[jhgb]

> America has a decent rail network

According to what metrics? For example my country has over five times greater length of railway network per unit of area. For electrified rail, which is increasingly important for sustainability reasons, that advantage goes up to a factor of 200 (!).

[coredog64]

I'm not 100% sold on these [0] values as I have seen different elsewhere. But according to this, the US is third behind China and Russia on rail ton-miles. I think those are reasonable numbers given a) the compactness of the US compared to Russia and b) that unlike China, the US has major ports on both coasts and doesn't need to traverse the entire country.

The reason I'm skeptical of the numbers is that UP/US DoT reported 2.7T ton-KMs for 2018 [1]. Given that there are good reasons for 2020 in particular to be low, I wouldn't hold 2020 out as representative.

[0] https://www.russia-briefing.com/news/russian-rail-freight-vo... [1] https://www.up.com/customers/track-record/tr120120-freight-r...

[jhgb]

> But according to this, the US is third behind China and Russia on rail ton-miles

That's awesome if you're not interested in carrying people, but whether a network incapable of carrying people is "a decent rail network" is something many would dispute.

Also, Russia has ~44% of population of the US, yet it still outperforms the US in absolute terms? That's quite impressive for Russia in my book. Having said that, they've always been heavily dependent on rail to lower their transportation costs. Trucks and airplanes won't work for them nearly as well. So I'm not surprised if they're placed so high in rail freight ranking.

> The reason I'm skeptical of the numbers is that UP/US DoT reported 2.7T ton-KMs for 2018 [1].

I'm reading 1.7 on that page. Am I looking in the wrong place? It says "In 2018, 1.7 trillion ton-miles of freight (calculated by multiplying shipment weight in tons by the number of miles that it is transported) was shipped by rail, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation."

[BenjiWiebe]

kilometers vs miles.

[sixstringtheory]

America has huge swathes of undeveloped and uninhabited land. Maybe over five times as much as your country.

What would the multiple be if you compared your country’s metrics to just the northeast corridor?

[danhor]

Adding up the metropolitan areas around the NE corridor, there are ~40 Million people living there, around half of Germany. The NE corridor includes 611km of electrified track (or 1500km for all electrified rail in the US, adding up all the numbers mentioned in the Wikipedia page).

In Germany 20000 km are electrified, so around 25cm per inhabitant. In comparison to the NE corridor with a number of 1.5cm per inhabitant, this is a huge difference. To account for other railways inside the NE corridor, we can also just use all electrified rail as a reference and arrive at 3.7cm per inhabitant).

And Germany hasn't been great about electrifying it's rail.

[jefftk]

I'm confused: why are you only counting electrified rail? For example, all of Boston's regional rail is diesel locomotives.

(US transit agencies are unreasonably ignorant of best practices, including electrification and EMUs, but it's still rail.)

[danhor]

Electrified Rail is important for great passenger rail, by nature of it's much higher acceleration and lower cost for increased service. This is part of great rail infrastructure for me and much of the electrification in the USA has been rolled back due to the different needs of freight providers and cost-cutting measures. Countries like India and China are also huge on electrification for dedicated freight routes, so it's not just a passenger service thing.

It's also much easier to compare as a baseline of decent rail infrastructure, since it implies a minimum condition of the line and a certain amount of investment in the last 100 years (and it was much easier to compare for the NE corridor, since that contains most electrified rail in the US). Most countries that are considered to have a great rail network have a lot of electrified lines, beginning with Switzerland but countries as Russia have also invested a lot in electrification. Electrification is a lot of effort, and it will take multiple decades to achieve a decent percentage in the US if it were started right now with a lot of political backing.

Many transit agencies in the US, including the one in Boston, are planning electrified rail (as they're aware of the benefits as well) but are unable to construct it right now (and likely the next 10 years) due to funding and ownership issues.

It's not impossible to run decent service over non-electrified rail, but the slower acceleration, near impossibility of high speed as well as the increasingly low availability of DMUs make it harder and, coupled with the higher fuel costs, unattractive.

Properly assessing the state of the routes without using electrification as an easy shortcut was way too much effort for me.

In short: Just because you have a lot of gravel roads everywhere doesn't mean you have a decent road network

[jefftk]

> Many transit agencies in the US, including the one in Boston, are planning electrified rail (as they're aware of the benefits as well) but are unable to construct it right now (and likely the next 10 years) due to funding and ownership issues.

Boston's MBTA owns its tracks (generally all the way to the state border), so ownership isn't the issue. Instead, it's been an issue of opposition to electrification. Ex: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/07/23/massachusetts-...

I'm not completely up-to-date on this, though -- has it gotten better in the last couple years?

[danhor]

The Wikipedia article implies a consensus on electrification and budgetary issues for Boston, but Alon Levy is a better source and I doubt anything major changed in that time frame (even if according to the wikipedia page first test runs are planned for 2023 on already electrified track). That's even worse, artificially pushing expected costs up for common sense things is ... something else.

Very glad germany has the opposite problem (Schönrechnen), where expected value is artificially kept high and expected costs low for politically wanted rail projects. It's also bad, but less so?

[willnonya]

i think youve misread this issue. i can assure you that the us is aware of best practices. the private swctors awareness of the economics involves drives a lot of their behabior while the politicians lack of awareness of anything but the political costs drives the regulatory side.

[jhgb]

I'm pretty sure we also don't have equal rail density in all regions. So this is just the average. Nevertheless I'm not sure how this can swing a factor of two hundred. (If I use rail length per capita instead, which somewhat compensates for unpopulated regions, the advantage is still ~1.4x for non-electrified and ~50x for electrified rail.)

Also, is there any statistics for this northeast corridor, regarding region area, electrified, and non-electrified rail length? I only know where to get national statistics, so that doesn't help me a lot here.

[ghaff]

The Northeast Corridor where the Acela runs is all electrified. In fact the electrification of the tracks north of New Haven (so an engine switch was no longer needed) was one of the big benefits Acela brought to even the non-Acela trains.

I don't know what it looks like north (basically Portland) and south of the northeast corridor--or the non-coastal routes in New England.