old stations but build a new one often outside the city. the shanghai station terminates at one of the airports, which is quite reasonable. beijing seems a bit more complicated because it looks like they actually upgraded existing stations for high speed railway, but they also built a new high speed rail station is in the south, which at first seems odd given that the airport is far away to the north and there is no direct connection (unlike some other cities), but then they built the new airport also in the south and now the placement makes a lot more sense. (still no direct connection to the airport though) in germany at least every larger city is trying to convert terminals into through running stations. vienna just merged its two major stations into one main station in the last decade.
flint 3y ago
What type of fiend rotates a map of Chicago ninety degrees counterclockwise?
- platz 3y ago
  To the train driver, the only directions are forwards and backwards, not left and right. Therefore, a simple rotation registers no change in the train driver's brain.
  - 4ggr0 3y ago
    I don't know if that was your intention but I read your comment as if David Attenborough had said it.
- selectodude 3y ago
  Somebody who wants to make it look like Toronto, I guess.
- downvotetruth 3y ago
  The lake is unused; thus detailed areas of interest are closer to the body/eyes & reasoning for superiority of bottom to top writing.
marc__1 3y ago
This is also an issue with subways. NYC subway, for example, originally had two different owners and they build their separate networks with different width so that one rail would not use the other. Today, they call it Division A and B trains. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_rolling_stock#:~:text=All%20A%20Division%20equipment%20is,inches%20(23.01%20m)%20long https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_rolling....
- rtpg 3y ago
  I still do not understand how local rail ends up fragmented like this. The Tokyo metropolitan area has like… what? 8 operators? You’d feel like there would be some consolidation and yet.
  - Empact 3y ago
    They may appreciate that competition between the operators is a mechanism to support efficiency and progress in infrastructure. Each rail operator wants people visiting their malls, building near their stations, and in working towards that, they improve their systems.
  - InitialLastName 3y ago
    In NYC, the MTA runs both so they are technically consolidated, but changing car widths on a live subway system that is used by millions of people every day is on the list of very difficult problems. For example, if you wanted to conform the IRT lines in NYC (the numbered lines + the 42nd Street Shuttle) to the BMT/IND lines, you would need to (at minimum), update every platform (to back the edge away from the train), probably update every place two tracks are parallel and too close together, probably also update some of the routing and tunnels to enable a larger turning radius, and reapprove all of the tracks (including elevated portions) to support heavier trains. Since all of the lines (barring the 7 and S) overlap at different points, you can't just make these mutually exclusive changes to one line at a time; you would have to shut down the whole system to make the changes, eliminating service to huge areas of the city for months (if not years).
  - dunmalg 3y ago
jschveibinz 3y ago
Not Chicago, but here’s a couple of related historical anecdotes about 19th century Baltimore’s similar railroad problem: - The Baltimore Riots of 1861 occurred as northern soldiers from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania had to March between Camden Station (now the baseball stadium site) and President Street station to connect to Washington DC - President-elect Lincoln had to travel incognito and at night to avoid assassins as he had to connect between the same two stations in Baltimore on the way to his inauguration. Baltimore was such a hotbed of civil unrest and an important strategic location that cannons were placed by the Union on Federal Hill pointed at the city within range of both railroad stations. Railroad interconnections (gauge and ownership) have been a problem in many places since the beginning. The U.S. was (and still is in many ways) the “Wild West” of commercial development (backed in no small part by London investors), and the building of the railroads was perhaps the most crazy, frenzied, back-room corrupt development of the 19th century. An interesting (but long) read: “Railroaded”, by Richard White.
- WeylandYutani 3y ago
  Most countries eventually decided to merge the railway companies under a single state controlled monopoly precisely to end the wild west days. Ofcourse the economic importance of the railroads declined when trucks and automobiles were invented so a lot of investors were happy when the government stepped in
RyanAdamas 3y ago
Every railroad in the USA should be nationalized, modernized and much of it transformed into commuter railways. This article is a perfect example of the inefficiencies of mass infrastructure created by the "free market"; which was entirely created by the US government anyway.
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  1. "Nationalized" doesn't necessarily get you "modernized". It gets your money supply controlled by Congress. 2. "Much of it transformed into commuter railways"? You seem to have no idea of how much of the US is rural. Commuter railways don't make sense in rural areas.
  - RyanAdamas 3y ago
    You seem to have no idea why those places are rural.
    - coffeebeqn 3y ago
      You seem to have no idea how many square miles of empty land exist in the US
      - RyanAdamas 3y ago
