How do you feel about resurrecting a nation wide train transportation system.

I believe that Trains are far more efficient at hauling large loads than trucks are. I'd like to see more train traffic, from an environmental impact and a road safety point of view. America's highways and interstates are packed, while millions of miles of train tracks go unused.

 

Maybe up north unused they get used plenty down here, from car transport, commercial goods, to military, at my folks houe they have a long i.e. 50-125 car train pass every five minutes going one way in the morning and the other way at night. they go all day all night. weekends they only come through every few hours.

and this is on one of 6 major railways leading into New Orleans

 

Actually, the railroads are facing being overrun with traffic. Right now, we need a larger infrastructure to handle the growing traffic. Either that, or stop shipping stuff in LCL (less than carload) aka containers, and ship everything in bulk. An average 100ton boxcar has a tare weight of 15tons, while a double stack container car can handle only 60 tons, with a total empty tare of 24 tons, with two 48' containers.
Why the containers? Convenience. Much easier to just load the whole box onto a truck, than to trans-load a boxcar to a truck.
FWIW, the only rail lines not being used are what wouldn't see any additional traffic if trucks were gone. Most of them, the industries they serve are gone.

 

I heard somewhere that OTR trucks are responsible for 80% of the pollution. While I understand that its not really possible to have a country without them, is there something more efficient than this?

My dad hauls US Mail OTR, per goverment contract. Its a terrible waste, 90% of the time, his truck is between 5 and 15% capacity.

 

My mom grew up in Alaska before it was the 49th state.... just a territory.

She told me a story about a man in Anchorage who went into one of the local stores and wanted to buy an axe. The storeowner told the man how much the axe was and the customer complained that he could buy the same axe from the Sear catalog (no Sears store in Alaska in those days) for half that price.

The storeowner said he would match the price of Sears and wrapped the axe up and took the mans money.

After he took the mans money the store owner threw the axe behind the counter and said, "now you have to wait three months to get it" (the time it would have taken for Sears to send it to Alaska in those days)

Moral of the story is people want things NOW, always have and always will.




I wish Alaska had a railroad system in place that would connect it to the lower 48. If memory serves me correct track would have to be built all the way from Fairbanks to Whitehorse Canada.

 

No need to resurrect it. It's alive and well. Many companies either don't need the type of quantity that it takes to ship by rail, aren't willing to wait for rail service (It takes much longer than shipping by truck), or are in a location where they are not served by rail.

For those reasons you will always see tons of trucks on the road.

 

I agree that the nation-wide rail system is doing well for hauling freight, it is the passenger system that needs to be addressed.

Go anywhere in Europe and there is an integrated system that allows both freight and pax to go from inter-country all the way down the smallest towns.

The US used to have a system (you can still see the abandoned railbeds at least throughout PA), from the glory days of the '30s, where rails served almost every town. Then the automobile, led by GM, lured Americans away from the trains and into personal vehicles. When Eisenhower started the Interstate highway system, the final nail was driven into the pax train system. We still haven't recovered to this day, as we all prefer our POV's and more and more roads continue to be built.

The only way the pax rails will ever become a viable transportation alternative is to build a system that emulates Europe's, where almost all the lines are electrified and vastly more efficient. As much as our gov't doles out to the airlines and highways, I'd like to see a similar (if not higher) amount dedicated to constructing new rail lines; first with major inter-city routes (like Philadelphia-Pittsburgh) that would compete with the airlines. The amount of fuel burned by the medium-range airlines on a daily basis is astronomical!

For long hauls, nothing beats the airlines. Medium routes is where the rail system should be developed (resurrected?). The short hauls will probably be the automobile's for many years to come.

 

This country is very large and so emulating Europe is not a viable option. Passenger rail travel is pretty much going or gone. Too expensive and time consuming.

As far as replacing the trucking, it would take a lot of track to come close to servicing the same area and take on the Teamsters at your peril.

 

I think the freight services have all the business that it is economically viable for them to get.

I don't want to subsidize freight RRs like we are doing with passenger service. Amtrack seems to be another bottomless pit to shovel money into. Wasn't Amtrack supposed to be econmically independant by now but they recently went back to the gov't and asked for more money.

And I never believe statistics about pollution.

 

I have trains up my nose around here, all hauling freight.

 

The difference between European passenger trains and US ones is that -most- of their systems are interurbans, versus our current long-distance system. Granted, Europe has some fine long-haul trains, but the majority of their ridership is less than 50 miles. We used to have an interurban system in this country, but between the above mentioned "I want it now" attitude, and cheap gas, that went away. In Europe, a densely packed region combines with gas prices averaging $5 a gallon to make rail a viable alternative. Here, people don't want to wait a half hour to get on a railcar, go shopping, then wait another half hour to go home, when they can get in their car, laugh at the people waiting for the train, then laugh again when they get home, and the others are still waiting.
As far as the interstate system being a cause for the railroads decline, like I said above, most passengers ride long-haul trains here, so about the only passengers it stole were those that commute a short distance to work (10 miles or so).

 

If we had a cross country two or three hundred mile per hour system, more people would use it, it would become cheaper, and it would be efficient.

 

Business travel supports the airlines. No businesspeople are going to take trains even at two hundred miles an hour between the coasts. Too time consuming and will never compete with air travel when you add the cost of meals and sleeping compartments. Now between Los Angeles and San Francisco or maybe even Seattle you may have a winner at 200mph. Certainly between Los Angeles and Las Vegas you could make a "bullet" train work.

 

they did the high speed train thing up here in Boston.Go's from Boston to Newyork to Dc.Been doing good in tickets sales too since 911.

 

Amtrak's Acela isn't really "high speed" by international standards. It tops out at around 125. Actually, it was a really, really stupid move on the part of Amtrak. The AEM-7's that pull the standard trains up there are capable of over 130, and can out-pull nearly anything. So there boxy- put a sleeker nose on them and go.
IIRC, there was a wreck on the northeast corrider in 87, where a Conrail train was on the wrong track, and collided head-on with an Amtrak AEM-7 pulling 10 metroliners, going 128mph.