These articles are a good reminder of a bittersweet truth: the US has an incredibly advanced and dense rail network, paid for with federal land grants[1]; we just choose not to use it to benefit travelers. That isn't to say that we need a system that's as good as most European countries have; having these railroad companies follow the laws around Amtrak's priority would be a good start[2].
> the US has an incredibly advanced and dense rail network, paid for with federal land grants
Note that only a small portion of the US rail network was built with land grants, about 18k miles out of ~250k miles in the peak of the US rail network. Also, most of the land-grant railroads are in the Western states, which is actually generally the least-dense portion of the rail network (in large part because the population density of that area is quite low--which is a large part of the reason for the land grants in the first place!).
That's true, but I'd argue that the land grants are what made it economically worthwhile to develop and maintain the denser parts of the network. You correctly observe that the network itself tracks with population density, but the value of the network is in its completeness: it wouldn't be nearly as valuable if there was a 1000 mile hole in it in the middle of the country.
The main dichotomy in political geography you have in the US is the opposite sides of the Mississippi River. You do have a transitional zone in Illinois (which nowadays as migrated to Chicago), but to a coarse approximation, even the rail magnates of the Gilded Age are unable to build systems that truly cross the transitional zone. In the West, the big prize is connecting the ports on the West Coast with ultimately Chicago, with lesser prizes for feeder lines to bring the products to Chicago. One of the big purposes of the land grants, after all, is to encourage settlement of agricultural lands in the area.
But in the East, the prizes are connecting to the Northeast ports (or Chicago, or to a lesser degree, the other major cities in the Mississippi River). And most of these lines aren't affected by the existence of the Western US. The commercial center, say, an Ohioan is looking towards isn't San Francisco, it's New York City. Rip out the land grant system, and you wouldn't reduce the viability of all of the lines being added in Ohio; although the lines people are working in, say, Indian Territory, will suffer mightily. But the latter are already in the not-dense portion of the network, whereas the former are in the dense part of the network.
It's really not until the mid-20th century that the Pacific Coast takes on the commercial significance that it has nowadays, by which time the railroad trackage of the US is beginning to decline as consolidation takes place.
> Rip out the land grant system, and you wouldn't reduce the viability of all of the lines being added in Ohio; although the lines people are working in, say, Indian Territory, will suffer mightily. But the latter are already in the not-dense portion of the network, whereas the former are in the dense part of the network.
I wasn't just thinking of the far West; I mean also the Southwest. To take an example: I don't think the centralization of meatpacking in the Midwest would have happened to nearly the same degree without land grant-subsidized railroads through Texas, New Mexico, etc. Same for the Gulf Coast with refineries.
But also, I think you're understating the "why" of Chicago being the "big prize" for the West. It's because it opened up California's bread basket to the rest of the country, including the East Coast and European markets represented on the East Coast. The US didn't carry beef, corn, and wheat across the country just to dump it in Lake Michigan; it got carried to Chicago so that it could be sold to points beyond.
Period fiction played on this: Frank Norris never finished The Epic of the Wheat[1], but it was supposed to end in Europe's wheat markets, having started in the San Joaquin valley in the first book. Already in that book, from 1902, is the European market well established:
> “The result is over-production. We supply more than Europe can eat, and down go the prices. The remedy is NOT in the curtailing of our wheat areas, but in this, we MUST HAVE NEW MARKETS, GREATER MARKETS. For years we have been sending our wheat from East to West, from California to Europe. But the time will come when we must send it from West to East."
(Norris confusingly says "East to West" as in "Western Europe.")
Your local library probably has a copy of Nature’s Metropolis, a very well-written, information-dense book that captures much of the reason why it was Chicago rather than, say, St. Louis that became the important link in the railroad system. (In the mid 18th century France and the UK concluded a treaty that made the ‘Illinois Country’ off-limits to Europeans. It depopulated and most people moved to St. Louis. By the time Chicago was much more than an Army fort and a dozen houses, St. Louis was a 100-year old large city).
Among the G8 we probably have the least-electrified, slowest rail network with the worst Positive Train Control. Probably the most dangerous, too, given how disastrous Precision Railroad Scheduling has been for safety. We also likely have the highest crash and derailment rates.
ASES, ACSES, ETMS, CBTM, CBOSS, E-ATC, ITCS, and whatever Union Pacific is using. That's over half a dozen different systems and none of them are inherently compatible with each other - specialized systems are required to tie the systems together on railways that might have trains with different systems.
I'm guessing no other country in the G8 has issues with freight train movement such that trains routinely bisect towns and entire counties for hours or more and force police, fire, and medical services to reroute, as well as require children to crawl underneath the trains (which could start moving without warning) to get to/from school.
Why? Because the feds are not regulating train lengths nor mandating that trains cannot block road intersections for more than a certain amount of time, so the railways do whatever they please.
I'm guessing no other G8 country has problems with the government (federal, state, or local) having no idea what hazardous materials are being shipped and where...no way to look it up, not noticed by the railroad, nothing.
Europes rail network is far worse - but it appears better because you see passanger traffic and don't think what else. That and europe mostly can't see beyond national borders (there is a language barrier with most) and so they fail to create good eu wide rail of any sort.
Far worse in what sense? More tracks, sure the US rail network is about 1.5 times the size of the European network for the same landmass.
But then, I don't think quality wise I don't think you'd encounter a track like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI anywhere in Europe. Or the comparison of high speed tracks 9600km in Europe vs 70 km in the US.
The reason for this is obviously the completely different priorities US is freight, Europe is passenger. So I don't think you can really compare the two networks and say one is clearly better.
The European network is far more fragmented than it seems. There are differences in power supply, track width, station and tunnel width and signalling such that you cannot easily cross borders in a train. There are lots of trains that are equipped for multiple signalling standards and have variable axles. But in general, you can only go to the immediate neigbouring countries, as soon as you cross another border you have to change trains. In some countries, like France, you even have concurring standards within the same network. A hypothetical Lisbon-Moscow connection would need to change trains at least 2, maybe 3 times.
I don't think, therefore, that "total track length" has any useful meaning in Europe.
Throwing in Moscow with Europe is a choice. Spain and Portugal are doing their own thing according to your rail gauge map, true, but there are many city pairs crossing multiple borders that are accessible nonstop, see the route map for the Austrian sleep railroad, nightjet.
Yes. But if you look at the electricity system map, you'll see that those are mostly north-south connections through easy transitions. They skip the south of France, east of Poland. Some of those routes use different locomotives than all the others. And the number of border crossings is limited for that reason.
I can't believe that the train can actually travel down that track. If I had just come upon that track, there's no way I would have ever thought that it was still an operational track. I'm sure the engineers navigating that track have a lot of colorful opinions about it as well
also not original, but an explanation in the description: The quality of the audio was poor in the copy of the film we obtained. Some audio restoration was attempted, but the results are less than ideal.
I meant specifically from the perspective of passenger rail, yes. I don't doubt that the US has significantly better freight rail.
(I've crossed borders several times on European trains, and it was never a problem. By contrast, crossing the US-Canada border by train is an exercise in boredom and frustration.)
> we just choose not to use it to benefit travelers
The Northeast Corridor is the only viable rail corridor in the US. It could be better, but we absolutely use it. Comparing the US to Europe is a mistake because cities aren't dense enough and are too far apart for European style rail to work.