        You think that land would be inhabited if it had commuter trains? You think the large cities which require a dense population for tax collection and often act as the hub for these transportation networks, perhaps have an incentive to fight nationalization and expansion of publicly held lands into housing developments? Roosevelt set aside hundred of millions of acres of land not for eternal preservation, but for future development by generations that would otherwise not had land considering the industrial barons of his time would have completely demolished it.
        thunderbird120 3y ago
        >You think that land would be inhabited if it had commuter trains? Yes, considering the distributed nature of the US's population pre-dates the car. Go look at a population density map from 1900. Tons of primarily agricultural small towns spread out over an enormous area. Back then most small-ish towns in the middle of nowhere probably did actually have commercial rail because there were no other options. It's just that when the other options did appear, rail went into terminal decline because it was simply a terrible way of serving those kinds of areas when cars and trucks exist. Even today when the spread is less driven by agriculture, people still prefer lower density housing because being stuck in an apartment building sharing walls with god knows who else stops being fun really quick. People like having a bit of space of their own.This results in lower population densities as a result of people's preferences about how they would like to live. Rail is a good means of transporting high volumes from one node to another. It is good at that and it should be used in that context. It is not good if you try to shoehorn it in as a replacement for all other means of transportation as some groups seem to be inclined to do.
math_dandy 3y ago
If the government mandated that rail companies sell passage on their track networks at reasonable rates and in a nondiscriminatory fashion, how much of Chicago's rail network becomes redundant? Perhaps removing this redundancy would allow Chicago to redevelop significant patches of urban real estate for residential and mixed-commercial purposes.
- pattakak 3y ago
  We dont need the space in the parts where the railroads are tbh
- em-bee 3y ago
  tracks themselves should be nationalized, just like roads are. then the government can allow any operator to use the tracks. don't get rid of redundancy, use it to increase capacity, and where practical, keep cargo and passenger tracks separate. mixing busy cargo and passenger tracks is a bad idea, because passenger trains need to be reliable without delays in order to be attractive. cargo can handle delays better but wants to travel as fast as possible which is pretty difficult when passenger trains with their multiple stops get in the way. so without knowing the chicago rail network, i'd claim that there is no redundancy that could be freed
- Ericson2314 3y ago
  Merges was proposed in the article too, along with a link to Swiss railways i.e. outright nationalization.
- aednichols 3y ago
  Railroads sell passage at market rates. I don’t know how reasonable they are, but seemingly good enough that it is a common practice. Therefore one often sees engines from the western railroads all the way in the northeast, e.g. BNSF and UP.
Symbiote 3y ago
It's slightly easier to see with Open Railway Map: https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=standard&lat=41.80327838120391&lon=-87.637038230896&zoom=14 https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=standard&lat=41.8032783812...
PLenz 3y ago
Good read - historically the railroads depended on a system of demurage to make money (deliberate oversimplification alert): this included three pots of money paid by the shipper, one to the originating railroad, one to the terminating railroad, and a per-mile fee to earch railroad that moved the car in between. Railroads could even specialize in different types of traffic, the NKP in the midwest was a mover of fast freights between various eastern and western systems. Many major cities would have a terminal railroad jointly owned by the larger systems who's major job was to interchange traffic between the major roads. Demuragr was a regulated system under the ICC.Come the end of the ICC and deregulation this system changed unit traffic, whole blocks of cars or even whole trains just for a shipper, became more important then single car load demurage system. Infrastructure (tracks, yards, the physical stuff of railroading) changed to support this mainly via abandonment or spin off (the spin offs are usually called shortlines or class 3s). New stuff is rarely built but refurbishment or reconstruction of old infra is fairly common. And all that leads into the situation the article talks about.
dayofthedaleks 3y ago
Author is right about one thing for sure: Nature's Metropolis is a hell of a book.
AlbertCory 3y ago
After I wrote this yesterday (partially) about the California Bullet Train (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36843136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36843136) I got to musing about what all that money could buy. It does relate to the topic of public/private ownership. Amtrak already offers passenger rail from SF to LA. It takes 10 hours and uses tracks that are mainly used for freight, and much of the roadbed is single track, too narrow, and too low-quality to support 200 mph trains. However: we're talking $100+ billion here! With that, you could buy a controlling interest in Union Pacific ($123 billion market cap), kick the freight to the side (), and fix the roadbed. It also wouldn't have to go through the San Joaquin Valley. Freight: what to do with it? Well, with all that money, you could do something. I'm not a railroad engineer.
- jcranmer 3y ago
