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Longer and Longer Freight Trains Drive Up the Odds of Derailment
- whalesalad 2y ago[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 32fff531 2y ago[flagged]
- mchannon 2y agoMissing from this article is the correlation between train length and use of sidings when opposing trains need to pass. It’s well known the reason Amtrak sucks is because freight trains run on the same tracks and their sidings are too short, relative to the length of the trains, to prevent freight-caused delays on most Amtrak lines. Avg. passenger rail speeds in the US peaked in the 1880’s iirc. If you simply can’t use a siding because your train is too long, I can see a derailment becoming more likely. There may also be loading fatigue contributions, similar to higher speeds and harder tires making semi trucks responsible for 90+% of US highway wear. The longest trains no doubt run on a minority of busiest routes, so there is less risk of derailment with shorter trains on the plurality of routes. In essence, it’s not that the derailed train is too long, it’s that the previous train is too long, causing the track to wear out too fast.
- bombcar 2y agoA federal law limiting trains to the length of a siding within 60 miles (or be double tracked) would simplify some things.
- unyttigfjelltol 2y agoAmtrak has weak service outside key corridors because it operates on infrastructure that it doesn't own, which is constructed and maintained to a freight-optimal standard, and so is slow and unreliable. Freight traffic conflicts are just icing on the cake, as is politicization of funding and a basic failure of purpose from inception-- Amtrak was a railroad union pension rescue brought about by massive subsidization of auto and air infrastructure in the mid-20th century. The purpose forever has been to extend and pretend, and not to actually make intercity rail travel viable across the US.
- bequanna 2y agoEven if there was a ~25% decrease in Amtrack trip length, would there be any meaningful increase in use? I’ve looked at longer Amtrack trips and the time it takes to travel across just a few states relative to flying just doesn’t make sense to me.
- banannaise 2y agoMaking a service better is a good thing regardless of whether it increases use. That said, there are some people for whom train travel makes a lot of sense, especially if you make it more efficient. You just don't happen to be one of them.
- bequanna 2y agoI guess the exact same argument could have been made in the 40s-50s for adding additional lanes on roads just for horse powered passengers. Some people enjoy the nostalgia, sure, but we’ve moved on and have better options. The US will likely never embrace (or need) longer range high speed passenger rail like Europe. I don’t understand why we would dedicate more public money or policy to continue to prove this point. Other than a few retirees who have time to kill, who would be interested in taking an Amtrack train from Chicago -> LA? This trip via Amtrak takes 3 days. I am not interested in my tax dollars subsidizing pleasure trips for Senior citizens.
- katbyte 2y agoIt’s not the same? Trains are great for the environment and pack a lot of people into a small area. Roads and cars do not.
- banannaise 2y agoTreating rail like an outdated and obsolete technology is weird. American rail infrastructure is, in many cases, outdated and obsolete. Rail as a technology is not. For freight, it is far more efficient than basically any other land transportation technology, even in the present state. For passengers, it is also more economically efficient than road travel, although the present quality of infrastructure often makes it impractical, and it lacks the aggressive subsidies of road travel. > Other than a few retirees who have time to kill, who would be interested in taking an Amtrack train from Chicago -> LA? This trip, which is an extreme example, takes 43 hours today (per the Amtrak ticketing portal). Driving this route (which people do) takes 30 hours and must be split up over 2-3 days due to fatigue. Greyhound takes 46 hours. Megabus does not serve California. Even with the current (bad) state of rail infrastructure in this country, the only more efficient travel method for this trip is flying. An upgraded conventional railway (similar to the Acela Express) would cover that distance in about 30 hours. An average high-speed rail would take about 15-20 and could be done in a day. Also, why are you pretending that this infrastructure doesn't serve shorter trips as well? A plane from Chicago to LA only serves Chicago and LA. The Amtrak route also serves Kansas City, Albuquerque, and Flagstaff. The route you were referring to (the Texas Eagle, 66 hours) serves Springfield, St. Louis, Little Rock, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, Tucson, and dozens of smaller cities.