There's also the fact that American towns aren't dense and are poorly walkable. I'd love to be able to catch a train to the next town over, but once I get there I'd have to walk at least a mile or two to get where I want to go. Not that big a deal for me if the weather was nice and I wasn't in a hurry, but I couldn't rely on that for commuting and I couldn't do it at all if I had a disability.
In cities big enough for a bus service it'd be all right, but you don't usually see that until you get 100k or so people.
What's the argument for the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger [1]? Any rational admin would shoot down the merger immediately as this will create a massive monopoly.
Perhaps a monopoly is the way for the rail, preferably state-owned.
Generally I'm heavily against both monopolies and state-controlled companies, but railways seem to be a corner-case where all the downsides and inefficiencies are outweighted by a nation-wide system that actually works.
the tracks should be state-owned, just like public roads, and then train operators should pay for use. (or you could let them use it for free like roads)
that way the state can give priority to passenger rail, and prioritize maintenance and building of rails according to the needs of the people.
it also makes much smaller train operators possible and compete on the same routes.
They share essentially zero miles of track or routes. A move only creates a monopoly if it reduces consumer choice.
No freight customer is deciding "Oh I can either ship from LA to Seattle, or Miami to DC." They are shipping from one fixed location to a different fixed location. These railroads merging does not reduce their choices or give the combined entity more leverage.
> They are shipping from one fixed location to a different fixed location. These railroads merging does not reduce their choices or give the combined entity more leverage.
If someone on the US west coast wants to ship to the US east (or vice versa) they can pit UP against BNSF, and then NS against CSX. There are a few pairs up because of the two negotiating points:
* UP-NS
* UP-CSX
* BNSF-NS
* BNSP-CSX
If the merger goes through you're now at:
* merged-UPNS
* BNSF-CSX
Do you think UPNS will give a cheaper price for a 'half-trip' and you go to their competitor the other half?
You don't think BNSF/CN/CP aren't looking at CSX right now?
The two compete reciprocally: business can either enter their system or a competitor's for the parts of the rail network that they control, which means bartering power. A single nationwide system would have fewer incentives to compete on pricing.
The rail industry has been trying to complete and end to end lashup merger since the 50's - had that been allowed in the 50's we might not have needed to spend billions on Conrail in the 70's and 80's.
A different regulatory attitude in the 50's, not just towards M&A but rates and routes, and mandatory services, would have prevented the bailouts we had to do in the aftermath of the Penn Central. Nearly every Class I carrier was in poor financial shape by the time the industry was deregulated in the late 70's, much of the 'capacity crunch' we have today in the rail industry is related to the contraction the industry went thru in that period, where they shed assets and lines in an attempt to resize their cost structure to the amount of revenue they were allowed to realize from their route networks.
Okay. That’s a very different argument than the original one: we’ve gone from “it wouldn’t be a competitive risk” to “the reduction in competition would have made midcentury rail profitable such that Conrail wouldn’t have been necessary.” But that presumes a change in bartering power and operating efficiency that can only come in a less competitive rail market.
Back then it would have given them a competitive advantage over their peers because of faster end to end performance.
Other than some of your head office folks (accounting, HR, etc) there wasnt much of a greater operating efficiency to be gained, nor do I think they would have gotten significantly lower costs (but for maybe fuel) by squeezing their vendors either.
I think that rationale holds true today too.
When we allowed the UP-SP and BN-SF lashups, we created two western colossuses, if we still had four roads in the west, and had they encouraged east/west mergers at that time, things would be better off today.
Monopoly? No. Union Pacific plus Norfolk Southern would have a monopoly on single-line end-to-end rail service in the US, true, but that's the kind of thing that you can get a "monopoly" in. BNSF and CSX interchange with each other, after all. And BNSF and CSX could (and almost certainly would) merge in response. So there's no monopoly argument.
Which doesn't mean that a rational regulator would not turn it down anyway. But rational regulators may not be running the show at the moment. UP sees that there may be an opportunity during the Trump administration. (Note "may" - nobody knows whether there is an opportunity, but there is more of a chance than there was under Biden.)
A regulated monopoly might be appropriate for something like a railroad. It doesn't really make sense for competing railroads to all run their own tracks between the same destinations. We give monopolies to utilities for this reason.
Or maybe all trackage should be government-owned, like streets and highways are. Then any operator can pay a toll and run their trains on any tracks. Traffic coordination is left as an exercise for the reader.
It's already an oligopoly. Most cities only have one or two. Of the few cities that have three or four (Chicago, say), the merger would reduce that by one.
Let's say you want to ship from Denver to Atlanta. In Denver, you hand your stuff over to either Union Pacific or BNSF. In Atlanta, you receive it from either NS or CSX. You only have two options in Denver, and only two in Atlanta. The merger doesn't change that at all.
why bother going through the performative charade of quoting four words of their post just to respond with something that so flagrantly betrays, charitably, your not having read what they said at all or, less charitably, willfully misconstruing it because you happen to disagree. maybe i'm just the simpleton you are pretending to be with the snarky faux folksy affect, but... "moving further over on the intellectually honest to arrogantly disingenuous spectrum is good how?"
what's worse is that the "more of a bad thing is prima facie worse" argument is so facile that it strains credulity to believe that even you think that it's actually true. i think we would all agree that, ceteris paribus, higher food prices are bad, for example, but i doubt anyone would mistake that for a reason to never do anything that might raise the price of food. the irony of it all is that you managed to turn siding with conventional wisdom-- usually a good bet, by definition-- into a no-upside proposition: either you are right but for the wrong reason-- a pyrrhic victory-- or not just wrong, but arrogantly so.
can we just leave the grandstanding and begging the question to our elected representatives during congressional hearings on C-SPAN where it belongs?
The rules that govern American railroads are impressively weird and arcane. They seem almost impossible to unravel at this point. Which is a shame, because so many American cities sacrifice the central corridors of their city to huge railyards and slow-moving freight trains.
I think of Portland, Oregon, where the tracks run north/south along the river. You can see them sitting there empty while you're stuck in traffic on I-5, which runs parallel. Running a commuter rail or light rail on those things would make life a lot less miserable trying to get around the city.
Portland is kind of weird because it has big yards for two Class Is in town. But they're both right on the waterfront (which is bad for urban transit, since it means half the walkshed is wasted). The BNSF line doesn't go anywhere useful on the west bank of the river. The useful parts of the UP line on the east bank of the river are essentially duplicated by the MAX lines to Expo Center and Milwaukie. The main useful thing you could get out of the Class I lines in Greater Portland is a S-Bahn-like service to Vancouver, WA IMO.
They said to keep Portland weird, but I don't think this is what they meant :)
I do think an S-Bahn style service would be interesting to pursue. Or even just regular commuter rail. The MAX is too slow for long distance commuting (it's usually faster just to sit in traffic), and it crucially doesn't go into Vancouver yet.
> heavily subsidized by the tax slave called the European worker,
> people like you are still not satisfied
> wanted to control people’s freedom of movement and/or can’t stand that people would have freedom of movement you don’t have
You can't comment like this on HN and we have to ban accounts that do it repeatedly. This style of commenting is not what HN is for and it destroys what it is for. HN is only a place where people want to participate because other people make an effort to keep the standards up. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
> it exposes that it really was never about emissions or combustion or pollution, you either wanted to control people’s freedom of movement
This isn’t the problem- the real problem is that in dense cities, transporting everyone where they want to go via private vehicles just doesn’t work geometrically- see the traffic and parking needs that grow as cities grow assuming private vehicle use only.You end up needing a more space-efficient form of moving people, namely public transit.
