I worked in this industry for many years. The railroads were always hyper-focused on increasing throughput. I left the industry about ten years ago, but back then derailments were considered the most significant risk to average network speed. At the time, average network speed was roughly correlated with profit. The rule of thumb was a 1 mph increase in average network speed was worth about $100MM in profit. That was 15 years ago.
There were a lot of systems in place to monitor rolling stock:
- Wheel Impact Detectors
- Hotbox detectors
- Acoustic bearing detectors
- Truck performance detectors
To name just a few. There were also efforts to monitor the railway infrastructure. The things I remember:
- Rail stress management (rails need to be under the right amount of stress, which of course varies with temperature)
- Top of rail friction management
- Rail profile management (the name eludes me, but the idea is you want the interface between the rail and wheel to meet certain parameters)
I worked on the rolling stock side measuring wheel impacts, overloads, imbalances, and a handful of more esoteric metrics. One of the outputs of these measurements was a train consist. For each of our locations we were able to build up the consist of the entire train (which was a fun CS problem in itself).
I stared at a lot of consists over the years. In North America I never saw anything longer than about 100 cars and 2-4 locos. However, in Northwest Australia they routinely ran 300 car trains meeting the description in this article. But, the reason they could get away with that is they were running a straight shot from the heart of the Pilbara to one of the port towns on the north west shoulder (Karratha and Port Hedland).
I need to check in with my old colleagues and see if things have changed. It wouldn't surprise me if train lengths have gotten longer, but I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on average network speed and thus profit.
As someone mentioned elsewhere on this thread, there are a lot of single track corridors. It's bad enough when one train has to sidetrack. It's really bad when a train takes out the whole corridor. These aren't packet switched networks. It's not easy to reroute. And it's really expensive and difficult to lay new rail.
They have and it is slowing them down, but they're using different metrics to define and track productivity. If you're interested in hearing about it this guy has a pretty good perspective on the overall issues:
> I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on average network speed and thus profit.
That would be true in a non-monopolistic situation, but it's well known from the investor side that what the railroads are doing around rates is driven by collusion and lack of regulation.
CSX stock was at $8 in 2016 and is at ~$33.50 now. There is no amount of throughput increase that could drive those financial results. You could lever up your cap structure with tons of debt (even 6-7x) and not even get close to this kind of return on equity.
Throughput doesn't matter when you have pricing power; in fact, abrupt drops in throughput make people even more desperate so that they can raise the freight rates even more.
I also live in Ames, Iowa, where the author resides. I live less than a mile from the track segment he is talking about, owned and operated by Union Pacific. While I'm pretty skeptical of this author's individual concerns given the twice-removed nature of the statements from their "source", trains have unmistakably gotten longer during my 15 years near these tracks, and they are moving faster.
A hazmat situation impacting only a one-mile radius around the tracks could effect up to 30 to 40 thousand people here. I interned for Union Pacific while in college, and yes, the company will state that safety is their number one priority, but it was very clear that their business was to profit by optimizing every single little part of their business for maximum efficiency. The company has an open distain for regulations, especially safety-related regulations, and did not shy away from sharing those views internally. I would not be at all surprised if crews are being abused, and safety sidelined, for the sake of maximizing profit.
> For myself: I believe it is Wall Street greed and investor demands. 16,450-foot trains weighing more than 42 million pounds are gratifying someone with power. Someone who wants it all and more. I believe it is those few, who live nowhere near here, who own their own private islands and jets. This is far removed from laissez faire economics, or the neo liberal model, coming out of the 1980s.
This was an incredibly common economic outlook coming from the Midwest and South. It's both tickling and sad to hear. I do love the way this was written, and those PSR trains sound like a nightmare. When I worked the network engineering desk for a Class I railroad we took derails seriously to the extent of pulling anyone who made changes to infra to the dispatchers themselves. That wasn't that long ago either but it sounds like a lot has changed.
Help me understand why Wall Street greed would prefer trains that derail to ones that don’t? (The machismo argument, sure, I get, though it’s unsubstantiated; one could just as easily try to pin it on urban environmentalists.)
This part stood out to me also, but mostly for the fact that it seemed poorly substantiated.
The fact of the matter is BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific are majority owned by institutional investors (Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street, Capital World Investors, etc.) Those institutions are managing these investments on behalf of large capital pools–insurance company float, pension funds, 401ks, etc. Who does all that capital belong to (or who are its beneficiaries)? Regular Americans. Very likely included? The author himself!
