4 ms·

The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that

by o11c 1y ago

The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail. The existing rail system has at least the following constraints: * Uses steel-on-steel friction, rather than rubber-on-rock. Cars that can do both exist but are rare. * Can only travel on the specially-prepared rails, not installed at the last-mile, related to the next point. * Poor cornering and elevation changing. * Difficulty in changing speeds (over a thousand meters and over a minute, compare to about a hundred meters and less than ten seconds for road vehicles) * Very limited lanes, usually no passing. Track reservations will be voided if you aren't exactly on schedule. * Almost all of the "intelligence" (both computer and human) is at one or both ends; the cars in the middle are all "dumb". Which of these can reasonably be changed?

sephamorr 1y ago
My previous company, Parallel Systems is working on this. The solution looks a lot like trucks on rail: individual locomotion, so you get the flexibility of trucking, but the energy efficiency and automation ease of rail. With modern braking, you can stop a Parallel vehicle about as fast as a truck. There's a ton of rail that's underutilized, particularly in Metro areas, so you almost get a fresh highway for free. Vehicles can platoon or separate at will.
- TrainedMonkey 1y ago
  Always upvote electric trains!
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  I’m not seeing much rail that is under utilized out here int he west, if anything it is over subscribed. The energy savings in having one or two diesel electrics pull a long chain of cars is substantial, I get the feeling that if you just put trucks on rails you’d lose a lot of that. You also need to be more conservative with elevation changes, right of ways, and turning radiuses, so lots of tunneling and viaducting ala the Chinese HSR network. You are still probably going to have a lot of roads since rubber works better for going up and down, twisty turns, and can deal last mile stuff flexibly. Not everyplace is going to be as simple as the island of sodor.
  - bgnn 1y ago
    most of Europe north of the alps is fairly flat in elevation. Railways are oversubscribed because they are not expanded enough, defunded if you like, to expand and fund the highway network. It is stupid to travel thousands of kilometers by trucks. It's inefficient, expensive and nit scalable. Currently we use mostly huge container ships and empty them with trucks, absolutely insane. There's quite a bit of river boat activity in Europe luckily, which is great if electrified. Though the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not didtated by economics.
    - tim333 1y ago
      >the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not dictated by economics I'm not sure about the world in general but I've followed the HS2 line in the UK and the problems are pretty much economic. We have a couple of north south lines along the UK but they are basically at capacity so the idea was to build another and make it high speed but it's proved incredibly expensive, partly due to property ownership and housing along the line and partly due to environmental regulations leading to £100m shelters to avoid disturbing a few bats. (bat thing https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/25/environment-secretary-lambasts-hs2s-100m-bat-shelter https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/25/environment-...) Estimates for building it have gone from £38bn in 2011 to £136bn in 2023. They are still building some of it but brexit britain doesn't have that many spare £136bns lying around. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/3088/economics/pros-and-cons-of-high-speed-rail-hs2/ https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/3088/economics/pros-and-c...
      - bgnn 1y ago
        Yeah the big infra projects in the West somehow became like this. It's a very different story in Asia though.
wahern 1y ago
They can all be changed, but then the capital costs for rail infrastructure would balloon and diminish the 3-5x cost advantage rail has over trucking. The modern rail business is structured (physically and, especially, financially) to squeeze every last cent out of existing infrastructure with minimal investment. I doubt that will change significantly anytime soon. The public road infrastructure subsidizes trucking (even after factoring in use and fuel taxes), and perhaps more importantly trucking companies don't have to contend with legal hurdles like land acquisition--the government handles that. (Land acquisition delays have been the biggest barrier for CAHSR.)
stackskipton 1y ago
>The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail. Because companies have invested in JIT because low cost of trucking, an industry which is heavily subsidized (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/50049 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/50049), allows it. If trucking costs reflected their true cost, railroad would look a ton more attractive along with not doing JIT.
cycomanic 1y ago
The bigger issue is that roads are immensely subsidised compared to rail. Even on private roads that are completely covered by usage charges, trucks pay maybe a factor of 2-10 more than cars, however they cause about 40000 times more wear (let's even disregard how they also cause disproportionately more traffic...). Obviously this calculation becomes even worse if we consider that most roads are subsidised by all tax payers. Trucks would be much less profitable (especially for long haul traffic) if they would have to cover their actual cost to society. But they are just another example of privatising profits and socialising the costs.
- seanmcdirmid 1y ago
  Are you just talking about the USA? I would bet that rail in Europe and Eastern Asia is also pretty subsidized, as much as or even more so than roads.
  - crote 1y ago
    Rather the opposite in Europe, actually. The European rail network is strongly liberalized, starting with the First Railway Directive 91/440/EEC. The physical infrastructure now usually falls under a state-owned enterprise, which provides access to any company wanting to use it, at a fair and non-discriminatory pricing. In practice this means that the usage fees have to pay for all upkeep and maintenance, with occasional cash injections from the government for things like constructing new railway lines. Importantly, this infrastructure company is expected to either have a neutral result, or run a profit: the railway users have to pay the true costs of operating the railway. The roads are a different story altogether. They are owned, constructed, and maintained directly by the government itself. Road upkeep comes out of the general budget - just like education or defense. Road users pay via a vehicle tax and/or fuel tax, but there is zero expectation that those taxes pay for the full cost of the road network. After all, you profit from the presence of a road network - even if you don't drive a car yourself.
    - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
      France has fairly high tolls on roads and Switzerland has that sticker you have to buy to use the expressways. Japanese rail companies must get some sort of subsidy on tracks, the passenger rail system runs at a loss and only turns a profit on renting space in train stations. Roads are also heavily tolled (similar in China).
pcarolan 1y ago
You can. It’s called multimodal and basically is just picking a shipping container off a train car with a crane and putting it on a truck platform or a ship. 1 platform supports all modes.
- rekenaut 1y ago
  This works great for finished consumer goods, but bulk cargo that makes up a significant portion of both rail and truck traffic like grain, liquid products (crude oil, gasoline, vinyl chloride), ore, etc. have very specialized transports that don't work well with the existing multimodal system.
  - mtnGoat 1y ago
    Most of those have their own specialized transport systems that work well already though.
greenavocado 1y ago
Intramotev is working on autonomous rail car retrofits to make the cars in the middle move on their own to their destinations.
skissane 1y ago
> I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail. A century ago they would have found it at lot easier: if you wanted to send just a few cars to the back of a factory, many rail operators would have found a way to make it happen, and at a reasonable price too - now they’ll tell you the service is uneconomic to provide, unless you charter an entire locomotive for $$$$
reustle 1y ago
The problem with rail is that we allowed the national rail network to be privatized. Maybe we’ll see some privatized lanes on interstate highways in the next 15 years.
virtue3 1y ago
railroad maintenance is also incredibly expensive. Especially compared to when you can offload the road maintenance to the state / rest of the population.
- ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
  As repairing roads costs so much, it annoys me that we don't make some attempt at penalising the heaviest vehicles. As road damage is roughly proportional to the fourth power of weight, it would make a lot of sense to prevent logistics companies from just using the largest vehicles that they can - it should work out costing less if loads are broken up and delivered via multiple, lighter vehicles. However, as the public bears the cost, it means that logistics companies will just look at their expenses (drivers' wages, fuel etc).