  > fix the roadbed. How much do you think that costs? Most of the costs in CAHSR are in building the 220-mph-capable track, not in acquiring new ROW for those tracks. For comparison, merely electrifying Caltrain is costing well over $2 billion. No new track, just stringing up catenary wire and installing electrical feeds. Rebuilding a single-line freight trunk into a high speed rail corridor would cost far money, and that's before considering what to do with the freight (hint: the answer is build a new line for them... and then you have to wonder why it wouldn't be simpler to build a new line for HSR and let the freight use the existing line). It shouldn't cost anywhere near that much money, but the short answer as to why it does cost so much money is that the CA governments seem to be uniquely and disastrously incompetent at project management, on top of several other systemic cost issues in the US.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    > How much do you think that costs? probably a f&cking lot. On the other hand, with the sums they're throwing away, nothing is off the table.
    - jcranmer 3y ago
      My point is that the reason it's so expensive is largely because of who's doing the work--buying out an entire company isn't going to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done, nor is it likely to fix the issues making the project so ruinously expensive. It's just going to make it more expensive because you have to buy out an entire company on top of all the work you're doing at inflated costs.
Kon-Peki 3y ago
This guy is definitely more knowledgeable about railroad operations than I am, but I'll just point out that the Chicago built environment can support a few million more people than it currently has. The expansion of an in-city rail yard in an economically depressed area of the city is not a disaster, and could prove to be a catalyst (however small) to improvements, and in 20-30 years that land could be reclaimed fairly easily for urban living once they accomplish the long-term goals that the author envisions.
- nocoiner 3y ago
  Yeah, I thought that the emphasis on (and assumption of) an inherent tragedy of an expanded yard detracted from what was otherwise a fascinating and pretty great article. I kept waiting to learn why this expansion was going to be so detrimental to the rail network, but I guess the author’s view is that the expansion is bad because it’s a requirement of a suboptimal network. I was going to make the observation that once the yard has been expanded, I doubt it would ever be reclaimed for other uses, but the number of paved-over spurs and customer connections disproves that point. It makes me sad to think about the amount of literally irreplaceable infrastructure that’s been ripped up rather than retained for future freight levels or repurposed for passenger use.
- leviathant 3y ago
  >The expansion of an in-city rail yard in an economically depressed area of the city is not a disaster, and could prove to be a catalyst (however small) to improvements, and in 20-30 years that land could be reclaimed fairly easily for urban living once they accomplish the long-term goals that the author envisions. Hello from Philadelphia, this take is so completely of touch with reality. The Reading Company, now dealing solely in movie theaters, continues to squat on land and bridges that it has not improved in half a century, yet continues to own. While the Reading Terminal was converted into a convention center and food market, the rail yards on the waterfront are largely parking lots and vacant land. The coal yards they fed in the center city are now home to a fenced in lot full of transformers. Expanding an in-city rail yard is not a catalyst to improvements in the city. Reclaiming former railyards is not relatively easy.
local_issues 3y ago
Resident conservative here - we need to nationalize the rails. Not the railroads, but the rails themselves. The freight companies take federal money to expand the network, and the second they don't meet profit projections they tear the tracks up. They treat Amtrak like shit despite taking their money hand over fist, they have been terrible stewards of the system, and they would rather engage in the fuckery from this article than think holistically. It's a misalignment of incentives, and it's really starting to fuck us. Nationalize the rails. It's what other sane Western countries do. The Erie and Lackawanna sold off the rails in the Lackawanna cutoff - considered at the time an engineering marvel, and capable of HSR - for scrap. That's insane, and should never have happened.
- GenerWork 3y ago
  >Resident conservative here - we need to nationalize the rails. Imagine calling yourself a conservative and supporting the idea of nationalizing the rails. Nationalization is quite possibly one of the most unconservative ideas out there.
  - stetrain 3y ago
    Depends on your perspective. It creates a market of competition for services upon those rails.
    - local_issues 3y ago
      Ding ding ding. Treat them like highways, they basically are anyway. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
  - unregistereddev 3y ago
    Nuanced thought is to be commended. As a moderate conservative, I am not opposed to nationalizing the rails. Certain shared infrastructure is impractical when privately owned, primarily when (as parent points out) private ownership creates misaligned incentives. As a fiscal conservative, my views are that we should reduce government waste. As long as Amtrak continues to be worthless, the money we spend on it is wasted. When unprofitable rail lines are torn out, the money we spent building those rail lines may have been wasted. If we genuinely want eco-friendly transportation, one option to explore is to centralize our rail infrastructure with the goal of it becoming useful to all. I don't know if it is the best option, but I think we should explore it and see what the benefits would be.