While I have no particular interest or knowledge of the rail industry, I am moved by the issues highlighted by the author. However, I think his call to conspiratorial instincts ("a few rich people are working us to death to fund their nth private island") is bad, dangerous logic.
They are especially a nightmare when you get stuck at a crossing with no other way around them (no bridges). I sat at a crossing for over 15 minutes waiting for a extremely long train to pass.
It gets even worse when you live near a place that has the train come to a compelete stop so that cars can be unhitched, taken off to a side rail, then have the engine reverse to connect back to the rest of the cars, for it to finally slowly pull away. The small town I lived it was forced to build a second fire department as the only one would get stuck behind trains delaying help. They evenutally built a new access road with a bridge over the tracks.
The government data I am able to find does not seem to support the idea that there is a massive (or any) increase in derailments. And this letter never provides any data supporting the premise either.
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there were 1,056 train derailments (both cargo and passenger) in the US in 2021. This was the lowest number in the dataset going back to 1975.
Ten years ago, it was 1,470 derailments. In the year 2000, it was over 2,000 derailments.
In reality, the data suggest we are on a strong downward trend in derailments per year.
Is this government data wrong? Or is this writer trying out a career in fiction?
During the first covid summer, with a friend, we studied two interesting points for the future: oil consumption relative to GDP (irrelevant here), and what is sometime called demographic dividend, or how infrastructure spending during time of growth will allow an aging population an easier life in the future. Since we thought western countries to be all the same, we studied France and its infrastructure cost, then China, then the other Brics, plus Turkey and some ex-colonial nation that got f*cked off their own demographic dividend by the west.
What we are sure off: maintenance is immensly cheaper than construction, three to five order of magnitude in most cases, and improvement upon existing infrastructure is one to two order of magnitude cheaper. From this, we also concluded that subsidizing an almost empty line on the west coast during more than twenty year actually was a net positive operation for the French government, and killing small train tracks is in 99% of case a mistake.
My really friendly advice to americans, whatever their political leaning: do not kill your rail, improve on it even. This will be a net positive for your country, even if atm it seems like it is loosing you money. You can't afford to not maintain your infrastructure, or to forget about it.
Speaking with railroader friends changed my mind on train unions.
To an outsider, they sound terribly unreasonable, but speaking with people in the trenches has made me a believer in these unions, for whatever that is worth.
Could you give examples of any kind? At the end you say "for whatever that is worth", but its worthiness is low given there are no specifics and I don't know you.
This calls for (not really) malicious compliance. There is a phone number at all train crossings (at least in my state) to call and let them know if there are issues or if a train made you wait too long. The amount of time you can be made to wait at a crossing varies by state. Find out that time, and call the number posted at the crossing or look it up in advance and complain every time your wait violates the law/rules. You will get train size reduced. Get everyone you know to call in and enforce the rules. I call every time I have to wait longer than the rule.
> A fellow engineer passed along information from another engineer, who I have never met, Mike, 17 years an engineer, like me, with a degree, like me (art, English), which has led to writing this body.
Am I reading this right? The content of this article is hearsay twice removed?
Rumors aren't admissible as court evidence. But rumors are worth looking into, they might have insights into communities we otherwise are ignoring.
If railroad engineers have a well known issue, such as the sudden loss of engineer/conductor skills due to retirement and/or quitting for other jobs, that's something that can be verified by other railroad engineers.
We all know that last year was "The Great retirement". I can imagine that a large number of skilled people have left the workforce... and their replacements are going to have to learn all of the problems and take years to retrain to their level.
The genesis may have been hearsay but the claim itself is verifiable. Are trains of the size he is describing derailing on a higher frequency? Are train lengths exceeding the safety margins of the yards and equipment?
Hearsay can be a valuable tool in prompting that process of verification.
When his bosses come after him for being a dirty scumbag killjoy (they won't use those exact words, but whatever words they use mean that), he can point to that sentence and say "I was just passing information, that's what I'm supposed to do - see employee handbook section X" (or similar).
Talk with locomotive operators, read their feeds on Twitter. This shit has been circulating all over the world, even here in Germany we have issues of that kind (not the massive length of the trains or double stacking because both is illegal here, but how staff is treated).
>The Surface Transportation Board already knows this; the FRA knows this, the shippers know this; the car owners/lessees know this, the executives know this; and certainly the front line knows all too well
If all these people know about it, why haven't we heard of this before?