Public transit also doesn't scale. Germany, during the Covid years, introduced a cheap country-wide flat fee ticket (~50 bucks per month, all you can ride) for public transit. Which lead to road traffic going down measurably. Which lead to trains and busses being packed, people traveling more and farther on those. Leading to higher cost, degraded service and packed bus stations and rail lines. Building more of those isn't possible geometrically as well, cities are already packed. We are currently, at tremendous cost and effort, moving railway lines and stations underground, like Stuttgart 21, for that reason.
The point is, moving people inherently is bad. Shifting from cars to public transit reduces the badness a little, but you still need infrastructure that scales O(p * s * f), where p is the number of people, s is the average distance travelled per journey, and f is the frequency of journeys. Scaling doesn't change the slightest bit with public transit, you just have a different constant factor which is irrelevant for scalability.
So the solution isn't public transit. It is the avoidance of any unnecessary travel, meaning that we actually need something like a tax on non-home-office jobs and stores that you personally have to visit (as opposed to shopping online). We need better delivery infrastructure so people don't need to travel. We need close-to-home shopping options. Because actually moving goods instead of people scales logarithmically, the network of countrywide, regional, local distribution centers, bigger shops, smaller shops behaves like a tree.
> you just have a different constant factor which is irrelevant for scalability.
So then why bother with cities at all? High rises are just a different constant factor relative to 40 acre farms after all.
I feel like this is analogous to a case where someone says that an algorithm only differs by a constant factor but it turns out that because of that difference it hits the cache for 99% of use cases and as a result you see better than 100x speedups for all real world workloads.
Cities with cars obviously work up to some size. The sheer number of personal vehicle trips that a single rail line can replace is huge. And just to give you an idea of how large the scale factor here is, consider that you can pack at least 3 rail lines into the width of a typical two lane road, and that large cities commonly have 4 lane arterials.
If the political will existed to reallocate the space it could be done and the viable density would scale accordingly. On the extreme end we have Tokyo as a practical example, and even they are far from saturating all the available space for building rail lines.
> moving goods instead of people scales logarithmically
This is obviously false. There's some average parcel size, and an associated maximum capacity for a delivery van. Thus any given delivery run has a limit on the number of shipments it can service. Obviously that scale factor is significantly larger than the one for passenger rail versus cars, but it's still "just" a constant factor and thus irrelevant for scalability by your own logic.
In fact by your own logic I'm fairly certain that you will find that life as a whole is unscalable. Better nuke the planet I guess.
> So then why bother with cities at all? High rises are just a different constant factor relative to 40 acre farms after all.
Because of the logarithmic scaling of infrastructure (like supermarkets, doctors, hospitals), and because of the square root scaling of people-density per area vs. total travel distance to said infrastructure.
>> moving goods instead of people scales logarithmically
> This is obviously false. There's some average parcel size, and an associated maximum capacity for a delivery van.
You do move bananas by ship from continent to continent. Then you split it up, move it by smaller ships up-river. Then you split it up, move it by truck to each cities distribution center. Then you split it up, move it by smaller truck to each store. Then people buy it.
Obviously logarithmic and the whole reason for ships and freight trains to exist, otherwise we would all get our tropical fruit in person by airplane.
And since we are on a CS-heavy site, talking about scalability, constant factors are irrelevant. That is what scalability means. It is the extrapolation to big numbers, where those constants no longer matter anymore. Of course there might be a local equilibrium for sufficiently small numbers. But that is always temporary as humanity keeps growing.
I take it you've never examined thev theoretical landscape of matrix multiplication algorithms?
The splitting you describe could be carried out just as easily with human transportation as with fruits and vegetables. I still object that it isn't logarithmic in either the space or trip requirement though. It's linear with one of those constant factors that you say are irrelevant. Just as you can never move a human using less than a human sized volume, you can never move a banana using less than a banana sized volume. Hence, linear.
> you seem to not understand how America functions
> you can rage against the system all you want [with] wishful thinking and obsessions
> people like you are still not satisfied
> you either wanted to control people’s freedom of movement
> want them to also be miserable with you
The cynical take is that two public company CEOs have run out of ideas for further stock growth and are looking for anything else that will juice the share price in the short term.
Neither company is so inefficient that you can save much of anything by combining the two, and there is only so far you can raise prices before customers switch to trucks or send container ships to different ports of call. With no overlapping territory, you aren't going to cut the number of trains you run and you can't get rid of half your maintenance staff (can you?).
Investment banks will do well running the merger and surely they'll issue debt to finance it. But what kind of growth can we really expect?
And ethanol plants, which I was surprised to find out is actually a big deal for rail (or rail is a big deal for ethanol?). I guess I never put much thought into how much of it was being produced and how it was being moved around.
Most industrial plants have rail connections to move bulk materials. It’s more economical than trucks for some stuff. Chemicals, crude oil, cut lumber, all cheaper by rail than by truck - though trucks haul 65%+ of goods in America, they are often used for last mile for those materials.
Private railroads are a mistake. Let's see what the private railroad industry has done.
The railroads kept reducing their workforce to get an uptick in profitability, so much so that there wasn't enough spare capacity for railroad workers to get paid sick leave of any kind. The railroad workforce were taking industrial action to get paid sick leave. What happened? Congress stepped in to use legislation to end a labor dispute for essential workers to side with the company. Oh and this was under Biden. As an aside, a later deal was made to give them a handful of paid sick days, quietly.
If the railroad caved to 100% of the union's demands it would've cost 6% of the company's profits. Not revenue. Profits.
The other is an industry wide effort called Precision Scheduled Railroads ("PSR"). Basically this means having trains with twice as many carriages and skipping safety chcecks because that costs money.
There are over 1000 train derailments a year. Most of these aren't a big deal. Others are like East Palestine, Ohio a few years ago, which caused a toxic spill in a populated area, something that continues to be an issue [1]. A lot of toxic chemicals are transported by rail. What was insane was the media didn't report on the East Palestine derailment for a week to 10 days despite there being a black toxic plume that could be seen from space. They were finally embarrassed into covering it by social media, particularly Tiktok.
All railroad companies do to maintain and increase profits is cut costs, pretty much like every other company. That means suppressing wages, skimping on maintenance and safety and not investing in fixing anything.
They built the railroads, often on their own dime, and paid taxes by the fistful for them.
Their competition was subsidized by the general government, and continues to be every year.
If you want to argue that nationalizing railroads should be done for the public good, do that - dont just demonize them, because its not a fully winning argument.
No surprise when the rails are utter dogshit. Something like [1] - you can clearly see how incredibly uneven the track is - which flies over my youtube feed way too much for my liking would yield immediate regulatory action here in Germany.
Would this have an impact on Amtrak service? The trains in my area often get stopped by freight traffic, and Chicago is pretty much a mandatory change-over point. Could this allow some routes to open up connecting each side of the Mississippi more fluidly in the longer term?
We got a new route (well, a new train running on a segment of an existing route, offering more flexibility for scheduling) from MSP to CHI recently, which has been great.
The gridlock in Washington has been mostly resolved. The party is power can do pretty much anything. And the current party is power is against Amtrak .