129 points by gok 3y ago

I love this kind of stuff, now if Netflix want to make a documentary out of this, that would be amazing! We had this sort of operation in the UK before WW2 when there were separate companies running trains and even more so pre WW1 when there were 10s/100s of companies running everything from a single short line through to main lines up and down the country. It was, of course, very inefficient for the reasons that the OP discusses, the need to send a wagon anywhere from anywhere meant 1000s of "trip freights", although these would almost entirely have been made by trains. You also had stopping freight services that collected and set down at each station so you can imagine the shunting/marshalling was very time-intensive but, of course, in the early days, a day or 2 was still faster than most alternatives. What happened in the 70s in the UK with Speedlink was that they realised the best way to utilise capacity was to try and create fixed freights that travelled good distances at relatively high speeds between a small number of very large yards where it could be broken down into smaller ongoing services or go onto trucks. Of course, this only suited certain customers and would not work for a small business shipping a small volume but it worked well enough that it became the standard pattern by which all freights now run in the UK. I guess the issue in the US is that the distances are so long, you don't want lots of smaller specific trains but a few much larger trains with an enormous mix of destinations.

rob74 3y ago
Not sure if it's mainstream enough for Netflix, but some enterprising Youtuber could?
- stuaxo 3y ago
  For the London Underground Jago Hazzard covers a lot of the history.
- faitswulff 3y ago
  Speaking of trains and YouTube, "Tunnel Vision: An Unauthorized BART Ride" came out this week and is pretty enjoyable to watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Jrp6it9Ss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-Jrp6it9Ss
  - em-bee 3y ago
    it's worth adding that during the video you can listen to an interview with former BART Director of Media Michael C. Healy who wrote a book about BART at 10:40 for about 10 minutes and at 44:10 you can hear State Senator Scott Wiener about funding BART. there are more interviews and commentary throughout the video.
KirillPanov 3y ago
Richard White's book _Railroaded_ is an excellent read: https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393342376 https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393342376

