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fr0sty | 3 years ago

Some light googling gives me 390B kilometer-tonnes[1] in Europe and 1.6T ton-miles[2] in the US for 2019. So that is 6x the freight movement.

The US rail network also >2x longer than Europe[3] (360,000km vs 151,000km).

[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/198443/us-class-i-freigh...

[3] https://www.floridarail.com/news/6-key-differences-between-a...

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danhor|3 years ago

Cursory googling throws out various different numbers for the rail length with english wikipedia saying that they're both roughly equal size at 210 vs 220 Mm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...) with old UIC data, the German one citing the cia world factbook which specifies 230Mm for the European union and 300Mm for the US (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/railways/).

I highly doubt that the US rail network is twice the size of the EU one by most metrics, I guess different methods for counting length were mixed there (e.g. how is single-track vs double-track counted).

This is taking europe as in the EU, as anything else is annoying.

It'd also be pretty interesting to get the frequency of passenger rail derailments vs freight derailments to more accurately compare the numbers given the high amount of passenger rail in EU. As a very rough idea, the first document I found giving any indication about the distribution had 2 dangerous freight derailments and 3 dangerous passenger train derailments in germany for 2021 (https://www.eisenbahn-unfalluntersuchung.de/SharedDocs/Downl... P. 16ff.).

The EU also differs from the US in that that cargo trains are much shorter, leading to more trains needed for the same amount of freight cars. So the question is does the rate of derailments scale with the number of individual cars or with the number of trains?

EDIT:

Looking at the floridarail.com link, they say that the US has a broader gauge than europe. Since almost all of the US is standard gauge and almost all of europe is standard gauge or wider, this is just wrong. It's also news to me that europe (specifically germany) doesn't allow toxic chemicals to be transported over rail. The article seems a bit iffy.

pixl97|3 years ago

>So the question is does the rate of derailments scale with the number of individual cars or with the number of trains?

You have to take in a much larger number of factors than that.

The railroad industry is currently pushing their new just in time paradigm which has been leading to attempted strikes in the US (Uncle Joe says no) by the railroad workers. The railroad operators are pushing for longer trains, less engineers per train, and less inspection time per car while also playing computerized shipping optimizations that put the number of 'hazards' on a train just below the regulated minimum number of cars so they don't have to declare it.

It's just ironic that this incident that got national news happened so quickly after the railroad co's got their no right to strike validated. It looks like it could very well be their undoing.