Britain tried that. Network Rail, a unit of the Government, owns the tracks, and 28 or so Train Operating Companies run the trains.
The UK started out with railroads in private ownership. They were nationalized in 1948, as British Rail. Then they were de-nationalized in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, they're being re-nationalized.
When one company controls both the trains AND the infrastructure, it results in an unfair advantage over anyone else wishing to use the rail. Commuter trains needing to pull over to let cargo trains from the parent company through, for example.
Which doesn't seem like a particular issr with commuter rail (or Northeast Corridor) in general. It is an issue on long distance rail as I understand it especially when passenger trains get off schedule which is often.
Having ridden the Northeast Corridor end-to-end the entire route, by far the worst section to traverse on Amtrak is western Connecticut. Which also happens to be the only bit of the NEC that Amtrak doesn't own--it's owned by Metro North instead.
Unfair? How is that unfair? If I built the track, then I own the track, and I decide what runs on the track. Anybody else thinking they have the right to run on it can get lost. A private railroad line is not an open-access situation. They'll carry your railroad car, but they'll do it in their train. Any argument otherwise is an argument against private ownership, which I view extremely skeptically.
(It's a little different in the case of commuter rail, where there's a contractual arrangement.)
You are willfully ignoring the reality that building a competing rail network that services the same area is wildly impractical given the land requirements.
This is the same argument behind having multiple providers to share one set of power lines, telephone cables, etc. Duplicate copies of physical infrastructure are pointless, wasteful, and unlikely to occur in practice, so there’s rarely competitive pressure.
How much government funding went, directly or indirectly, into building the track? What sort of deals where put in place to facilitate building them? Where did all that land come from? What sort of special rights (e.g. the ability to build level crossings) have railways been granted?
By buying it. Even the land-grant railroads bought the land, in the form of carrying the US mail at reduced rates for the next 80 years. (During World War 2, when the government was desperate for money, they let the railroads buy themselves out of the reduced mail rates. So it worked out to payments for 80 years with a balloon payment at the end.)
Things get complicated with a common good like land. It's not particularly just that just because someone purchased some natural resource a hundred years ago people who weren't even born at the time are screwed. Presumably every generation should have a say in how society operates.
No, they're suggesting something more along the lines of Standard Oil being required to refine anyone's oil in their refinery, or carry it in their pipelines. But the one suggesting it didn't offer to let anyone stay in their house, and to me that's the same issue. Does the owner of private property get to control access and use, or not?
You say that the railroad is a business, not a private residence. All right, does Home Depot have to let Lowe's use part of their floor space? No, they don't.
Property owners generally don't have complete freedom to control access, hence easements.
Even if those weren't a thing, there's a coherent political view (which I'm not arguing for) that "resolves" the issue: nationalizing the infrastructure and licensing access back like the UK.
It's a strawman though. There's no reason anyone needs to hold identical political views on the property rights of private houses, home improvement stores, and rail infrastructure. They're different things.
FWIW, while the instinctive response here will be that this is a monopolistic and anti-consumer play, the reality is that these companies share almost zero routes. There's no real way for railroads to be be competitive unless they are fighting for the same customers (and UP/NS are not).
So, the statements about improved operational efficiency are not totally implausible.
> FWIW, while the instinctive response here will be that this is a monopolistic and anti-consumer play, the reality is that these companies share almost zero routes.
And cable companies also don't have overlapping territory, so from the consumer point of view it did not reduce competition. But from the 'other side' when there are fewer ISPs then tech companies can be squeezed because there are fewer paths to eye-balls overall and each path has more influence because instead of two ISPs have 10% of Netflix customers, now one has 20%:
Similarly with Amazon and books: while cheap consumer prices may look great, from the book publishers' perspective there's a choke point to readers, and so now the publishers have to consolidate to get market power over Amazon.
And if this goes through, do you think the other Class Is will sit around?
Copy-pasting my comment from elsewhere in the discussion:
"""
If someone on the west coast wants to ship to the east (or vice versa) they can pit UP against BNSF, and then NS against CSX. There are several pairs up because of the two negotiating points:
* UP-NS
* UP-CSX
* BNSF-NS
* BNSP-CSX
If the merger goes through you're now at:
* merged-UPNS
* BNSF-CSX
Do you think UPNS will give a cheaper price for a 'half-trip' and you go to their competitor the other half?
"""
In this case it's not even about non-overlap, it's a straight reduction of competition. You don't think BNSF/CN/CP aren't looking at CSX right now?
I think about a book I found in Texas at a thrift store. Poor's 1925 Railroad Section [1] is a thick book containing details about every (?) railroad in the US such as miles of track, tons hauled, revenue, recent mergers, etc.
I'm not sure whether there is digitized data for railroad performance from the era, but it seemed like it'd be a neat dataset to assemble and research.
...it would also completely fuck any remaining Amtrak traffic that isn't on Amtrak-owned track. Norfolk Southern already routinely ignores the actual on-the-books law that prioritizes passenger traffic over freight, and UP isn't much better out west. BNSF we'll just ignore.
These articles are a good reminder of a bittersweet truth: the US has an incredibly advanced and dense rail network, paid for with federal land grants[1]; we just choose not to use it to benefit travelers. That isn't to say that we need a system that's as good as most European countries have; having these railroad companies follow the laws around Amtrak's priority would be a good start[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_land_grants_in_the_Un...
[2]: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
> the US has an incredibly advanced and dense rail network, paid for with federal land grants
Note that only a small portion of the US rail network was built with land grants, about 18k miles out of ~250k miles in the peak of the US rail network. Also, most of the land-grant railroads are in the Western states, which is actually generally the least-dense portion of the rail network (in large part because the population density of that area is quite low--which is a large part of the reason for the land grants in the first place!).
That's true, but I'd argue that the land grants are what made it economically worthwhile to develop and maintain the denser parts of the network. You correctly observe that the network itself tracks with population density, but the value of the network is in its completeness: it wouldn't be nearly as valuable if there was a 1000 mile hole in it in the middle of the country.
I strongly disagree with that argument.
The main dichotomy in political geography you have in the US is the opposite sides of the Mississippi River. You do have a transitional zone in Illinois (which nowadays as migrated to Chicago), but to a coarse approximation, even the rail magnates of the Gilded Age are unable to build systems that truly cross the transitional zone. In the West, the big prize is connecting the ports on the West Coast with ultimately Chicago, with lesser prizes for feeder lines to bring the products to Chicago. One of the big purposes of the land grants, after all, is to encourage settlement of agricultural lands in the area.
But in the East, the prizes are connecting to the Northeast ports (or Chicago, or to a lesser degree, the other major cities in the Mississippi River). And most of these lines aren't affected by the existence of the Western US. The commercial center, say, an Ohioan is looking towards isn't San Francisco, it's New York City. Rip out the land grant system, and you wouldn't reduce the viability of all of the lines being added in Ohio; although the lines people are working in, say, Indian Territory, will suffer mightily. But the latter are already in the not-dense portion of the network, whereas the former are in the dense part of the network.
It's really not until the mid-20th century that the Pacific Coast takes on the commercial significance that it has nowadays, by which time the railroad trackage of the US is beginning to decline as consolidation takes place.
> Rip out the land grant system, and you wouldn't reduce the viability of all of the lines being added in Ohio; although the lines people are working in, say, Indian Territory, will suffer mightily. But the latter are already in the not-dense portion of the network, whereas the former are in the dense part of the network.