masklinn 3y ago

> Unlike in much of the rest of the world, the United States’ rail network is fragmented. Rather than having a national railroad, or tracks open to use by any company, our railroads are vertically integrated—they own, maintain, and run their own lines, and compete largely on the strengths and weaknesses of their networks. For what that's worth, that used to be the case in many countries, it was certainly the case in most of europe before the inter-war period (e.g. the ancestor of Deutsche Bahn was created after WWI, the french SNCF in 1938, and British Railways after WWII). And numerous traces of that remain if you know how to look. Paris has several major railway stations each serving a slice of the country (and inconveniently disconnected requiring connecting transit through the city) because each of these slices used to be handled by a different company, each with its own terminus station in Paris.

duxup 3y ago
There was a BBC article (I think) about a guy who travels via train all over Europe and finds these odd disconnections and routes that don't make sense, take too long. Often due to a lack of cooperation between various government imaginations. It was an interesting read, as a tourist I generally can get where I need to go, and that's no small accomplishment, but traveling otherwise seems to present more complications than I assumed.
qwezxcrty 3y ago
Having more than one railway terminals for a city as big as Paris is not unreasonable. There are technical difficulty with connecting the stations as it's not easy to build lines through/beneath the city. A single reasonably sized station also may not have the capacity to handle all the passengers. In China, most long range railway services are centrally planned (this is not necessary a bad thing here.), but Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. all end up with more than one terminal.
- em-bee 3y ago
  all the terminals are historical. you really want trains to go through the city. in china apart from the historical stations there is usually only one new station for high speed trains. the problem in china is that the cities are huge and their high speed tracks are new and independent from the historical infrastructure so they are usually not upgrading old stations but build a new one often outside the city. the shanghai station terminates at one of the airports, which is quite reasonable. beijing seems a bit more complicated because it looks like they actually upgraded existing stations for high speed railway, but they also built a new high speed rail station is in the south, which at first seems odd given that the airport is far away to the north and there is no direct connection (unlike some other cities), but then they built the new airport also in the south and now the placement makes a lot more sense. (still no direct connection to the airport though) in germany at least every larger city is trying to convert terminals into through running stations. vienna just merged its two major stations into one main station in the last decade.

flint 3y ago

What type of fiend rotates a map of Chicago ninety degrees counterclockwise?

platz 3y ago
To the train driver, the only directions are forwards and backwards, not left and right. Therefore, a simple rotation registers no change in the train driver's brain.
- 4ggr0 3y ago
  I don't know if that was your intention but I read your comment as if David Attenborough had said it.
selectodude 3y ago
Somebody who wants to make it look like Toronto, I guess.
downvotetruth 3y ago
The lake is unused; thus detailed areas of interest are closer to the body/eyes & reasoning for superiority of bottom to top writing.

marc__1 3y ago

This is also an issue with subways. NYC subway, for example, originally had two different owners and they build their separate networks with different width so that one rail would not use the other. Today, they call it Division A and B trains. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_rolling_stock#:~:text=All%20A%20Division%20equipment%20is,inches%20(23.01%20m)%20long https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_rolling....

rtpg 3y ago
I still do not understand how local rail ends up fragmented like this. The Tokyo metropolitan area has like… what? 8 operators? You’d feel like there would be some consolidation and yet.
- Empact 3y ago
  They may appreciate that competition between the operators is a mechanism to support efficiency and progress in infrastructure. Each rail operator wants people visiting their malls, building near their stations, and in working towards that, they improve their systems.
- InitialLastName 3y ago
  In NYC, the MTA runs both so they are technically consolidated, but changing car widths on a live subway system that is used by millions of people every day is on the list of very difficult problems. For example, if you wanted to conform the IRT lines in NYC (the numbered lines + the 42nd Street Shuttle) to the BMT/IND lines, you would need to (at minimum), update every platform (to back the edge away from the train), probably update every place two tracks are parallel and too close together, probably also update some of the routing and tunnels to enable a larger turning radius, and reapprove all of the tracks (including elevated portions) to support heavier trains. Since all of the lines (barring the 7 and S) overlap at different points, you can't just make these mutually exclusive changes to one line at a time; you would have to shut down the whole system to make the changes, eliminating service to huge areas of the city for months (if not years).
- dunmalg 3y ago

