[close04]

Probably the biggest challenge is that there is way more rail traffic today and it's more tightly coupled in logistics chains and people's day to day lives. Disruptions are more expensive and harder to tolerate. And that's on top of the technical challenges, tolerances leave less room for error today.

[shaftoe]

(US centric assumption)

It might be easier to change today than it was in 1886. Back then, trains were really the only means of travel between cities. Today, there are less passenger trains than back then, though more freight (even with trucks and planes). But freight diversions/delays could be scheduled well in advance and have alternative means. Not to mention, since then we've developed variable gauge train tech. A subset of trains could run during the cutover.

It's likely more costly today, but less disruptive.

[MyPasswordSucks]

Passenger travel is easy mode. The economic consequences of disrupted freight dwarf anything you could imagine from disrupted passenger travel of equal duration. That's why the US has always strived to do a really, really good job with their freight rail system, and US freight is still to this day generally considered the best freight rail system in the world, even as passenger rail lags well behind.

Remember that freight is more than just moving pallets of finished goods to Amazon warehouses. It doesn't matter if you've given the cows a month's advance notice, if they don't have feed they're still going to starve; and no matter how many KPIs you dangle at the silos, they're only going to hold x amount of reserve grain.

[AlotOfReading]

Any competent shipper facing a train issue will just put the load on semis instead for 3-10x the price. Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days. Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways, and semis outcompete rail for network volume, ease of delivery, and adaptability to constraints.

[MyPasswordSucks]

> Any competent shipper facing a train issue will just put the load on semis instead for 3-10x the price.

Did you not see how the markets recently reacted to certain components merely doubling in cost due to tariffs? In what world do you live in where the agricultural margins are high enough that the cattle ranchers can just casually absorb a threefold cost increase? Clearly they're eating the loss, because if they passed those costs onwards in the chain there'd certainly be huge economic consequences, as I said, and you wouldn't have felt the need to try and correct my premise. Anyway, I'd like to visit this world of yours, though only if you'd be buying the meals.

> Freight rail mainly exists as an low cost bulk carrier of convenience these days.

This is what happens when one tries to create a narrative from DoT statistics.

The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.

Once you have the logs processed into boards, then you use trucks to carry those boards to various short-haul destinations, where some of the boards are further processed into fence pickets and bird houses and old-timey sign posts that Roadrunner can inadvertently spin around so Wile E ends up taking a completely wrong turn. All of that stuff then goes to storefronts and warehouses (also short-haul) and as a result, the short-haul tonnage can count twice, three times, or even more, depending on just how many steps are being taken between "tree" and "birdhouse".

> Ships outcompete rail for bulk goods along inland waterways

Which is great along inland waterways, but if you're not located along them, you're probably using rail to get the bulk goods to the shipyard.

[AlotOfReading]

Feel free to look up the ton-mile by distance numbers. Rail exceeds trucks by fairly narrow margins only for hauls between 1,000-2,000 miles. Below that distance, trucks dominate. Above that distance, trucks also dominate. Even in that band, it's like a narrow difference of like 35% vs 40%.

Note that the inverse situation is common at west coast ports, with short haul rail lines running to intermodal facilities so things can be loaded onto trucks for long haul. The cost of transloading to domestic containers often dominates keeping it on rails.

> The reason why rail freight tonnage is less than truck tonnage is long-haul vs short-haul. You deliver lumber from the timber yard to the finishing facility once. That's rail. You don't load up trucks with semi-finished logs on an industrial scale, you don't load them with coal, you don't load them with industrial quantities of gravel or sand or steel either.

Around here the timber arrives at the railyard by truck and aggregates are usually mined and transported locally, which is truck heavy. Grain is also majority truck these days from the BTS stats I can see, but basic materials isn't my industry.

Regardless, ton-miles aren't doubled counted. It's one ton, transported one mile. If rail took freight that extra distance, it'd get the same share (subject to all the usual caveats of industry numbers).

