One of those mostly invisible things people don't know about is the New York and Atlantic Railroad, which is basically a private group that has been contracted to take over the freight operations that were previously run by the Long Island Rail Road. You can see some of their locomotives in the picture.
The short line connecting railroad mentioned sounds like its the NY&NJ, which is actually a barge float operation between the 65th st yard and Bayonne iirc. There are certainly ways to avoid this barge, but they are rather circuitous, and could only maybe be done at night otherwise the slow freight trains would get in the way of normal passenger service on those tracks.
And describing an extra siding on the Bay Ridge Branch as a "new terminal" is a bit misleading.
Yes, but I don't think there is a rail route to there from west of NYC. Besides barges and passenger rail tunnels, it looks like the only rail crossing over the Hudson is over 100 miles up river.
These freight and passenger lines weren't built separately. They were literally part of the same railroad.
Though I do admit the shortline barge is still a reasonable option to avoid the scheduling and bureaucratic complications of the "Penn-freight" route.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_freight_transport#Regiona...
But whatever the actual ranking, the volume of rail freight is very high.
The US ranks decently high in passenger miles as well, but that's just because we're a huge country, not because trains are regularly used by people in the US.
Not the long-distance Amtraks across the country.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_us...
If you remove that particular outlier (that basically drowns out everything else), the US's rail is pretty trash.
Or look at coverage; US rail companies will abandon profitable routes because they're fixated on improving the average profitability instead of absolute profits.
Nobody who knows much about railways is impressed by the US's railway system. Electrification is cheaper in the long run, and yet the US railway system is <1% electrified, because it's not profitable in the short term and all the railway companies are horrifically allergic to anything that won't be profitable within the decade. The US rail system is slowly falling apart, because while it makes sense in the long term to maintain it, it won't earn a profit now.
Each place is adapted to the geography.
In Europe, the coal or ore may well be loaded onto a barge. The rivers here follow some useful routes, and the continent is surrounded by sea on three sides.
The USA doesn't have such convenient waterways.
Similarly, a container ship will make multiple stops around Europe, so there's less need to have a huge freight railway from Greece to the Netherlands.
I think most people, including journalists, don’t know or think much about trains. Or whatever they know it’s about passenger trains and they compare those with European ones.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09213...
So they didn't have to buy land and fight with multiple levels of government about land use, which would have been the hard part.
for freight there were different considerations and electric didn't have the needed power.
Steam was more fuel efficient than diesel when it was replaced. But a diesel engine could start in less than a few hours, and needed one less person on the crew so it was cheaper overall.
No better way to travel than sitting in a train's comfortable dining car, watching the world flash by and getting where you're going.
Case point - Switzerland, the place of trains - coverage, precision, cleanness, small dense place. I live here. If you take a family of 4 they are roughly 4x more expensive than taking a car, even with their half-card (which for a family of four would be maybe 600 annually). Highways are still chock full of cars and its growing every year steadily. Unless you travel between train stations (or sometimes from city A to city B), but rather from/to rural areas (which are anyway connected via Post buses, having trains everywhere would ruin this country) they are much slower (ie 1h vs 3h to get to/from some mountain hiking spot). God forbid you want to travel further, cross sea or even big lake.
Don't look for salvation of personal transport there, that's a very definition of pipe dream currently.
The positive externalities of rail also make it cost effective to subsidize. Here in Queensland, all public transport now only costs 50c a trip (about 30 eurocents), making travel between our two largest cities (a trip of about 71km) super fast and cheap.
Trains have been around long enough to fill their niches. There's a reason if they haven't.
Some of the headwinds are bad reasons (like status games of showing off your expensive car). However some of the reasons are because trains suck.
There's a train I love to take from my city on holiday, but it's rather inconvenient and costly.
Here in the Netherlands there's actually fewer routes than a 100 years ago (country was full of local 'intertown' trams then). Housing stock has expanded a few times over since the war, but rail routes (light of heavy) stayed put. It's ridiculous to build a 5000 home neighborhood and not plunk down some steel bars! Or at least reserve the space. Meanwhile, bus services are down YoY in frequency, reach. They now basically only serve as a last resort for those that really have no other options and thus can be forced to deal with incredible transit durations.
Even cycling, which in denser cities can absorb some of the commuter traffic, is not encouraged as part of mixed transport. Tax law is such that one modality can be compensated.
The Netherlands has none of the geology to deal with that Switzerland has, so I don't know what excuse there is. All energy went into cycling I suppose. Not bad, but it's about the network, and never about the one modality.
Where I come from, taxes are comparatively low. So it's weird to see people talking about them influencing their behavior so significantly. That's a lot of power the government has... I'd rather keep my money than let bureaucrats spend it to manipulate the public's behavior.
Taxing cars puts the cost of those roads more directly on the users of them.
Whoever is left driving cars (which is, also in the Netherlands, a large fraction), can't for instance drive up to some remote train station, and rail the rest. That's how you can get those who still drive out of their cars; those that already take trains are covered by the rules as they are.
This is normal pretty much throughout europe on long distance trains. I know at the very least it's standard in Germany, France, Austria, and Italy. Maybe you're thinking of regional commuter trains that don't have dining cars?
That you're using multiple qualifiers here suggests that these could still be exceptions.
Intercity Express is the high speed long distance train, and are the most common long distance trains by a long shot. They're the ones that have the dining cars. Regular Intercity trains usually don't have dining cars, but they're rather rare. I've still never actually ridden one because they're almost never used (since Intercity Express is so sucessful, and the Regional trains are fast enough for journeys of around 200km)
95% of passengers are not sitting in a dining car watching the world go by in an Amtrak style experience.
Over the last few decades they have generally died out on shorter intercity routes, granted.
The future is actually some kind of teleportation, which is equally feasible in places like where I live when rail is dead on arrival.
The problem is NYC/NY are quite solidified and building new rail lines is neigh impossible as you'll need to start eminent domaining land or, spending years fighting NIMBYs for land that is already zoned and allocated for the use.
The only news here is they found an existing property with rail connections they can piggy back on.
I have heard that rail is heavily subsidized, and trucking is possibly taxed. But their operating procedures have to account for a lot of it.
Which one? Hope she isn’t referring to the gateway project.
This is a classic Elon musk project-problem. Hyperloop freight to NYC for the next ten years and then converting that to people travel. And then to commuter travel over the course of fifty years. Govt funding would be needed because no one would be able to predict how much travel will change in the next 50 years. But a gamble is worth it.
jcranmer•9mo ago
I assume this is referring to the proposed Cross Harbor Tunnel, which the furthest it's gotten is announcing the preparation of a Tier II EIS which appears to have nobody working on it, judging from recent FOIA requests (https://bqrail.substack.com/p/no-activity-on-the-cross-harbo...).