I wasn't just thinking of the far West; I mean also the Southwest. To take an example: I don't think the centralization of meatpacking in the Midwest would have happened to nearly the same degree without land grant-subsidized railroads through Texas, New Mexico, etc. Same for the Gulf Coast with refineries.
But also, I think you're understating the "why" of Chicago being the "big prize" for the West. It's because it opened up California's bread basket to the rest of the country, including the East Coast and European markets represented on the East Coast. The US didn't carry beef, corn, and wheat across the country just to dump it in Lake Michigan; it got carried to Chicago so that it could be sold to points beyond.
Period fiction played on this: Frank Norris never finished The Epic of the Wheat[1], but it was supposed to end in Europe's wheat markets, having started in the San Joaquin valley in the first book. Already in that book, from 1902, is the European market well established:
> “The result is over-production. We supply more than Europe can eat, and down go the prices. The remedy is NOT in the curtailing of our wheat areas, but in this, we MUST HAVE NEW MARKETS, GREATER MARKETS. For years we have been sending our wheat from East to West, from California to Europe. But the time will come when we must send it from West to East."
(Norris confusingly says "East to West" as in "Western Europe.")
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Epic_of_the_Wheat
Fascinating comment thread here - thanks to you both!
Your local library probably has a copy of Nature’s Metropolis, a very well-written, information-dense book that captures much of the reason why it was Chicago rather than, say, St. Louis that became the important link in the railroad system. (In the mid 18th century France and the UK concluded a treaty that made the ‘Illinois Country’ off-limits to Europeans. It depopulated and most people moved to St. Louis. By the time Chicago was much more than an Army fort and a dozen houses, St. Louis was a 100-year old large city).
Incredibly advanced? Bullshit.
Among the G8 we probably have the least-electrified, slowest rail network with the worst Positive Train Control. Probably the most dangerous, too, given how disastrous Precision Railroad Scheduling has been for safety. We also likely have the highest crash and derailment rates.
This is a sad joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control#Deploym...
ASES, ACSES, ETMS, CBTM, CBOSS, E-ATC, ITCS, and whatever Union Pacific is using. That's over half a dozen different systems and none of them are inherently compatible with each other - specialized systems are required to tie the systems together on railways that might have trains with different systems.
I'm guessing no other country in the G8 has issues with freight train movement such that trains routinely bisect towns and entire counties for hours or more and force police, fire, and medical services to reroute, as well as require children to crawl underneath the trains (which could start moving without warning) to get to/from school.
Why? Because the feds are not regulating train lengths nor mandating that trains cannot block road intersections for more than a certain amount of time, so the railways do whatever they please.
I'm guessing no other G8 country has problems with the government (federal, state, or local) having no idea what hazardous materials are being shipped and where...no way to look it up, not noticed by the railroad, nothing.
I grew up in a town of 20k that freight trains would park in the middle of. No one crawled under the train to get to school, you were just late.
It was also paid for by ripping the face of 19th century bondholders who went bust many, many times.
Europes rail network is far worse - but it appears better because you see passanger traffic and don't think what else. That and europe mostly can't see beyond national borders (there is a language barrier with most) and so they fail to create good eu wide rail of any sort.
Far worse in what sense? More tracks, sure the US rail network is about 1.5 times the size of the European network for the same landmass.
But then, I don't think quality wise I don't think you'd encounter a track like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI anywhere in Europe. Or the comparison of high speed tracks 9600km in Europe vs 70 km in the US.
The reason for this is obviously the completely different priorities US is freight, Europe is passenger. So I don't think you can really compare the two networks and say one is clearly better.
The European network is far more fragmented than it seems. There are differences in power supply, track width, station and tunnel width and signalling such that you cannot easily cross borders in a train. There are lots of trains that are equipped for multiple signalling standards and have variable axles. But in general, you can only go to the immediate neigbouring countries, as soon as you cross another border you have to change trains. In some countries, like France, you even have concurring standards within the same network. A hypothetical Lisbon-Moscow connection would need to change trains at least 2, maybe 3 times.
I don't think, therefore, that "total track length" has any useful meaning in Europe.
Here is some maps to illustrate my point:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Europe_rail_electrif...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Track_gauge_in_Europe#/media/F...
Throwing in Moscow with Europe is a choice. Spain and Portugal are doing their own thing according to your rail gauge map, true, but there are many city pairs crossing multiple borders that are accessible nonstop, see the route map for the Austrian sleep railroad, nightjet.
https://www.nightjet.com/en/dam/jcr:6a8041cb-0131-4ad3-84fd-...
Yes. But if you look at the electricity system map, you'll see that those are mostly north-south connections through easy transitions. They skip the south of France, east of Poland. Some of those routes use different locomotives than all the others. And the number of border crossings is limited for that reason.
> track like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9X2A2f6E5DI
I can't believe that the train can actually travel down that track. If I had just come upon that track, there's no way I would have ever thought that it was still an operational track. I'm sure the engineers navigating that track have a lot of colorful opinions about it as well
There's a great video from 1944 of how much rail you have to knock out before derailing a train. Pretty humorous voice over too.
Train Wreck: Experiments To Derail Trains
https://youtu.be/Xplxx0Fc4ew
that VO sounds much more modern than the footage. I was hoping for authentic 1940s voice over like from Newsreel type of footage.
here is a different voice-over: https://youtu.be/RK8cWY7MOtU
also not original, but an explanation in the description: The quality of the audio was poor in the copy of the film we obtained. Some audio restoration was attempted, but the results are less than ideal.
i guess the original audio will remain lost.
here is a related video with some original voice (first original is half a minute in): https://youtu.be/Zz0dadJoyzc?t=36
cool! thanks for digging
While certainly suboptimal track, much of that seems to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perspective_distortion due to extreme telezooming.
picking a worst example isn't inditative of the state of things. The us uses our rail a lot more for freight traffic.
I meant specifically from the perspective of passenger rail, yes. I don't doubt that the US has significantly better freight rail.
(I've crossed borders several times on European trains, and it was never a problem. By contrast, crossing the US-Canada border by train is an exercise in boredom and frustration.)
Notably most of the BN part of BNSF was not built with land grants.
> we just choose not to use it to benefit travelers
The Northeast Corridor is the only viable rail corridor in the US. It could be better, but we absolutely use it. Comparing the US to Europe is a mistake because cities aren't dense enough and are too far apart for European style rail to work.
There's also the fact that American towns aren't dense and are poorly walkable. I'd love to be able to catch a train to the next town over, but once I get there I'd have to walk at least a mile or two to get where I want to go. Not that big a deal for me if the weather was nice and I wasn't in a hurry, but I couldn't rely on that for commuting and I couldn't do it at all if I had a disability.
In cities big enough for a bus service it'd be all right, but you don't usually see that until you get 100k or so people.
What's the argument for the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger [1]? Any rational admin would shoot down the merger immediately as this will create a massive monopoly.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/union-pacific-talks-advance...
Perhaps a monopoly is the way for the rail, preferably state-owned.
Generally I'm heavily against both monopolies and state-controlled companies, but railways seem to be a corner-case where all the downsides and inefficiencies are outweighted by a nation-wide system that actually works.
the tracks should be state-owned, just like public roads, and then train operators should pay for use. (or you could let them use it for free like roads)
that way the state can give priority to passenger rail, and prioritize maintenance and building of rails according to the needs of the people.
it also makes much smaller train operators possible and compete on the same routes.