[culopatin]

Assuming an unlimited supply of semis and drivers to fit the demand. With limited supply big companies will be able to a compete for the available trucks at really high prices but small-mid businesses will be left out.

[AlotOfReading]

Small-mid businesses generally are not shipping on rail to begin with, unless they've been bundled as part of a larger shipment by an intermodal carrier. If you've ever tried to talk to a rail carrier, they really don't want to deal with companies under a certain size.

[Suppafly]

>Assuming an unlimited supply of semis and drivers to fit the demand.

If the US really wanted to get it done, they could involve the army and various state national guards. They have tons of trained semi and heavy truck drivers, way more than most people would assume. Most states also have tons of trained drivers for their massive snow plows and highway repair trucks and stuff. The only thing stopping these massive projects is money and lack of imagination.

[franktankbank]

I see several trains go by per day on my pretty sleepy tracks. You have no clue the amount of semis that would need to be built to accommodate your proposal, they just do not wait in the wings. Do you think all the bulk shipments are being done for fun and someone isn't waiting for 5000 gallons of HCL and 2000 tons of coal?

[AlotOfReading]

I'm well aware that it's a couple hundred trucks to replace a single train. I'm not sure you understand that this is what already happens. Rail carries around a quarter of freight ton-miles in the US. Trucks carry much more than that. All of the stuff that isn't bulk, time insensitive freight, or anything that surges in excess of the carefully scheduled rail capacity already has to spill over onto trucks. That includes things like disaster recovery shipments, unusual seasonal demand, and so on. There's also a population of truckers that work these temporary jobs, as well as a certain level of excess vehicle capacity in the fleet carriers to service it, plus whatever truckers can be pulled from other work to meet the demand.

Anyone looking at massive losses will pay the sticker shock to put it on trucks. Anyone who can afford to shut down instead will wait. That's the system working as intended.

[franktankbank]

Thanks for the response. I'm curious what percent of stuff that would normally end up on train ends up as spillover onto trucks. Any idea? I think stuff is quite finetuned already and there may only be an extra few percent of capacity in trucks. I agree, in a lot of cases it might work to just bite the bullet and wait or try a different apparatus. However the stuff on the trains typically is not slackable. That is, you aren't transporting computers and sofas via rail.

[bobthepanda]

This is not as true in the US where domestic shipping is subject to the expenses of the Jones Act.

[red_admiral]

I was told a while ago "trains are great if you want to move a trainload of stuff, trucks are great if you want to move a few truckloads of stuff". I guess trains also need loading/unloading facilities and stations close to your origin and destination, and perhaps a hump yard somewhere.

Cargo ships beat everything hands down if there's a port close to your origin and destination, and lots of water in between.

[Reason077]

> "Today, there are less passenger trains than back then"

I don't think this is true in Europe. Certainly in the UK, passenger rail volume since the 2010s has set records higher than in any previous years, exceeding numbers that were last seen before WW2. Today there are fewer miles of track than there were in that era, but modern signalling technology allows more trains to operate safely on the same tracks, and modern trains run much faster on average.

As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.

[jabl]

> As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe. One reason for this is that in Europe many lines are congested with passenger traffic, leaving few slots for freight trains to operate - except late at night.

It's also that rail tends to be more competitive for long haul traffic, and the US operators have big trans-continental freight networks well suited to that. In Europe there's a sharp drop off in modal share as freight crosses borders. Each national railway operator is in practice fiercely protective of its own turf, and there are a lot of hurdles to overcome. So in practice cross-border freight is largely done with trucks instead.

Despite the EU commission wanting to get some competition going on the rails and better interoperability requirements etc etc. for at least the past 30 years, the operators are still in the "discussion about preparing to setup a committee to discuss interoperability" phase.

[crote]

> As for freight, the US actually moves a significantly greater portion of its freight by rail than Europe does. Rail has around 40% modal share for freight in the US vs only 17% in Europe.

Europe also has far more freight-friendly waterways. US rail is designed for dirt-cheap bulk transport for things like coal and grain. In most of Europe that's done by barge - but US geography doesn't really allow for that.