[ShteiLoups]

At the risk of being put on even more watchlists than the average person-

I wonder if it would be quite as easy to wreck similar havoc on a commuter rail as on an airplane. It seems that it is easier to induce catastrophic failure to a plane than it is to a train.

Interestingly, there have been attempts[1], specifically in North America, with no major addition of security checks to train boarding. I suppose it would take a full scale, 9/11 style event to induce the same sort of worry about travel. I'd say that trains have a pretty good safeguard built in: they're stuck on tracks. That makes them significantly harder to ram into buildings, by my reckoning.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Via_Rail_Canada_terrorism...

[aetherson]

It would be harder to ram a train into a building, of course, but a derailment of a high speed train full of passengers would be a plenty bad enough incident to create a perceived need for TSA-style person and baggage screening.

[criddell]

What happens when a fast train hits a moose or other large animal? Is the mass difference so huge that it's effectively like a car running over a squirrel?

[ehnto]

Most countries solve that issue by separating the high speed rail lines from the land much better than you would bother with low speed rail. A mind boggling amount of infrastructure goes into separating the Shinkansen from the rest of the world. Hundreds of kilometers of it is raised up on bridges, the rest is inside tunnels or strongly fenced off by wire fences or concrete walls. No level crossings either.

I imagine part of the design of the front of the trains is also to minimize damage by deflecting impacts. Although I think the major design drive for their long noses is entering and exiting tunnels without creating sonic booms and air pressure issues for passengers.

[javagram]

Adding security checks to train boarding is very costly because most trains stop at a dozen or more stations, oftentimes open air platforms without any real infrastructure or place to do security.

I think that’s the main thing that has protected them from TSA nonsense so far. The TSA does occasionally do baggage screening on train passengers at large stations but it’s rare and mainly to flex their power I think.