They share essentially zero miles of track or routes. A move only creates a monopoly if it reduces consumer choice.
No freight customer is deciding "Oh I can either ship from LA to Seattle, or Miami to DC." They are shipping from one fixed location to a different fixed location. These railroads merging does not reduce their choices or give the combined entity more leverage.
> They are shipping from one fixed location to a different fixed location. These railroads merging does not reduce their choices or give the combined entity more leverage.
If someone on the US west coast wants to ship to the US east (or vice versa) they can pit UP against BNSF, and then NS against CSX. There are a few pairs up because of the two negotiating points:
* UP-NS
* UP-CSX
* BNSF-NS
* BNSP-CSX
If the merger goes through you're now at:
* merged-UPNS
* BNSF-CSX
Do you think UPNS will give a cheaper price for a 'half-trip' and you go to their competitor the other half?
You don't think BNSF/CN/CP aren't looking at CSX right now?
That is a big assumption on your part that east coast ports don't compete with west coast ports
How about monopsony?
> What's the argument for the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger [1]?
'Cost savings through synergies which will be passed down to customers.'
(And certainly not shareholders and suits making more money.)
Consolidation reduces competition and increases margins. The rest of the market and the people are sacrificed at the altar of shareholder value.
NS and UP do not meaningfully compete today, their networks have very little overlap.
The two compete reciprocally: business can either enter their system or a competitor's for the parts of the rail network that they control, which means bartering power. A single nationwide system would have fewer incentives to compete on pricing.
The rail industry has been trying to complete and end to end lashup merger since the 50's - had that been allowed in the 50's we might not have needed to spend billions on Conrail in the 70's and 80's.
A different regulatory attitude in the 50's, not just towards M&A but rates and routes, and mandatory services, would have prevented the bailouts we had to do in the aftermath of the Penn Central. Nearly every Class I carrier was in poor financial shape by the time the industry was deregulated in the late 70's, much of the 'capacity crunch' we have today in the rail industry is related to the contraction the industry went thru in that period, where they shed assets and lines in an attempt to resize their cost structure to the amount of revenue they were allowed to realize from their route networks.
Okay. That’s a very different argument than the original one: we’ve gone from “it wouldn’t be a competitive risk” to “the reduction in competition would have made midcentury rail profitable such that Conrail wouldn’t have been necessary.” But that presumes a change in bartering power and operating efficiency that can only come in a less competitive rail market.
Back then it would have given them a competitive advantage over their peers because of faster end to end performance.
Other than some of your head office folks (accounting, HR, etc) there wasnt much of a greater operating efficiency to be gained, nor do I think they would have gotten significantly lower costs (but for maybe fuel) by squeezing their vendors either.
I think that rationale holds true today too.
When we allowed the UP-SP and BN-SF lashups, we created two western colossuses, if we still had four roads in the west, and had they encouraged east/west mergers at that time, things would be better off today.
Monopoly? No. Union Pacific plus Norfolk Southern would have a monopoly on single-line end-to-end rail service in the US, true, but that's the kind of thing that you can get a "monopoly" in. BNSF and CSX interchange with each other, after all. And BNSF and CSX could (and almost certainly would) merge in response. So there's no monopoly argument.
Which doesn't mean that a rational regulator would not turn it down anyway. But rational regulators may not be running the show at the moment. UP sees that there may be an opportunity during the Trump administration. (Note "may" - nobody knows whether there is an opportunity, but there is more of a chance than there was under Biden.)
> Monopoly? No.
How about oligopoly then.
If UP/NS happens, we're down from six to five Class Is (ignoring Amtrak):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Class_I_railroads
Then BNSF/CSX? Or CN or CP go after CSX? That's four.
Do we start seeing the acquiring of Class IIs?
A regulated monopoly might be appropriate for something like a railroad. It doesn't really make sense for competing railroads to all run their own tracks between the same destinations. We give monopolies to utilities for this reason.
Or maybe all trackage should be government-owned, like streets and highways are. Then any operator can pay a toll and run their trains on any tracks. Traffic coordination is left as an exercise for the reader.
It's already an oligopoly. Most cities only have one or two. Of the few cities that have three or four (Chicago, say), the merger would reduce that by one.
Let's say you want to ship from Denver to Atlanta. In Denver, you hand your stuff over to either Union Pacific or BNSF. In Atlanta, you receive it from either NS or CSX. You only have two options in Denver, and only two in Atlanta. The merger doesn't change that at all.
> It's already an oligopoly.
So reducing competition to move further over on the oligopoly spectrum is good how?
why bother going through the performative charade of quoting four words of their post just to respond with something that so flagrantly betrays, charitably, your not having read what they said at all or, less charitably, willfully misconstruing it because you happen to disagree. maybe i'm just the simpleton you are pretending to be with the snarky faux folksy affect, but... "moving further over on the intellectually honest to arrogantly disingenuous spectrum is good how?"
what's worse is that the "more of a bad thing is prima facie worse" argument is so facile that it strains credulity to believe that even you think that it's actually true. i think we would all agree that, ceteris paribus, higher food prices are bad, for example, but i doubt anyone would mistake that for a reason to never do anything that might raise the price of food. the irony of it all is that you managed to turn siding with conventional wisdom-- usually a good bet, by definition-- into a no-upside proposition: either you are right but for the wrong reason-- a pyrrhic victory-- or not just wrong, but arrogantly so.
can we just leave the grandstanding and begging the question to our elected representatives during congressional hearings on C-SPAN where it belongs?
The rules that govern American railroads are impressively weird and arcane. They seem almost impossible to unravel at this point. Which is a shame, because so many American cities sacrifice the central corridors of their city to huge railyards and slow-moving freight trains.
I think of Portland, Oregon, where the tracks run north/south along the river. You can see them sitting there empty while you're stuck in traffic on I-5, which runs parallel. Running a commuter rail or light rail on those things would make life a lot less miserable trying to get around the city.
Portland is kind of weird because it has big yards for two Class Is in town. But they're both right on the waterfront (which is bad for urban transit, since it means half the walkshed is wasted). The BNSF line doesn't go anywhere useful on the west bank of the river. The useful parts of the UP line on the east bank of the river are essentially duplicated by the MAX lines to Expo Center and Milwaukie. The main useful thing you could get out of the Class I lines in Greater Portland is a S-Bahn-like service to Vancouver, WA IMO.
They said to keep Portland weird, but I don't think this is what they meant :)
I do think an S-Bahn style service would be interesting to pursue. Or even just regular commuter rail. The MAX is too slow for long distance commuting (it's usually faster just to sit in traffic), and it crucially doesn't go into Vancouver yet.
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> heavily subsidized by the tax slave called the European worker,
> people like you are still not satisfied
> wanted to control people’s freedom of movement and/or can’t stand that people would have freedom of movement you don’t have
You can't comment like this on HN and we have to ban accounts that do it repeatedly. This style of commenting is not what HN is for and it destroys what it is for. HN is only a place where people want to participate because other people make an effort to keep the standards up. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
> it exposes that it really was never about emissions or combustion or pollution, you either wanted to control people’s freedom of movement
This isn’t the problem- the real problem is that in dense cities, transporting everyone where they want to go via private vehicles just doesn’t work geometrically- see the traffic and parking needs that grow as cities grow assuming private vehicle use only.You end up needing a more space-efficient form of moving people, namely public transit.