by o11c 1y ago

sephamorr 1y ago

My previous company, Parallel Systems is working on this. The solution looks a lot like trucks on rail: individual locomotion, so you get the flexibility of trucking, but the energy efficiency and automation ease of rail. With modern braking, you can stop a Parallel vehicle about as fast as a truck. There's a ton of rail that's underutilized, particularly in Metro areas, so you almost get a fresh highway for free. Vehicles can platoon or separate at will.

TrainedMonkey 1y ago
Always upvote electric trains!
seanmcdirmid 1y ago
I’m not seeing much rail that is under utilized out here int he west, if anything it is over subscribed. The energy savings in having one or two diesel electrics pull a long chain of cars is substantial, I get the feeling that if you just put trucks on rails you’d lose a lot of that. You also need to be more conservative with elevation changes, right of ways, and turning radiuses, so lots of tunneling and viaducting ala the Chinese HSR network. You are still probably going to have a lot of roads since rubber works better for going up and down, twisty turns, and can deal last mile stuff flexibly. Not everyplace is going to be as simple as the island of sodor.
- bgnn 1y ago
  most of Europe north of the alps is fairly flat in elevation. Railways are oversubscribed because they are not expanded enough, defunded if you like, to expand and fund the highway network. It is stupid to travel thousands of kilometers by trucks. It's inefficient, expensive and nit scalable. Currently we use mostly huge container ships and empty them with trucks, absolutely insane. There's quite a bit of river boat activity in Europe luckily, which is great if electrified. Though the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not didtated by economics.
  - tim333 1y ago
    >the sorry state of the railways is just human-made and not dictated by economics I'm not sure about the world in general but I've followed the HS2 line in the UK and the problems are pretty much economic. We have a couple of north south lines along the UK but they are basically at capacity so the idea was to build another and make it high speed but it's proved incredibly expensive, partly due to property ownership and housing along the line and partly due to environmental regulations leading to £100m shelters to avoid disturbing a few bats. (bat thing https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/25/environment-secretary-lambasts-hs2s-100m-bat-shelter https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jan/25/environment-...) Estimates for building it have gone from £38bn in 2011 to £136bn in 2023. They are still building some of it but brexit britain doesn't have that many spare £136bns lying around. https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/3088/economics/pros-and-cons-of-high-speed-rail-hs2/ https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/3088/economics/pros-and-c...
    - bgnn 1y ago
      Yeah the big infra projects in the West somehow became like this. It's a very different story in Asia though.