jschveibinz 3y ago

Not Chicago, but here’s a couple of related historical anecdotes about 19th century Baltimore’s similar railroad problem: - The Baltimore Riots of 1861 occurred as northern soldiers from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania had to March between Camden Station (now the baseball stadium site) and President Street station to connect to Washington DC - President-elect Lincoln had to travel incognito and at night to avoid assassins as he had to connect between the same two stations in Baltimore on the way to his inauguration. Baltimore was such a hotbed of civil unrest and an important strategic location that cannons were placed by the Union on Federal Hill pointed at the city within range of both railroad stations. Railroad interconnections (gauge and ownership) have been a problem in many places since the beginning. The U.S. was (and still is in many ways) the “Wild West” of commercial development (backed in no small part by London investors), and the building of the railroads was perhaps the most crazy, frenzied, back-room corrupt development of the 19th century. An interesting (but long) read: “Railroaded”, by Richard White.

WeylandYutani 3y ago
Most countries eventually decided to merge the railway companies under a single state controlled monopoly precisely to end the wild west days. Ofcourse the economic importance of the railroads declined when trucks and automobiles were invented so a lot of investors were happy when the government stepped in

RyanAdamas 3y ago

Every railroad in the USA should be nationalized, modernized and much of it transformed into commuter railways. This article is a perfect example of the inefficiencies of mass infrastructure created by the "free market"; which was entirely created by the US government anyway.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago
1. "Nationalized" doesn't necessarily get you "modernized". It gets your money supply controlled by Congress. 2. "Much of it transformed into commuter railways"? You seem to have no idea of how much of the US is rural. Commuter railways don't make sense in rural areas.
- RyanAdamas 3y ago
  You seem to have no idea why those places are rural.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    You seem to have no idea how many square miles of empty land exist in the US
    - RyanAdamas 3y ago
      You think that land would be inhabited if it had commuter trains? You think the large cities which require a dense population for tax collection and often act as the hub for these transportation networks, perhaps have an incentive to fight nationalization and expansion of publicly held lands into housing developments? Roosevelt set aside hundred of millions of acres of land not for eternal preservation, but for future development by generations that would otherwise not had land considering the industrial barons of his time would have completely demolished it.
      - thunderbird120 3y ago
        >You think that land would be inhabited if it had commuter trains? Yes, considering the distributed nature of the US's population pre-dates the car. Go look at a population density map from 1900. Tons of primarily agricultural small towns spread out over an enormous area. Back then most small-ish towns in the middle of nowhere probably did actually have commercial rail because there were no other options. It's just that when the other options did appear, rail went into terminal decline because it was simply a terrible way of serving those kinds of areas when cars and trucks exist. Even today when the spread is less driven by agriculture, people still prefer lower density housing because being stuck in an apartment building sharing walls with god knows who else stops being fun really quick. People like having a bit of space of their own.This results in lower population densities as a result of people's preferences about how they would like to live. Rail is a good means of transporting high volumes from one node to another. It is good at that and it should be used in that context. It is not good if you try to shoehorn it in as a replacement for all other means of transportation as some groups seem to be inclined to do.

math_dandy 3y ago

If the government mandated that rail companies sell passage on their track networks at reasonable rates and in a nondiscriminatory fashion, how much of Chicago's rail network becomes redundant? Perhaps removing this redundancy would allow Chicago to redevelop significant patches of urban real estate for residential and mixed-commercial purposes.

