That would be a curious comparison point. I feel like every discussion of rail in the US always turns into pointing and laughing at how bad the US is at rail because it's viewed through a passenger lens, completely ignoring how much rail is used for freight.
My impression is that a lot of the rest of the world has much better passenger rail, but uses freight rail quite a bit less. I wonder if part of it is due to the inverse reason to the US. Amtrak often complains that it gets sidelined (literally) because of freight usage of the same track. Is freight rail usage in, say, Germany, lower than the US because of the dominance of passenger rail?
I assume it would be less about the dominance of passanger displacing freight and more about scale/distance. Germany is smaller than Texas (half the area). How often is it economical to put stuff on trains before loading them on trucks again for distances sub 1000km?
Oh sure, but the "haha the US isn't even a third world country with its train system" people already are ignoring scale/density when they're laughing at the US rail systems. I'm past even bothering dealing with that bad faith take.
My curiosity is if the US has just traded off having better passenger rail for better freight rail, and if that's maybe a somewhat environmentally justified choice. How much more freight is going by truck in Europe because of the bias towards rail for passengers, and how does that compare to US people traveling by car when train would be better?
The usual metric is ton-kilometers of freight, not gross tonnage. Going by gross tonnage alone overweights the impact of last-kilometer freight, which is almost always by road.
Measured by ton-kilometers, the EU moves about 5% of freight by rail, whereas the US moves about 28% of freight by rail.
Intermodal (hauling shipping containers for trucks to take last-kilometer) is by far America’s biggest freight type. Something like 80% or more of consumer goods go through intermodal or road on their way to distribution centers that load it onto trucks that deliver it to the store (or your home).
For rail alone it looks like 50/50. 50% is resources and dry goods, oil and gas, and the rest is consumer goods, boxcar, flatcar, intermodal. [1]
But the density in the US is not _that_ different. Sure if you take the average over the whole country or states like Texas or Arizona then you end up with numbers. But the north east of the US is comparably densely populated to Western Europe. And even parts of California/the west coast are similarly densely populated. Albeit with larger separations between population centers. Which, as a German, does not sound so bad, given that our high-speed rail has to stop every 30mins because the next city just isn’t that far away.
Really it is a (maybe unintentional) decision not to use trains for passenger rail.
On the other hand. The density of population (and thereby logistic) centers in Western and Central Europe makes freight trains much less useful. From Germany you can reach all of Europe in basically 2 days. And that’s already stretching what you’ll need to reach in practice. And then you add the expense of getting the load to a train station and away from it again and you basically never end up with an easy or obvious advantage for the rail system. What you see here quite often is that a single company/factory fills up a whole train (think car carrier or chemical transport). In these cases at least one end of the journey is typically directly linked to the rail system and the other end is probably a port. And that’s before you take into account that a useful expansion of the rail system requires coordination between multiple governments (there was/is a plan to link Rotterdam to Venice by high volume train connections. AFAIK this is still limited by a lack of expansion of a short part in northern Germany)
So yes. There is a bias towards passenger rail, both for operational (passenger rail is much faster to accelerate/decelerate) and political (passengers sometimes punish politicians for delays, freight doesn’t) reasons. But even without that. The geography and industrial makeup doesn’t produce the same kind of advantages as in the US. So it would still be used less
> How much more freight is going by truck in Europe because of the bias towards rail for passengers, and how does that compare to US people traveling by car when train would be better?
Europe moved lots of freight by rail. But building of motorways shifted a lot of freight to roads. If your company moves just a few trucks of goods per week across Europe, road will be faster and cheaper.
Rail is now used mostly for bulk goods, but increasing conterisation is enabling easier use of rail even for smaller shipments (less than a full train length, which in Europe is max 700 m).
Americans passed on passenger rail due to more modern inventions like the automobile. Being able to “drive yourself” was the ultimate freedom. Trucking (and the interstate highway system) post WWII made it so trucks can get to every major city without hassle. This was because of the rail system being clogged up and some railroads failing (merger). People are starting to come back around to passenger rail service as more younger adults forgo the traditional driving right of passage. Sun rail in Florida for example. Metro subways. Etc. For longer distances, we have Frontier Airlines which is like the Greyhound Bus of the sky. Tickets are dirt cheap and you get what you pay for. Americans also designed their cities to be driven and not walked so we kinda went all in on “Ford” early.
It is actually a problem in Germany that high-speed trains too often share tracks with slower passenger and freight trains. Other countries like Japan put their high-speed trains on completely separate tracks.
