this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2023
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Someone should design an armored train that can be used by the military.
First, the US would need to have more locomotive manufacturers than you can fit in a single sprinter van. We've abandoned rail so thoroughly that we have to have foreign companies manufacture most of our rolling stock these days.
We’ve abandoned passenger rail, but not freight rail. The USA consistently ranks as one of the top users of freight rail (and by many metrics it is the top user of freight rail). The issue is that most American cities outside of the northeast corridor tend to be far enough apart that you are going to be better off flying. High speed rail hasn’t really caught on yet, but I suspect in another 15 years it’s going to be lot more common now that it’s starting to look commercially viable
We have just about the dumbest freight rail operators, though. They care so much about cost curves that they regularly turn down highly profitable expansions because it would make the line go down. Being highly profitable isn't good enough when the line isn't going up. It also makes them absolutely allergic to capital expenses, not to mention how extreme their cost-cutting measures are (especially re: labor) even at the expense of safety. Cutting $10 of cost by rejecting $20 of new business is a bargain in the eyes of these morons.
Not to mention the pure madness of the track & right-of-way being privately owned. That shit is just bonkers.
I wonder how much worse our rail mode share would look if you did a comparison of countries without including unit trains. I suspect very, very much worse.
Also average rolling stock age is what, 20 years? And there's still units from the first days of modern roller bearings in service? Yeesh.
I am not at all expert in the matter, but aren't freight rates heavily regulated? That would likely put a damper on expansion -- if you can't easily increase price in response to demand, the default strategy will be to milk your existing resources for every drop. Any expansion will detract from profit margin.
I wouldn't say that at all. I would describe it as the opposite, an unregulated hellscape.
They build and maintain their own tracks at their own discretion except when the public steps in to fund a particular project. There are rules about operating their right-of-way... many of which they have a standard practice of completely ignoring and nobody does anything about it, especially when it comes to the law that they give passenger rail preference.
They mostly can set their own prices, with only market competition controlling what they set them to. The STB is pretty toothless even when there is a complaint of anti-competitive behavior.
Outside of a small number of high-volume passenger corridors, they have complete freedom to set their own schedules. In the last decade, they've started increasingly operating trains unscheduled and calling it "precision scheduled rail". In actual practice, PSR is just running the longest trains they physically can and having them leave the yard exactly when they're full and not according to any clock. They theoretically need to show right of way to passenger service, but their trains have gotten so big and long that they are physically unable to show right of way and so they just don't.
The mandatory safety rules are pretty minimum, especially when compared to things like air travel. Enforcement of Environmental Protection rules and post-incident safety reviews are pitifully enforced.
They're also the only private industry specifically exempt from the NLRA. Just the rail industry has a largely weaker set of worker protections than every other American gets.
I'm sure I could keep coming up with more examples. But as far as I've ever seen, the only thing stopping them from expanding service is an unwillingness to do so. Regular Old Market bullshit short-term financial goals are preferred even if they are not sustainable and long-term sustainability is unacceptable because it would hurt short-term financial goals.
The industry doesn't really need more regulation though. Because what it needs is nationalization, at least of the track and ROWs.
Just in case you're not aware, armored trains are (or were) a thing. In the US they were used from the US civil war to early in the cold war (at the end there to transport nuclear weapons).
In the rest of the world... the most recent use is by Russia in their invasion of Ukraine.