Public transit also doesn't scale. Germany, during the Covid years, introduced a cheap country-wide flat fee ticket (~50 bucks per month, all you can ride) for public transit. Which lead to road traffic going down measurably. Which lead to trains and busses being packed, people traveling more and farther on those. Leading to higher cost, degraded service and packed bus stations and rail lines. Building more of those isn't possible geometrically as well, cities are already packed. We are currently, at tremendous cost and effort, moving railway lines and stations underground, like Stuttgart 21, for that reason.
The point is, moving people inherently is bad. Shifting from cars to public transit reduces the badness a little, but you still need infrastructure that scales O(p * s * f), where p is the number of people, s is the average distance travelled per journey, and f is the frequency of journeys. Scaling doesn't change the slightest bit with public transit, you just have a different constant factor which is irrelevant for scalability.
So the solution isn't public transit. It is the avoidance of any unnecessary travel, meaning that we actually need something like a tax on non-home-office jobs and stores that you personally have to visit (as opposed to shopping online). We need better delivery infrastructure so people don't need to travel. We need close-to-home shopping options. Because actually moving goods instead of people scales logarithmically, the network of countrywide, regional, local distribution centers, bigger shops, smaller shops behaves like a tree.
> you just have a different constant factor which is irrelevant for scalability.
So then why bother with cities at all? High rises are just a different constant factor relative to 40 acre farms after all.
I feel like this is analogous to a case where someone says that an algorithm only differs by a constant factor but it turns out that because of that difference it hits the cache for 99% of use cases and as a result you see better than 100x speedups for all real world workloads.
Cities with cars obviously work up to some size. The sheer number of personal vehicle trips that a single rail line can replace is huge. And just to give you an idea of how large the scale factor here is, consider that you can pack at least 3 rail lines into the width of a typical two lane road, and that large cities commonly have 4 lane arterials.
If the political will existed to reallocate the space it could be done and the viable density would scale accordingly. On the extreme end we have Tokyo as a practical example, and even they are far from saturating all the available space for building rail lines.
> moving goods instead of people scales logarithmically
This is obviously false. There's some average parcel size, and an associated maximum capacity for a delivery van. Thus any given delivery run has a limit on the number of shipments it can service. Obviously that scale factor is significantly larger than the one for passenger rail versus cars, but it's still "just" a constant factor and thus irrelevant for scalability by your own logic.
In fact by your own logic I'm fairly certain that you will find that life as a whole is unscalable. Better nuke the planet I guess.
> So then why bother with cities at all? High rises are just a different constant factor relative to 40 acre farms after all.
Because of the logarithmic scaling of infrastructure (like supermarkets, doctors, hospitals), and because of the square root scaling of people-density per area vs. total travel distance to said infrastructure.
>> moving goods instead of people scales logarithmically > This is obviously false. There's some average parcel size, and an associated maximum capacity for a delivery van.
You do move bananas by ship from continent to continent. Then you split it up, move it by smaller ships up-river. Then you split it up, move it by truck to each cities distribution center. Then you split it up, move it by smaller truck to each store. Then people buy it.
Obviously logarithmic and the whole reason for ships and freight trains to exist, otherwise we would all get our tropical fruit in person by airplane.
And since we are on a CS-heavy site, talking about scalability, constant factors are irrelevant. That is what scalability means. It is the extrapolation to big numbers, where those constants no longer matter anymore. Of course there might be a local equilibrium for sufficiently small numbers. But that is always temporary as humanity keeps growing.
I take it you've never examined thev theoretical landscape of matrix multiplication algorithms?
The splitting you describe could be carried out just as easily with human transportation as with fruits and vegetables. I still object that it isn't logarithmic in either the space or trip requirement though. It's linear with one of those constant factors that you say are irrelevant. Just as you can never move a human using less than a human sized volume, you can never move a banana using less than a banana sized volume. Hence, linear.
> you seem to not understand how America functions > you can rage against the system all you want [with] wishful thinking and obsessions > people like you are still not satisfied > you either wanted to control people’s freedom of movement > want them to also be miserable with you
I was just ideating on Portland traffic, dawg
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The cynical take is that two public company CEOs have run out of ideas for further stock growth and are looking for anything else that will juice the share price in the short term.
Neither company is so inefficient that you can save much of anything by combining the two, and there is only so far you can raise prices before customers switch to trucks or send container ships to different ports of call. With no overlapping territory, you aren't going to cut the number of trains you run and you can't get rid of half your maintenance staff (can you?).
Investment banks will do well running the merger and surely they'll issue debt to finance it. But what kind of growth can we really expect?
Wikipedia has a combined map of UP & NS, for some reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Union_Pacific_and_Norfolk...
And ethanol plants, which I was surprised to find out is actually a big deal for rail (or rail is a big deal for ethanol?). I guess I never put much thought into how much of it was being produced and how it was being moved around.
https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_railNA_a_EPOOXE_RAIL_m...
Most industrial plants have rail connections to move bulk materials. It’s more economical than trucks for some stuff. Chemicals, crude oil, cut lumber, all cheaper by rail than by truck - though trucks haul 65%+ of goods in America, they are often used for last mile for those materials.
Chemical plants in general have rail spurs to move products out and raw materials in.
Private railroads are a mistake. Let's see what the private railroad industry has done.
The railroads kept reducing their workforce to get an uptick in profitability, so much so that there wasn't enough spare capacity for railroad workers to get paid sick leave of any kind. The railroad workforce were taking industrial action to get paid sick leave. What happened? Congress stepped in to use legislation to end a labor dispute for essential workers to side with the company. Oh and this was under Biden. As an aside, a later deal was made to give them a handful of paid sick days, quietly.
If the railroad caved to 100% of the union's demands it would've cost 6% of the company's profits. Not revenue. Profits.
The other is an industry wide effort called Precision Scheduled Railroads ("PSR"). Basically this means having trains with twice as many carriages and skipping safety chcecks because that costs money.
There are over 1000 train derailments a year. Most of these aren't a big deal. Others are like East Palestine, Ohio a few years ago, which caused a toxic spill in a populated area, something that continues to be an issue [1]. A lot of toxic chemicals are transported by rail. What was insane was the media didn't report on the East Palestine derailment for a week to 10 days despite there being a black toxic plume that could be seen from space. They were finally embarrassed into covering it by social media, particularly Tiktok.
All railroad companies do to maintain and increase profits is cut costs, pretty much like every other company. That means suppressing wages, skimping on maintenance and safety and not investing in fixing anything.
[1]: https://www.npr.org/2024/02/05/1228772709/east-palestine-tra...
They built the railroads, often on their own dime, and paid taxes by the fistful for them.
Their competition was subsidized by the general government, and continues to be every year.
If you want to argue that nationalizing railroads should be done for the public good, do that - dont just demonize them, because its not a fully winning argument.
They spend a LOT on lobbying and politics.
> There are over 1000 train derailments a year.
No surprise when the rails are utter dogshit. Something like [1] - you can clearly see how incredibly uneven the track is - which flies over my youtube feed way too much for my liking would yield immediate regulatory action here in Germany.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/A0ZYKJm-tno
Would this have an impact on Amtrak service? The trains in my area often get stopped by freight traffic, and Chicago is pretty much a mandatory change-over point. Could this allow some routes to open up connecting each side of the Mississippi more fluidly in the longer term?
