this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2024
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Don't even need to lay down rails. The rails are already there. Built by Chinese slave labor 150 years ago. We need merely to seize them.
Or just cut a check to the freight companies.
Many cities paved over their tram lines. Sometimes they poke through during road work. We had trams in nearly every city 100 years ago yet today people tell me we can't afford it or our population is too small to support it. If we could do it 100 years ago we could certainly do it now.
Even the rural college town my grandma grew up in had tram lines running down the main streets in the 30's and to both colleges. If a city had more than 20,000 residents 100 years ago, they probably had a tram system that was pulled up at GM's behest.
We've still got the major line going through our town, but the spurs, what connected to the mines and factories, are all paved over. I moved across town a decade ago, and the train went by a mile away at 1am at the old place. I now wake up at 1am every night because there's no damn train. I should probably set a short, quiet, train honk alarm or something and see if that helps.
I'd be very concerned about the state and safety of those rails.
Amtrak currently runs trains on the freight tracks, but as Amtrak essentially leases the privilege of using the tracks at all from CSX and BNSF and Union Pacific and the like, their traffic gets heavily deprioritized to freight trains. You can totally catch a train from Fort Worth to Los Angeles, but it will take a few days longer than driving, will be almost as expensive as flying, and the train will be delayed many times for freight traffic.
If the federal government nationalized the rails, put them under the care of the FRA, properly funded Amtrak, and gave it a healthy advertising budget to let people know rail is the clear choice for medium length trips (like Chicago to St. Louis), there's no reason we couldn't send passengers on the same rails and with the same priority as freight trains. They're perfectly safe, and the reason we've been hearing about so many train wrecks lately is the degradation of work conditions for rail workers. Longer trains and longer hours make for more dangerous operating conditions and more frequent wrecks.
And while the trains wouldn't run 190 miles an hour, many long, straight stretches do exist, and it's not unheard of for a train to be running 80-100 miles an hour on those stretches. That kind of speed is very doable for passenger rail. Hell, some Amtrak trains are capable of 150 miles an hour.
My point wasn't to use 150 year old rails. It's that the rails already exist so it doesn't need to be a decades-long multi-trillion dollar project. It's highly unlikely that any of the rails in use today are from the 19th century.
Gotta be honest, it doesn't make sense to cross the Rockies on rail as is right now. We've either gotta get japan speed from Washington state to LA then over to Dallas with north south lines up to Utah, Idaho and Montana or drill straight fucking through the damn mountains. It takes 24 hours to take a train direct from Sacramento to SLC. I can drive that in 12 (breaks included) or fly that in 3 (including airport time), all for around the same cost (if I get cheap tickets). I haven't even looked at the train from SLC to Denver or anywhere on the other side of the Rockies, but I'm sure it's just as ridiculous.
Don't get me wrong, the train through the Sierras can be gorgeous, but I don't want to spend 24 hours traveling when I could be spending 3. We only get so much time off.