pattakak 3y ago
We dont need the space in the parts where the railroads are tbh
em-bee 3y ago
tracks themselves should be nationalized, just like roads are. then the government can allow any operator to use the tracks. don't get rid of redundancy, use it to increase capacity, and where practical, keep cargo and passenger tracks separate. mixing busy cargo and passenger tracks is a bad idea, because passenger trains need to be reliable without delays in order to be attractive. cargo can handle delays better but wants to travel as fast as possible which is pretty difficult when passenger trains with their multiple stops get in the way. so without knowing the chicago rail network, i'd claim that there is no redundancy that could be freed
Ericson2314 3y ago
Merges was proposed in the article too, along with a link to Swiss railways i.e. outright nationalization.
aednichols 3y ago
Railroads sell passage at market rates. I don’t know how reasonable they are, but seemingly good enough that it is a common practice. Therefore one often sees engines from the western railroads all the way in the northeast, e.g. BNSF and UP.

Symbiote 3y ago

It's slightly easier to see with Open Railway Map: https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=standard&lat=41.80327838120391&lon=-87.637038230896&zoom=14 https://openrailwaymap.org/?style=standard&lat=41.8032783812...

PLenz 3y ago

Good read - historically the railroads depended on a system of demurage to make money (deliberate oversimplification alert): this included three pots of money paid by the shipper, one to the originating railroad, one to the terminating railroad, and a per-mile fee to earch railroad that moved the car in between. Railroads could even specialize in different types of traffic, the NKP in the midwest was a mover of fast freights between various eastern and western systems. Many major cities would have a terminal railroad jointly owned by the larger systems who's major job was to interchange traffic between the major roads. Demuragr was a regulated system under the ICC.Come the end of the ICC and deregulation this system changed unit traffic, whole blocks of cars or even whole trains just for a shipper, became more important then single car load demurage system. Infrastructure (tracks, yards, the physical stuff of railroading) changed to support this mainly via abandonment or spin off (the spin offs are usually called shortlines or class 3s). New stuff is rarely built but refurbishment or reconstruction of old infra is fairly common. And all that leads into the situation the article talks about.

dayofthedaleks 3y ago

Author is right about one thing for sure: Nature's Metropolis is a hell of a book.

AlbertCory 3y ago

After I wrote this yesterday (partially) about the California Bullet Train (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36843136 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36843136) I got to musing about what all that money could buy. It does relate to the topic of public/private ownership. Amtrak already offers passenger rail from SF to LA. It takes 10 hours and uses tracks that are mainly used for freight, and much of the roadbed is single track, too narrow, and too low-quality to support 200 mph trains. However: we're talking $100+ billion here! With that, you could buy a controlling interest in Union Pacific ($123 billion market cap), kick the freight to the side (), and fix the roadbed. It also wouldn't have to go through the San Joaquin Valley. Freight: what to do with it? Well, with all that money, you could do something. I'm not a railroad engineer.

jcranmer 3y ago
> fix the roadbed. How much do you think that costs? Most of the costs in CAHSR are in building the 220-mph-capable track, not in acquiring new ROW for those tracks. For comparison, merely electrifying Caltrain is costing well over $2 billion. No new track, just stringing up catenary wire and installing electrical feeds. Rebuilding a single-line freight trunk into a high speed rail corridor would cost far money, and that's before considering what to do with the freight (hint: the answer is build a new line for them... and then you have to wonder why it wouldn't be simpler to build a new line for HSR and let the freight use the existing line). It shouldn't cost anywhere near that much money, but the short answer as to why it does cost so much money is that the CA governments seem to be uniquely and disastrously incompetent at project management, on top of several other systemic cost issues in the US.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  > How much do you think that costs? probably a f&cking lot. On the other hand, with the sums they're throwing away, nothing is off the table.
  - jcranmer 3y ago
    My point is that the reason it's so expensive is largely because of who's doing the work--buying out an entire company isn't going to reduce the amount of work that needs to be done, nor is it likely to fix the issues making the project so ruinously expensive. It's just going to make it more expensive because you have to buy out an entire company on top of all the work you're doing at inflated costs.

