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by coredog64
1530 days ago
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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... |
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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."