- blueflow 2y agoNobody talking about the track geometry which is surely a major factor at play.
- throwup238 2y ago> “We desperately need a law in this country to cap the length of a train,” Cassity says. “We need to know what too long is, and we need to know what the limit is going to be.” The big picture of the Risk Analysis study is correct, in his view: “They’re seeing the reality that long trains derail more often than shorter trains,” Cassity says. The limit should be whatever fits in the sidings on a track. It's ridiculous that the rail industry can handicap passenger rail by just increasing the length of the trains until they physically can't fit in the sidings. Then if they want to make their trains longer, they have to improve the infrastructure instead of putting pressure on everything and everyone except the shareholders' profits.
- banannaise 2y agoMisaligned incentives are killing what's left of rail in this country. There needs to be a serious reckoning... or just a straightforward law about how long you can make a train, either in absolute terms or relative to the sidings available.
- nradov 2y agoDo you mean killing passenger rail? Because despite some occasional derailments, freight rail is generally doing pretty well. There is certainly room for improvement and the system is a bit strained but volumes remain high. https://www.aar.org/data-center/rail-traffic-data/ https://www.aar.org/data-center/rail-traffic-data/
- banannaise 2y agoRail now accounts for less than 10% of domestic freight traffic by weight, and less than 15% that of truck. Considering how much more cost-efficient rail is (and how much cheaper the infrastructure is), that's pretty bad. It's a slow death, but rail freight remains flat at best while total freight continues to increase.
- TylerE 2y agoIt also doesn’t address magnitudes. Quantity of freight is relatively fixed. If running trains half as long. Reduces derailments by 20%, you now have 60% more derailments, because you have twice as many trips. It is rare for more than a dozen or so cars to detail at one time.
- resource_waste 2y agoWell, fix the economics. That will make corporations rational overnight. If a derailment only happens X% of time and causes Y$ amount of monetary loss, you need to increase Y. Apparently no one cares when corn gets derailed, and maybe that is okay. If derailments cause human injury, the cost goes up. Toxic chemicals are the classic example. So why not raise the cost when a toxic chemical is released during derailment? You can do it with fines, regulations, etc.. But until you fix the economics, its going to continue to happen. Ask yourself: Over the course of 1 year, it better to have a 20% longer train with a 0.1% chance of corn derailment, or a 20% shorter train with a 0.001% chance derailment? If you arent breaking out excel, and instead using emotions, you never had a chance to make this decision.
- SoftTalker 2y agoShorter trains means more trains, which means more train crews are needed to operate them. That's expensive, and they may just not be available. They have per-day and per-week hour limits like airline pilots or truck drivers, so they can't pick up extra trips even if they wanted to. And it's another one of those jobs where people are aging out and there aren't enough younger people coming in. There's an expectation that trains will be automated at some point, but we aren't there yet.
- katbyte 2y agoMaybe the reason younger people are not coming in is the bad treatment of workers and union busting?
- SoftTalker 2y agoPartly, but the nature of the job involves days away from home, odd work hours, being called in on short notice, stress ... obviously WFH is not possible. Stuff that a lot of young people just don't want in a job these days. More pay solves everything, up to a point.
- katbyte 2y ago
- banannaise 2y agoI find it interesting that the article doesn't really mention that regardless of derailment rate, longer trains increase derailment impact. A longer train can, of course, derail more cars, and when it derails, will strand more cars (since the train's cars still on the rails are temporarily stopped and often can't be moved until the derailment is partially cleaned up). In addition, derailing the 50th car of a 50-car train can only cascade to cars ahead of it; derailing the 50th car in a 100-car train can cascade in both directions. (Stated more generally, the average car in a 100-car train is twice as far from the end of the train than the average car in a 50-car train.) Even if a 100-car train had the same likelihood of derailment as a 50-car train, a 50-car train would, on average, have reduced impact.