Trains derailing regularly is consider acceptable and to be expected, infrastructure being tasked with jobs for which it was not designed, calls for more resources ignored, policy makers prioritizing profit over safe and efficient transportation of goods.
This sounds like something from a fictional dystopian novel.
My time in rail was all related to positive train control (PTC), which is a safety overlay that stops the train before anything bad happens, at least in theory. The railroads generally despised the idea because it would slow down overall network velocity. It was only when it was mandated that they really got started with it beyond science projects.
I'm pretty far from rail these days, so I know I'm out of date. But as I recall, the prediction algorithms didn't work as well with distributed power (locomotive in the middle of the train, almost required for trains this long). So it's entirely possible that these super-long trains aren't able to predict unsafe conditions. I also vaguely recall they didn't predict anything to do with buff and draft forces (or other in-train forces) that could lead to the kind of derailments the article discussed.
This seems odd given the safety culture of railroads (every meeting I attended as a vendor, even if it was just a handful of people who had known each other for years, started with a safety briefing that included evacuation instructions and who was CPR qualified, along with tripping hazards and such). But around the time I was leaving the industry, CSX was spending lots of millions of dollars to bring the (now-late) Hunter Harrison in to implement Precision Scheduled Railroading. That led to a rush for other roads to implement it, to the point where I believe BNSF is the only Class I that does not do PSR. And PSR is all about reducing costs, cutting manpower, mothballing locomotives—which absolutely could lead to the sort of stuff this article is about. And, because it is (at least was) so fashionable in the industry, a road moving away from PSR (whether announced or just in practice) would likely see a stock price plunge and a CEO change.
Makes me wonder if, stuck between a rock and a hard place (ballast and the rail?), the roads are hoping the STB steps in and makes a rule to stop their game of chicken.
People are also leaving because the schedules they have to keep are unpredictable and horrible. My brother-in-law worked for a bit as an engineer, and as a person low on the totem pole, got bad assignments (all of the more senior people took the decent ones) and often didn't have a schedule until a day or two before the train was scheduled to leave. It hurt his social life substantially, because he couldn't plan on anything. Then COVID hit, and even though the company has hurting for people to run the trains, he was furloughed "until further notice" with no potential return date. Honestly, the companies are doing this to themselves with poor management.
To run even a, say, “simple” traditional grain train—6,700 feet, 28 million pounds—through the ice fog of a late February night, applying the physics of the horsepower and weight to a landscape you cannot see, but must know—every inch of, every hill and dip, every crossing, every signal mast is something no office worker can imagine.
Why are train engineers expected to know every nuance of the route, when it should be trivial to do fine-grained GPS maps of the tracks and provide moving map displays that could show every hill and dip, every crossing, every signal mast. This shouldn't be left up to the memory of the engineers.
There's already automation that could enforce speed limits, but for some reason it relies on track-side equipment so isn't universally available:
The advancements in equipment to clean up after a large and/or complicated derailments contributes to these "acceptable" number of derailments. This includes roadbed, rail, and specialized equipment to move cars and locomotives. There are even 3rd party companies that specialize in railroad derailments.
There are several hot takes on the accuracy of various numbers (train derailment, for example), but that is not the most striking point of the article. The article is raising alarms about labor shortages and the effect on safety and deliverability of large loads (monster trains). It is another data point to bolster the idea that the US supply chain is under a lot of stress.
So if I understand this correctly, shorter trains are better because when they derail they take down less cars? Or are super long trains harder to control in varied terrain? Both probably.
Shorter trains are better on a lot of metrics except the number of crews you need driving trains around, basically. Except that everything ends up taking longer with the longer train, so you have a bit of a false economy, although I'm guessing it's not false enough to make it undesirable.
To mention an issue that I don't think was well-touched upon in the article -- in a lot of places, you have single tracks running from point A to point B, with the occasional side track a train can park on to let another train past.
But these side tracks may only be a mile or so long -- what happens when two three-mile trains need to pass each other using a 1 mile side track? A fun puzzle, but not very fun to implement the solution in real time.
Based on my uninformed reading, these super trains are beyond what the existing rail infrastructure was designed for, and therefore are significantly more likely to derail, while also being more expensive to clean up when they do detail.
Long trains don't "exist" in a way - because the couplers can't hold the weight, so you take a number of shorter trains and mash them together, and then "drive" it like that. It results in all sorts of "fun" that means if everything works perfectly; you save the cost of a crew or two - if anything goes wrong you have a derailment or worse.