It's arguably the problem with any attempt at high speed rail in the US. Or even low-speed passenger rail. There's so much freight moving on the rails that there's just not much slack in the system for things not running on time.
As the parent says, the solution would be to add dedicated high-speed rails, but then you loop back to the US density issues. How fast would the Acela have to be for it to justify the price you'd have to charge to ever come close to paying back the cost to add a whole dedicated train line between Boston and Washington DC?
>How fast would the Acela have to be for it to justify the price you'd have to charge to ever come close to paying back the cost to add a whole dedicated train line between Boston and Washington DC?
No faster than it already is, I would think. The experience is SO much nicer than taking an airplane that a little extra time is worth it. Don't forget how much time is wasted in airplanes just getting to and from the airports and waiting for security checks and sitting on the tarmac waiting to taxi. Trains travel directly between city centers with almost no waiting time.
The Acela doesn't really need to be much faster, though it'd be nice; it just needs to be cheaper and more frequent.
Amtrak owns most (all?) of the NEC track between New York and Boston. Most other routes are freight train owned and Amtrak has issues. Though the freights claim the issue is Amtrak is late for their assigned times and once that happens they lose priority, if Amtrak was on time they claim that they would let Amtrak through on time. (one fright that doesn't let Amtrak through on time will cascade to being late for all transfers, so the freights can overall be right and still wrong just because of the one exception) I don't know how to evaluate this claim.
My understanding is that the freight trains now are really long, and there's few places to pull off the tracks for such long trains, so the timetables are really tight for when trains can pass each other.
This goes to what I was talking about in my initial post. Right now, part of why Amtrak is bad in the US is because we're getting pretty efficient use of the same rails for freight purposes. The ways around this would either be to somehow legally force freight to fully be lower priority than passenger, which presumably raises prices/lowers efficiency of freight on the rails or to build a mostly disjoint system of rails for passenger only.
The costs required to build a passenger only system is high and the density of the US makes me question if it would get the use needed to be viable. In the meantime then, is it net positive for the US to prioritize freight use over passenger? Even if we gave passenger traffic maximum priority, would it defer enough flights to offset the freight efficiency losses?
Passengers and freight have different constraints and so don't mix well on rail. We should build separate rail for each. Make them compatible rail but that is for emergencies you can mix not normal operations. (2am maintenance windows count as a good reason to mix)
Don't be fooled by population density, the western states and Alaska have a lot of nothing and bring the density down. You can find overlays of France and the Midwest that have similar populations. Overall there are lots of potentially great rail routes east of the Mississippi, and along the west coast. (But of course only if you invest in local transit, otherwise everyone may as well drive as they will need their car when they get there.
I'm not getting "fooled" by anything. I've spent most of my life in various parts of the Eastern US. The problem, to a big degree is that the parts of the US with the density for rail are both already big freight areas with major ports (LA, NYC, Baltimore, Boston, Savannah, Seattle) and have the good land already taken for freight rails, and also, because they're dense areas, are exceedingly difficult to find space to run new rails in that go to places people actually want to go.
We're past the era where we could just put a highway or rail line through the poorest neighborhood of minorities we can find, pay them all $10 for their land, and pretend it's a net good for the country. Without some truly insane government intervention that is both unlikely to happen, and probably shouldn't happen, I don't see how we'd add a full new rail system.
Amtrak pays $145m a year to freight rail companies like CSX and UP to use their rails for passengers. This was the bargain struck for allowing deregulation and privatization of rail in the US. They own the rails between NY and Boston but everywhere else, they have to pay the toll booth.
If you want to see the real Railways of North America, check out these interactive maps [1]
I think Japan only does that for weird legacy reasons- freight and slower passenger trains run on 1067 mm gauge tracks, while the Shinkansen network is standard (1435 mm) gauge.
I don't think so. There's simply too much traffic on the shinkansen lines to be able to mix slower and/or freight trains on the same lines. On the Tokaido line between Tokyo and Osaka, trains run every 7 minutes (IIRC); you can't have a freight train sharing a track with a bullet train service that has trains that close together.
My impression is that a lot of the rest of the world has much better passenger rail, but uses freight rail quite a bit less. I wonder if part of it is due to the inverse reason to the US. Amtrak often complains that it gets sidelined (literally) because of freight usage of the same track. Is freight rail usage in, say, Germany, lower than the US because of the dominance of passenger rail?