- hanniabu 2y agoI'm sure longer trains also increases the likeliness of it carrying something toxic too
- xnx 2y agoA few comments here noting the conflicts between freight and passenger service on shared lines. Would it be a better use of resources to eliminate token passenger rail service to keep it from interfering with freight? Bus is as good or better than passenger rail in many cases, but there is no real alternative for moving hundreds of tons of materials.
- dv_dt 2y agoThe best use of resources would be to build far more railroad tracks and reduce semi-truck transportation.
- nradov 2y agoSounds good. Who will pay for that? The problem is that most of our major freight rail lines were first built when land was very cheap or even free (stolen from indigenous people). Now the land for more rail lines will cost a lot whether it's purchased outright or acquired through eminent domain. And even building more railroad tracks would only marginally reduce truck transportation. Most truck freight is time sensitive (rail freight can never be fast) or goes places that rail can't really reach.
- dv_dt 2y agoWho pays for the upkeep of roads that are exponentially more broken down by truck freight than by any other traffic on them?
- jeffbee 2y agoIsn't there some static limit to how long a train can be? On a 1% grade with a 15000-ton train, the first knuckle is loaded with 150 tons statically, which sounds like a lot. It seems like you wouldn't be able to practically enjoy the power of 9 locomotives because you wouldn't be able to pass that much force through the knuckle.
- bregma 2y agoIt's not the pull that leads to problems. It's the braking. The engines in front might have come to a full stop before the last cars a mile or more back have even gotten the message that they need to decelerate. Do that on a curve going down a hill and the cars in motion just keep going, usually into a river or some buildings beside the tracks. The longer the train, the more the whip cracks.
- kart23 2y agotrains have air brakes connecting all the cars... theres no delay.
- opwieurposiu 2y agoThey put engines in the middle and at the end to avoid running out of knuckle capacity. It works most of the time, except all those engines pushing and pulling tends to increase the chance of derailment.
- mind-blight 2y agoI'd really like there to be a study on the secondary impact of long trains. They cut entire towns in half for sometimes 30+ minutes at a time. In Portland, OR, extremely long trains would cut of entire sections of the city, and that's assuming they didn't have to stop for some reason. It makes it really hard for emergency services to get to where the need to be. At least a couple of times a day, a train would cut Naito in half (the main road running on the west side of the river). The fire station was on one side, and a ton of apartment buildings were on the other. If a fire starts at the wrong time, it'll take 30 extra minutes to get there. Ditto for ambulances. Not to mention all of the impact on congestion in the city, which has tertiary effects on emergency services
- mananaysiempre 2y agoWait, there are no bridges over or tunnels under the rail tracks in a big city? What kind of twisted planning is this?
- michaelt 2y agoPresumably, planning that took place 100 years ago when a train would pass by in 60 seconds or so. Once you've built the rails, built the roads, sold off the land nearby and constructed buildings, adding a bridge later can be difficult. If your bridge is 22 feet high, and the approach ramps have a 6% slope, each approach ramp will be 360 feet long.
- mind-blight 2y agoThere is a pedestrian bridge, but the nearest for vehicles is a couple of miles away. There are 3 roads connecting these two parts of the city, but I've had a train cut off all 3, then stop. It must have been there for around an hour. There are often alternatives, but they add 10-30 minutes depending on where you're at. That's really bad in an emergency situation
- jclay 2y agoHere’s another great article on the topic. I particularly like the animations in this one. https://www.propublica.org/article/train-derailment-long-trains https://www.propublica.org/article/train-derailment-long-tra...
- calibas 2y agoLook up Cantara Loop in Northern California, a derailment caused a major environmental disaster back in 1991. They've never really figured out how to stop derailments there, they still happen on a regular basis. We've just gotten lucky recently and the derailed cars weren't full of toxic chemicals. https://www.ijpr.org/disasters-and-accidents/2022-11-17/fourth-train-derailment-occurs-near-dunsmuir-at-cantara-loop https://www.ijpr.org/disasters-and-accidents/2022-11-17/four...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]