Longer trains derail much much easier. For example consider the "straight lining" phenomenon. Straight lining is a major cause for derailments. The straight lining forces are pretty much proportional to the weight of the cars behind the car that is subject to the straight lining forces.
- Shorter trains need less engines (or rather, they can be run with one or two locomotives). That means when one fails the conductor can immediately hear this and halt the train. When a mid- or end engine fails, it may escalate to catastrophic failure
- long trains have issues with brake apply speed - remember, train cars are dumb. No electricity, all they have (at least here in Europe) is one main brake line where the transmission speed is the speed of sound - that means, for a 700m long train a drop in pressure at the front is only registered after 2 seconds at the last carriage.
- long trains are a nightmare to shunt around. Not just because you have immense distance between the engine and the conductor at the end, but especially if the train has to run over a street level crossing. Old shunting yards simply were never estimated to run such long trains.
- long trains are a nightmare for residents along the lines for the same reason
- long and especially double stacked trains put up a hell of a lot more stress on the infrastructure than it was constructed for - remember again, this infra is sometimes well over a century old!
Shorter trains are better because they are lighter and easier to control. The additional cars don't just make derailment worse, it causes the derailments to happen at all.
> I have given up enormous amounts of home and family life for insurance, for a living wage, for a trade that is respectable.
I think this is the problem - paying people in respect that you can't make a meal of. And what does the living wage mean? That you can come back from work, eat a meal and have somewhere to sleep?
It's interesting that people are happy to be taxed to teeth, having very little in exchange and do nothing about the fact that corporations their work for don't pay much and if their bosses pay taxes, then it means they got lame accountants.
[+] [-] redshirtrob|3 years ago|reply
There were a lot of systems in place to monitor rolling stock:
- Wheel Impact Detectors
- Hotbox detectors
- Acoustic bearing detectors
- Truck performance detectors
To name just a few. There were also efforts to monitor the railway infrastructure. The things I remember:
- Rail stress management (rails need to be under the right amount of stress, which of course varies with temperature)
- Top of rail friction management
- Rail profile management (the name eludes me, but the idea is you want the interface between the rail and wheel to meet certain parameters)
I worked on the rolling stock side measuring wheel impacts, overloads, imbalances, and a handful of more esoteric metrics. One of the outputs of these measurements was a train consist. For each of our locations we were able to build up the consist of the entire train (which was a fun CS problem in itself).
I stared at a lot of consists over the years. In North America I never saw anything longer than about 100 cars and 2-4 locos. However, in Northwest Australia they routinely ran 300 car trains meeting the description in this article. But, the reason they could get away with that is they were running a straight shot from the heart of the Pilbara to one of the port towns on the north west shoulder (Karratha and Port Hedland).
I need to check in with my old colleagues and see if things have changed. It wouldn't surprise me if train lengths have gotten longer, but I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on average network speed and thus profit.
As someone mentioned elsewhere on this thread, there are a lot of single track corridors. It's bad enough when one train has to sidetrack. It's really bad when a train takes out the whole corridor. These aren't packet switched networks. It's not easy to reroute. And it's really expensive and difficult to lay new rail.
[+] [-] brnaftr361|3 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/Q0rk5tnrFqA?t=9300
[+] [-] engineeringwoke|3 years ago|reply
That would be true in a non-monopolistic situation, but it's well known from the investor side that what the railroads are doing around rates is driven by collusion and lack of regulation.
CSX stock was at $8 in 2016 and is at ~$33.50 now. There is no amount of throughput increase that could drive those financial results. You could lever up your cap structure with tons of debt (even 6-7x) and not even get close to this kind of return on equity.
Throughput doesn't matter when you have pricing power; in fact, abrupt drops in throughput make people even more desperate so that they can raise the freight rates even more.
[+] [-] mym1990|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] truffdog|3 years ago|reply
Throughput optimization destroying latency- sounds like bufferbloat!
[+] [-] sullivanmatt|3 years ago|reply
A hazmat situation impacting only a one-mile radius around the tracks could effect up to 30 to 40 thousand people here. I interned for Union Pacific while in college, and yes, the company will state that safety is their number one priority, but it was very clear that their business was to profit by optimizing every single little part of their business for maximum efficiency. The company has an open distain for regulations, especially safety-related regulations, and did not shy away from sharing those views internally. I would not be at all surprised if crews are being abused, and safety sidelined, for the sake of maximizing profit.