wahern 1y ago

They can all be changed, but then the capital costs for rail infrastructure would balloon and diminish the 3-5x cost advantage rail has over trucking. The modern rail business is structured (physically and, especially, financially) to squeeze every last cent out of existing infrastructure with minimal investment. I doubt that will change significantly anytime soon. The public road infrastructure subsidizes trucking (even after factoring in use and fuel taxes), and perhaps more importantly trucking companies don't have to contend with legal hurdles like land acquisition--the government handles that. (Land acquisition delays have been the biggest barrier for CAHSR.)

stackskipton 1y ago

>The problem with railroad is exactly the other side of this: that you can't trivially and automatically detach a single car at any point. I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail. Because companies have invested in JIT because low cost of trucking, an industry which is heavily subsidized (https://www.cbo.gov/publication/50049 https://www.cbo.gov/publication/50049), allows it. If trucking costs reflected their true cost, railroad would look a ton more attractive along with not doing JIT.

cycomanic 1y ago

The bigger issue is that roads are immensely subsidised compared to rail. Even on private roads that are completely covered by usage charges, trucks pay maybe a factor of 2-10 more than cars, however they cause about 40000 times more wear (let's even disregard how they also cause disproportionately more traffic...). Obviously this calculation becomes even worse if we consider that most roads are subsidised by all tax payers. Trucks would be much less profitable (especially for long haul traffic) if they would have to cover their actual cost to society. But they are just another example of privatising profits and socialising the costs.

seanmcdirmid 1y ago
Are you just talking about the USA? I would bet that rail in Europe and Eastern Asia is also pretty subsidized, as much as or even more so than roads.
- crote 1y ago
  Rather the opposite in Europe, actually. The European rail network is strongly liberalized, starting with the First Railway Directive 91/440/EEC. The physical infrastructure now usually falls under a state-owned enterprise, which provides access to any company wanting to use it, at a fair and non-discriminatory pricing. In practice this means that the usage fees have to pay for all upkeep and maintenance, with occasional cash injections from the government for things like constructing new railway lines. Importantly, this infrastructure company is expected to either have a neutral result, or run a profit: the railway users have to pay the true costs of operating the railway. The roads are a different story altogether. They are owned, constructed, and maintained directly by the government itself. Road upkeep comes out of the general budget - just like education or defense. Road users pay via a vehicle tax and/or fuel tax, but there is zero expectation that those taxes pay for the full cost of the road network. After all, you profit from the presence of a road network - even if you don't drive a car yourself.
  - seanmcdirmid 1y ago
    France has fairly high tolls on roads and Switzerland has that sticker you have to buy to use the expressways. Japanese rail companies must get some sort of subsidy on tracks, the passenger rail system runs at a loss and only turns a profit on renting space in train stations. Roads are also heavily tolled (similar in China).

pcarolan 1y ago

You can. It’s called multimodal and basically is just picking a shipping container off a train car with a crane and putting it on a truck platform or a ship. 1 platform supports all modes.

rekenaut 1y ago
This works great for finished consumer goods, but bulk cargo that makes up a significant portion of both rail and truck traffic like grain, liquid products (crude oil, gasoline, vinyl chloride), ore, etc. have very specialized transports that don't work well with the existing multimodal system.
- mtnGoat 1y ago
  Most of those have their own specialized transport systems that work well already though.

greenavocado 1y ago

Intramotev is working on autonomous rail car retrofits to make the cars in the middle move on their own to their destinations.

skissane 1y ago

> I know businesses that literally have an old railroad branch line right up to their door, but they can't actually order anything meaningful via rail. A century ago they would have found it at lot easier: if you wanted to send just a few cars to the back of a factory, many rail operators would have found a way to make it happen, and at a reasonable price too - now they’ll tell you the service is uneconomic to provide, unless you charter an entire locomotive for $$$$

reustle 1y ago

The problem with rail is that we allowed the national rail network to be privatized. Maybe we’ll see some privatized lanes on interstate highways in the next 15 years.

virtue3 1y ago

railroad maintenance is also incredibly expensive. Especially compared to when you can offload the road maintenance to the state / rest of the population.

ndsipa_pomu 1y ago
As repairing roads costs so much, it annoys me that we don't make some attempt at penalising the heaviest vehicles. As road damage is roughly proportional to the fourth power of weight, it would make a lot of sense to prevent logistics companies from just using the largest vehicles that they can - it should work out costing less if loads are broken up and delivered via multiple, lighter vehicles. However, as the public bears the cost, it means that logistics companies will just look at their expenses (drivers' wages, fuel etc).