a satellite view of the mississippi river valley in AR/TN highlighting locations of steel mills
As manufacturing continues moving southwards and outwards from cities, it's fascinating to watch new clusters emerge. A good example: the string of 5 steel mills north of Memphis. They're low-profile and (relatively) low-employment--but are now the most significant group of plants outside of Chicago
If you have an ax to grind with it's the regulatory capture of the FRA by the ARR that stifles innovation.
I mean I was a Class 1 field manager trainee, they absolutely look abroad. At Australia, and gaps sometimes even European tech I recall being mentioned in the on boarding process being investigated in 2018-19. Class 1s are incredibly opaque institutions that share very little with the outside.
To just assume they never look outside is laughable. On my division we were testing out Italian style white walled rails for mitigating heat. back before COVID for Example. They never figured out the economics of painting the rails at scale so they didn't pursue it was what I was told.
This train is one of many that exports New York City's export trash to a network of landfills and incinerators across the eastern United States. As urban landfills reach capacity, arrangements like this one will likely become more common.
Sometimes shit fails while you're moving it, but yes the conductor and all crew are supposed to have their eyes out for these kinds of issues. I was MOW and we had to call a train master more than once for similar issues.
good EPISODE. i FORCED my WIFE to listen to THE BIT about BIG LIZ she AGREED it was FUNNY
Waaaaaaaay too expensive when the most likely area for it to be an issue is immediately after getting picked up or switched. Think lumber cars, flat cars with weird loads, scrap gons, boxcars improperly loaded shifting when getting switched.
Here is at least a freight derailment caused by an unsecured load example.
www.progressiverailroading.com/federal_legi...
It's from a 1981 DOT electrification study.
That's enough rewiring that you may as well just put the whole thing on the primary locomotives. Don't give them the excuse of "excessive operational complexity" that dealing with B units would give them.
Don't share this with a Class 1 it'll scare them.
Not sure, most of my time at a class 1 was with limited exposure to passenger ops besides a twice a day long distance train on trackage with incredibly generous track spacing.
T4 should have been a wake up call about electrification but the railroads settled with motive power that will shoot pistons out of engines half a football field away instead. (That actually happened)
Dragging/loose equipment hazards were bad enough that it was a particularly emphasized part of safety training. It's not just the railroads fault with this, It's also every shipper having to properly secure their loads. Which doesn't always happen.
Low emissions systems and reliability are goals at odds with each other
www.ntsb.gov/investigatio...
NTSB sliding in at the buzzer before government shutdown recommending SEPTA sideline all silverliner IVs (2/3rds of the regional rail fleet) until they can stop them from catching fire
I thought that was a freight only rule
Anecdotally, I know a lot of people who tried it for the first time after 2020 and many whose only real barrier to taking it more is the cost when buying a ticket on short notice for personal travel.
Also, Amtrak ridership growth was going strong throughout the 2010s.
Also, in an increasingly environmentally conscious public, anything on the NEC is more attractive to many, even if often the carbon math isn't that wide of a gulf once you're talking about non-automobile options.
If I had to guess it was a confluence of multiple factors at once both a large wave so soft marketing via social buzz about taking trains in social media, covid making the flying experience even less attractive, the growth of remote work...
If you're lucky, they acknowledge its existence but say it's "just too expensive" or laughably that the country is "just too big".
The industry can only bury its head in the sand for so long before the rot takes ever deeper roots.
There are still tons of people in the industry and around it in North America that will lie to your face or are totally oblivious to anything going on outside of NA and say that double stack trains under wire are impossible while China and India blaze on past us into the future.
The North American rail industry can't just keep acting like what they are doing now is anywhere near enough. They lack the imagination and vision they had just half a century ago. They are no longer ready to meet the demands of modern overland freight transportation without a serious shakeup.
Yes, granted the physical volume of lighter goods means that even when in double stack containers to get similar tonnage moved is difficult. Coal tonnage by rail has continued to drop like a rock freeing up track capacity in some areas for more internmodal traffic. www.aar.org/wp-content/u...
The extent to which China has dramatically shifted over most bulk freight from trucking over to rail in the past 10 years has been dramatically underreported in the West
theicct.org/publication/...
An oft-quoted claim about US freight is that it's the best in the world. The trouble is, as soon as you actually look at the data, it isn't by a long measure.
We have a ton of structural aspects that make the NA freight rail system look great on paper but it could be so much better if it can get it's head out of it's ass about investing in it's self both for physical infrastructure and equipment modernization to enable better operations practices.
Yeah formerly working for a Class 1 has made the narrative about the US freight rail system being unparalleled is getting exhausting. Seeing China starting to roll out electrification for double stack container routes, India build whole new trunk lines, Europe get closer to a rollout of DACs, ect.