[+] [-] kodah|3 years ago|reply
This was an incredibly common economic outlook coming from the Midwest and South. It's both tickling and sad to hear. I do love the way this was written, and those PSR trains sound like a nightmare. When I worked the network engineering desk for a Class I railroad we took derails seriously to the extent of pulling anyone who made changes to infra to the dispatchers themselves. That wasn't that long ago either but it sounds like a lot has changed.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] next_xibalba|3 years ago|reply
The fact of the matter is BNSF, CSX, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacific are majority owned by institutional investors (Vanguard, Blackrock, State Street, Capital World Investors, etc.) Those institutions are managing these investments on behalf of large capital pools–insurance company float, pension funds, 401ks, etc. Who does all that capital belong to (or who are its beneficiaries)? Regular Americans. Very likely included? The author himself!
While I have no particular interest or knowledge of the rail industry, I am moved by the issues highlighted by the author. However, I think his call to conspiratorial instincts ("a few rich people are working us to death to fund their nth private island") is bad, dangerous logic.
[+] [-] dylan604|3 years ago|reply
They are especially a nightmare when you get stuck at a crossing with no other way around them (no bridges). I sat at a crossing for over 15 minutes waiting for a extremely long train to pass.
It gets even worse when you live near a place that has the train come to a compelete stop so that cars can be unhitched, taken off to a side rail, then have the engine reverse to connect back to the rest of the cars, for it to finally slowly pull away. The small town I lived it was forced to build a second fire department as the only one would get stuck behind trains delaying help. They evenutally built a new access road with a bridge over the tracks.
[+] [-] mwint|3 years ago|reply
I’m not up on railway lingo, can you expand on this?
[+] [-] mediaman|3 years ago|reply
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, there were 1,056 train derailments (both cargo and passenger) in the US in 2021. This was the lowest number in the dataset going back to 1975.
Ten years ago, it was 1,470 derailments. In the year 2000, it was over 2,000 derailments.
In reality, the data suggest we are on a strong downward trend in derailments per year.
Is this government data wrong? Or is this writer trying out a career in fiction?
Data: https://www.bts.gov/content/train-fatalities-injuries-and-ac...
[+] [-] orwin|3 years ago|reply
What we are sure off: maintenance is immensly cheaper than construction, three to five order of magnitude in most cases, and improvement upon existing infrastructure is one to two order of magnitude cheaper. From this, we also concluded that subsidizing an almost empty line on the west coast during more than twenty year actually was a net positive operation for the French government, and killing small train tracks is in 99% of case a mistake.
My really friendly advice to americans, whatever their political leaning: do not kill your rail, improve on it even. This will be a net positive for your country, even if atm it seems like it is loosing you money. You can't afford to not maintain your infrastructure, or to forget about it.
[+] [-] alkaloid|3 years ago|reply
To an outsider, they sound terribly unreasonable, but speaking with people in the trenches has made me a believer in these unions, for whatever that is worth.
[+] [-] rejectfinite|3 years ago|reply
? To someone in the EU, it sounds bizarre that they would NOT have a union.
[+] [-] whatisthiseven|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alliao|3 years ago|reply
I still can't get over how little view count this video got
[+] [-] mumblemumble|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lac-M%C3%A9gantic_rail_disaste...
https://ici.radio-canada.ca/recit-numerique/891/bande-dessin...
[+] [-] ROTMetro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cogman10|3 years ago|reply
They put up a 15 minute limit, but then put in "Oh, but so long as the train is doing 'SOMETHING' then that limit doesn't count".
[1] https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idstat/title49/t...
[+] [-] stickfigure|3 years ago|reply
> A fellow engineer passed along information from another engineer, who I have never met, Mike, 17 years an engineer, like me, with a degree, like me (art, English), which has led to writing this body.
Am I reading this right? The content of this article is hearsay twice removed?
[+] [-] dragontamer|3 years ago|reply
Rumors aren't admissible as court evidence. But rumors are worth looking into, they might have insights into communities we otherwise are ignoring.
If railroad engineers have a well known issue, such as the sudden loss of engineer/conductor skills due to retirement and/or quitting for other jobs, that's something that can be verified by other railroad engineers.
We all know that last year was "The Great retirement". I can imagine that a large number of skilled people have left the workforce... and their replacements are going to have to learn all of the problems and take years to retrain to their level.
[+] [-] zaphar|3 years ago|reply
Hearsay can be a valuable tool in prompting that process of verification.
