| I've noticed this too in China and the B&R rail projects, and while it would be nice to have double stack containers, consider Chinese engineers are making a reasonable set of tradeoffs. China is moving more containers than anyone else in the world, and this may actually more efficient in other ways: 1) Loading/unloading. Double stack requires cranes of some sort and is inherently dangerous when lifting large heavy mass into the air. Single stack could be more loaded/unloaded cheaper, faster, safer with less equipment, and keep trains moving and making money rather than sitting around being loaded/unloaded. 2) Maintenance cost and wear/tear on rail infrastructure. Wear and tear on rails (and roads) is proportional to the axle load to the power of 4 based on AASHTO testing [0]. Double stacking containers will roughly double axle loads, so damage and maintenance cost increases by ~16x. Keeping axle loads down keeps costs down. As an aside for roads, that means a fully loaded semi trailer (80000 lbs) is about 9600 passenger cars (4000 lbs) worth of road wear [1]. Re Longer trains: they are generally better, but there are practical limits. Trains have to be assembled and disassembled in rail yards. If the train is extra long it makes things more complicated and time consuming. If there are grade crossings on the route (there usually are), extra long trains result in long gate down time (5-10 mins) which can constitute a public safety risk (emergency vehicles not being able to cross tracks), and generally frustrates all other road users including pedestrians and cyclists. Older railway axle counters used for train control and signalling systems in Europe and elsewhere had 8 bit integer logic controllers. That's 256 axles per train, or 64 rail vehicles assuming 4 axles per vehicle. Any longer and it will overflow, and the train might not be detected. So that is a hard limit without upgrading those systems or risking a catastrophic failure on a safety-critical system, that prevents 2 trains from occupying the same section of track at the same time [2]. [0] https://higherlogicdownload.s3.amazonaws.com/IPWEA/c7e19de0-... [1] https://www.vabike.org/vehicle-weight-and-road-damage/ [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axle_counter |