We got a new route (well, a new train running on a segment of an existing route, offering more flexibility for scheduling) from MSP to CHI recently, which has been great.
I don’t see how Amtrak survives the next 3 years
What’s changed? That general sentiment has been around for the last 15-20 years but they keep plugging along.
The gridlock in Washington has been mostly resolved. The party is power can do pretty much anything. And the current party is power is against Amtrak .
I'm not disputing the party in power and how it hates Amtrak, but how many bills did the House pass so far this year?
Gridlock got replaced with monumental Republican incompetence.
He can just replace the board, stop writing checks, or send someone to kick them out of their building. All apparently legal.
Sure hope they do. Ridership is at record levels, if they get shut down it's certainly not for lack of demand.
Let them run the railroad, let others run the trains.
Britain tried that. Network Rail, a unit of the Government, owns the tracks, and 28 or so Train Operating Companies run the trains.
The UK started out with railroads in private ownership. They were nationalized in 1948, as British Rail. Then they were de-nationalized in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, they're being re-nationalized.
None of this is considered a huge success.
I would argue the rail/train ownership split was the least bad bit of this tbh.
What does this comment mean?
When one company controls both the trains AND the infrastructure, it results in an unfair advantage over anyone else wishing to use the rail. Commuter trains needing to pull over to let cargo trains from the parent company through, for example.
Which doesn't seem like a particular issr with commuter rail (or Northeast Corridor) in general. It is an issue on long distance rail as I understand it especially when passenger trains get off schedule which is often.
Having ridden the Northeast Corridor end-to-end the entire route, by far the worst section to traverse on Amtrak is western Connecticut. Which also happens to be the only bit of the NEC that Amtrak doesn't own--it's owned by Metro North instead.
I think the NE corridor has a dedicated right of way
More or less. I believe they still share railways with freight but different situation from the rest of the country as a whole.
Unfair? How is that unfair? If I built the track, then I own the track, and I decide what runs on the track. Anybody else thinking they have the right to run on it can get lost. A private railroad line is not an open-access situation. They'll carry your railroad car, but they'll do it in their train. Any argument otherwise is an argument against private ownership, which I view extremely skeptically.
(It's a little different in the case of commuter rail, where there's a contractual arrangement.)
You are willfully ignoring the reality that building a competing rail network that services the same area is wildly impractical given the land requirements.
This is the same argument behind having multiple providers to share one set of power lines, telephone cables, etc. Duplicate copies of physical infrastructure are pointless, wasteful, and unlikely to occur in practice, so there’s rarely competitive pressure.
We did it with subways in NYC, why not with rail lines over farmland?
How much government funding went, directly or indirectly, into building the track? What sort of deals where put in place to facilitate building them? Where did all that land come from? What sort of special rights (e.g. the ability to build level crossings) have railways been granted?
How did you get the land for the track?
By buying it. Even the land-grant railroads bought the land, in the form of carrying the US mail at reduced rates for the next 80 years. (During World War 2, when the government was desperate for money, they let the railroads buy themselves out of the reduced mail rates. So it worked out to payments for 80 years with a balloon payment at the end.)
Things get complicated with a common good like land. It's not particularly just that just because someone purchased some natural resource a hundred years ago people who weren't even born at the time are screwed. Presumably every generation should have a say in how society operates.
I see. So you are suggesting like a Standard Oil or British Rail type breakup?
No, they're suggesting something more along the lines of Standard Oil being required to refine anyone's oil in their refinery, or carry it in their pipelines. But the one suggesting it didn't offer to let anyone stay in their house, and to me that's the same issue. Does the owner of private property get to control access and use, or not?
You say that the railroad is a business, not a private residence. All right, does Home Depot have to let Lowe's use part of their floor space? No, they don't.
Property owners generally don't have complete freedom to control access, hence easements.
Even if those weren't a thing, there's a coherent political view (which I'm not arguing for) that "resolves" the issue: nationalizing the infrastructure and licensing access back like the UK.
It's a strawman though. There's no reason anyone needs to hold identical political views on the property rights of private houses, home improvement stores, and rail infrastructure. They're different things.
Trying to split infrastructure from operations hasn't worked out well in the UK, and the US version for passengers isn't doing so hot either.
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FWIW, while the instinctive response here will be that this is a monopolistic and anti-consumer play, the reality is that these companies share almost zero routes. There's no real way for railroads to be be competitive unless they are fighting for the same customers (and UP/NS are not).
So, the statements about improved operational efficiency are not totally implausible.
> FWIW, while the instinctive response here will be that this is a monopolistic and anti-consumer play, the reality is that these companies share almost zero routes.
And cable companies also don't have overlapping territory, so from the consumer point of view it did not reduce competition. But from the 'other side' when there are fewer ISPs then tech companies can be squeezed because there are fewer paths to eye-balls overall and each path has more influence because instead of two ISPs have 10% of Netflix customers, now one has 20%:
* https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...
Similarly with Amazon and books: while cheap consumer prices may look great, from the book publishers' perspective there's a choke point to readers, and so now the publishers have to consolidate to get market power over Amazon.
And if this goes through, do you think the other Class Is will sit around?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Class_I_railroads
CSX is mostly east of the Mississippi, while BNSF is west: what about that kind of merger? Or CN or CP doing the same thing?
Who is the equivalent of Netflix in this relationship? You can't draw fuzzy-wuzzy analogies without actually spelling out the connection.
Freight rail is not an eyeball market, the customers are the ones paying.
Copy-pasting my comment from elsewhere in the discussion:
""" If someone on the west coast wants to ship to the east (or vice versa) they can pit UP against BNSF, and then NS against CSX. There are several pairs up because of the two negotiating points:
* UP-NS
* UP-CSX
* BNSF-NS
* BNSP-CSX
If the merger goes through you're now at:
* merged-UPNS
* BNSF-CSX
Do you think UPNS will give a cheaper price for a 'half-trip' and you go to their competitor the other half? """
In this case it's not even about non-overlap, it's a straight reduction of competition. You don't think BNSF/CN/CP aren't looking at CSX right now?
I'd regard Trains magazine as experts in the industry.
That said, they're obviously reluctant to criticize the larger railroads.
Any time I hear the names of train companies in America, I am always transported back a few decades, playing Rail Baron with my family.
For those that have never heard of that game, please enjoy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neWZVhmSFJs
Ticket to Ride is thought to be RB's natural successor.
ref: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/94883/rail-baron-comparing-...
I think about a book I found in Texas at a thrift store. Poor's 1925 Railroad Section [1] is a thick book containing details about every (?) railroad in the US such as miles of track, tons hauled, revenue, recent mergers, etc.
I'm not sure whether there is digitized data for railroad performance from the era, but it seemed like it'd be a neat dataset to assemble and research.
https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Poors-1925-Railroad-S...
Welp, there goes the brand new HQ that Norfolk Southern built in Atlanta...
More likely the UP headquarters in Omaha, just like Enron moving Northern Natural Gas to Houston
...it would also completely fuck any remaining Amtrak traffic that isn't on Amtrak-owned track. Norfolk Southern already routinely ignores the actual on-the-books law that prioritizes passenger traffic over freight, and UP isn't much better out west. BNSF we'll just ignore.