[+] [-] mattbee|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _Algernon_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sophacles|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] hammock|3 years ago|reply
>The Surface Transportation Board already knows this; the FRA knows this, the shippers know this; the car owners/lessees know this, the executives know this; and certainly the front line knows all too well
If all these people know about it, why haven't we heard of this before?
[+] [-] DrBoring|3 years ago|reply
This sounds like something from a fictional dystopian novel.
[+] [-] cybadger|3 years ago|reply
My time in rail was all related to positive train control (PTC), which is a safety overlay that stops the train before anything bad happens, at least in theory. The railroads generally despised the idea because it would slow down overall network velocity. It was only when it was mandated that they really got started with it beyond science projects.
I'm pretty far from rail these days, so I know I'm out of date. But as I recall, the prediction algorithms didn't work as well with distributed power (locomotive in the middle of the train, almost required for trains this long). So it's entirely possible that these super-long trains aren't able to predict unsafe conditions. I also vaguely recall they didn't predict anything to do with buff and draft forces (or other in-train forces) that could lead to the kind of derailments the article discussed.
This seems odd given the safety culture of railroads (every meeting I attended as a vendor, even if it was just a handful of people who had known each other for years, started with a safety briefing that included evacuation instructions and who was CPR qualified, along with tripping hazards and such). But around the time I was leaving the industry, CSX was spending lots of millions of dollars to bring the (now-late) Hunter Harrison in to implement Precision Scheduled Railroading. That led to a rush for other roads to implement it, to the point where I believe BNSF is the only Class I that does not do PSR. And PSR is all about reducing costs, cutting manpower, mothballing locomotives—which absolutely could lead to the sort of stuff this article is about. And, because it is (at least was) so fashionable in the industry, a road moving away from PSR (whether announced or just in practice) would likely see a stock price plunge and a CEO change.
Makes me wonder if, stuck between a rock and a hard place (ballast and the rail?), the roads are hoping the STB steps in and makes a rule to stop their game of chicken.
[+] [-] sheepybloke|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] volkl48|3 years ago|reply
"These trains exceed the coupler and drawbar limits of the very cars themselves."
This seems like something that can be explicitly proven true or false, so I would be interested to see whether that claim is true on investigation.
[+] [-] Johnny555|3 years ago|reply
Why are train engineers expected to know every nuance of the route, when it should be trivial to do fine-grained GPS maps of the tracks and provide moving map displays that could show every hill and dip, every crossing, every signal mast. This shouldn't be left up to the memory of the engineers.
There's already automation that could enforce speed limits, but for some reason it relies on track-side equipment so isn't universally available:
https://www.businessinsider.com/amtrak-derail-washington-pos...
[+] [-] blueatlas|3 years ago|reply
Large wrecks can be cleaned up in 24 hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qkui84o6rNA
[+] [-] clarge1120|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phgn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DrBoring|3 years ago|reply
I was more subtle in my comment, hoping that someone would pick up the thread and point it out.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31315171
[+] [-] Finnucane|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mwattsun|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] saalweachter|3 years ago|reply
To mention an issue that I don't think was well-touched upon in the article -- in a lot of places, you have single tracks running from point A to point B, with the occasional side track a train can park on to let another train past.
But these side tracks may only be a mile or so long -- what happens when two three-mile trains need to pass each other using a 1 mile side track? A fun puzzle, but not very fun to implement the solution in real time.
[+] [-] yifanl|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bombcar|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hristov|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] advisedwang|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|3 years ago|reply
- long trains have issues with brake apply speed - remember, train cars are dumb. No electricity, all they have (at least here in Europe) is one main brake line where the transmission speed is the speed of sound - that means, for a 700m long train a drop in pressure at the front is only registered after 2 seconds at the last carriage.
- long trains are a nightmare to shunt around. Not just because you have immense distance between the engine and the conductor at the end, but especially if the train has to run over a street level crossing. Old shunting yards simply were never estimated to run such long trains.
- long trains are a nightmare for residents along the lines for the same reason
- long and especially double stacked trains put up a hell of a lot more stress on the infrastructure than it was constructed for - remember again, this infra is sometimes well over a century old!
[+] [-] w-j-w|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brundolf|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] varispeed|3 years ago|reply
I think this is the problem - paying people in respect that you can't make a meal of. And what does the living wage mean? That you can come back from work, eat a meal and have somewhere to sleep? It's interesting that people are happy to be taxed to teeth, having very little in exchange and do nothing about the fact that corporations their work for don't pay much and if their bosses pay taxes, then it means they got lame accountants.