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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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Passenger trains? We have more than one? Looking at the schedule you'd think one singular train services all of Via Rail.
You have:
• Toronto's rail system that generally has its own tracks
• Vancouver's commuter train, which already has priority, but because of laws forbidding the movement of dangerous cargo at the same time as passenger trains, CN intentionally kneecaps the line and refuses to let it expand.
• And Via Rail, which has exactly one train in all of BC and it costs over 2k per ticket per seat.
Yeah I wanted to train ride from my place to Edmonton. $2K plus a night stay in Jasper. I could fly 3 times for that.
Via Rail has two if you count the Prince Rupert/Prince George train... but to get there from where people exist in British Columbia, you have to go to Alberta and back.
US needs to follow Canada’s lead on this one!
The US already has that law on the books, it's just not enforced.
No kidding? That’s tragic…
Yeah, we let freight trains get so long that they don't fit into the areas where they'd normally wait to let passenger trains through. Since they don't fit, they don't have to wait or yield the right of way to passenger trains.
Should be illegal to run a train too long to fit in the waiting areas.
It's not just the fact they no longer fit in sidings but every aspect that ends up hurting passenger rail on time preformace. Trains are getting so long they don't fit within a yards switching lead which blocks the main tracks. They are limiting horse power per tonnage so strictly that there's only just barely enough to crawl up grades. There's no room for error with these trains and it's a merical they haven't caused a serious derailment.
Allowing trains this long on the rails kinda feels like letting people drive a Canyonero through the carpool lane
The amount of industry actively opposing this in Washington is the reason we have plenty of freight trains and rail but very limited passenger transport. In fact, so much of America’s rail system is private that public transportation would have to either be serviced by the freight companies or would have to pay for second-tier access to the rail systems, after negotiating with a plethora of private rail companies.
Here is one of the most significant train lobbyist groups, you can see their priorities in the first main paragraph: increase freight and maintain privatization of rail.
If Richard Nixon had nationalized the infrastructure nationwide instead of just the passenger operations...
If Reagan hadn't re-privatized ConRail...
I'm guessing they don't put forward any arguments related to their climate impact, but out of curiosity do we know how prioritizing passenger trains in the US impacts the way these goods are transported ? Is this a minor inconvenience for the industry that's they're fussing about and nothing would actually change, or would the goods have to significantly shift to truck transportation ?
I live in a country where there's the opposite problem: we have a lot of passenger trains, but they're attempting to revive freight trains because truck transportation is quite CO2 costly. Reduced emissions are definitely only one advantage amongst many for public trains, but I'm wondering how much you save/lose by replacing(?) one freight train passing with passenger train.
What a coincidence, just yesterday we were all complaining about the sad state of Canadian passenger rail over on lemmy.ca, and now there's a bunch of good news.