Kon-Peki 3y ago

This guy is definitely more knowledgeable about railroad operations than I am, but I'll just point out that the Chicago built environment can support a few million more people than it currently has. The expansion of an in-city rail yard in an economically depressed area of the city is not a disaster, and could prove to be a catalyst (however small) to improvements, and in 20-30 years that land could be reclaimed fairly easily for urban living once they accomplish the long-term goals that the author envisions.

nocoiner 3y ago
Yeah, I thought that the emphasis on (and assumption of) an inherent tragedy of an expanded yard detracted from what was otherwise a fascinating and pretty great article. I kept waiting to learn why this expansion was going to be so detrimental to the rail network, but I guess the author’s view is that the expansion is bad because it’s a requirement of a suboptimal network. I was going to make the observation that once the yard has been expanded, I doubt it would ever be reclaimed for other uses, but the number of paved-over spurs and customer connections disproves that point. It makes me sad to think about the amount of literally irreplaceable infrastructure that’s been ripped up rather than retained for future freight levels or repurposed for passenger use.
leviathant 3y ago
>The expansion of an in-city rail yard in an economically depressed area of the city is not a disaster, and could prove to be a catalyst (however small) to improvements, and in 20-30 years that land could be reclaimed fairly easily for urban living once they accomplish the long-term goals that the author envisions. Hello from Philadelphia, this take is so completely of touch with reality. The Reading Company, now dealing solely in movie theaters, continues to squat on land and bridges that it has not improved in half a century, yet continues to own. While the Reading Terminal was converted into a convention center and food market, the rail yards on the waterfront are largely parking lots and vacant land. The coal yards they fed in the center city are now home to a fenced in lot full of transformers. Expanding an in-city rail yard is not a catalyst to improvements in the city. Reclaiming former railyards is not relatively easy.

local_issues 3y ago

Resident conservative here - we need to nationalize the rails. Not the railroads, but the rails themselves. The freight companies take federal money to expand the network, and the second they don't meet profit projections they tear the tracks up. They treat Amtrak like shit despite taking their money hand over fist, they have been terrible stewards of the system, and they would rather engage in the fuckery from this article than think holistically. It's a misalignment of incentives, and it's really starting to fuck us. Nationalize the rails. It's what other sane Western countries do. The Erie and Lackawanna sold off the rails in the Lackawanna cutoff - considered at the time an engineering marvel, and capable of HSR - for scrap. That's insane, and should never have happened.

GenerWork 3y ago
>Resident conservative here - we need to nationalize the rails. Imagine calling yourself a conservative and supporting the idea of nationalizing the rails. Nationalization is quite possibly one of the most unconservative ideas out there.
- stetrain 3y ago
  Depends on your perspective. It creates a market of competition for services upon those rails.
  - local_issues 3y ago
    Ding ding ding. Treat them like highways, they basically are anyway. Let a thousand flowers bloom.
- unregistereddev 3y ago
  Nuanced thought is to be commended. As a moderate conservative, I am not opposed to nationalizing the rails. Certain shared infrastructure is impractical when privately owned, primarily when (as parent points out) private ownership creates misaligned incentives. As a fiscal conservative, my views are that we should reduce government waste. As long as Amtrak continues to be worthless, the money we spend on it is wasted. When unprofitable rail lines are torn out, the money we spent building those rail lines may have been wasted. If we genuinely want eco-friendly transportation, one option to explore is to centralize our rail infrastructure with the goal of it becoming useful to all. I don't know if it is the best option, but I think we should explore it and see what the benefits would be.