Originally Posted by
noglider
There is a middle ground between the level of service the northeast has and that of the rest of the country. The guy known as City Nerd makes some fascinating arguments about how rail makes sense between pairs or triplets of cities. Check him out on youtube. Also, the country HAD rail service blanketing the country, and that was when the population was less dense than it is now. There have long been arguments comparing the density of the US and Canada with the density of places like Europe. City Nerd points out that these arguments don't hold much water. People don't travel from, say, Phoenix to Chicago daily. But if there were a train between Phoenix and Las Vegas, there could be more commerce etc between them.
I don't see how building rail lines outside the northeast would dilute the service in the northeast. In building rail lines, no one would propose keeping the budget the same for the whole system.
As for the freight lines, something fundamental needs to change. There's too much power concentrated in too few hands.
Well, throughput on the lines is related to train speed which is related to the condition of the tracks and beds, and ours are not great, I see the trains rolling and swaying where the track sags on one side. Even if better, I don't know if freighters would run faster.
I'm pro-rail, but even I have to admit that it's way easier and efficient to fly people and train bulk freight, than vice versa; Passenger cars are more air than people. No way you're going to fly train cars full of coal (which I hope is eliminated), grain, plywood, bulk liquids, 737 Max fuselages from their fab in Wichita to final assembly in Renton WA, etc, all of which I've seen on the tracks here.
Also, more trains mean issues with holding up cars at crossings, people won't be happy, even bicyclists who are held up. Now where I grew up, they did something smart: Trains were really holding up a 4 lane highway at a crossing, often stopped, I think due to factories neearby. Instead of building a rail overpass like in the past, which would also require high approaches for miles in each direction, they did the reverse and stacked up concrete blocks to have the road go over the trains, graded approaches in far less distance and don't need to handle the concentrated weight that trains do. This was over 40 years ago. Worked fantastic. But even that would take a lot of money for all the crossings.
Ya know what's more feasible? Make flying easier, like it used to be, only even better. Personally, I would prefer the old Soviet system; Most airports did not have baggage handling systems. You showed up at the plane with luggage in tow. Either it was handed to loaders, or, quite common, you brought it on board and it was dropped through the floor hatches to handlers (I think common hatch forward, not hatch at each seat), which probably required boarders to line up in order or unassigned seats, so when deplaning, each person gets handed their luggage in order. From wiki on Ilyushin Il-86, introduced 1976:
The Soviet solution to the airport capacity issue involved passengers loading and unloading their own luggage into and from the aircraft. This was eventually called "the luggage at hand system" (
Russian:
transliterated:
"sistyema bagazh s soboy").
[12] Soviet aviation journalist Kim Bakshmi described it (at its ultimate) thus: "One arrives five minutes prior to departure, buys oneself a ticket on board the aircraft, hangs one's coat next to the seat and places one's bag or suitcase nearby."
[13]Taking suitcases into the cabin, as in trains, was studied, but necessitated a 3 m fuselage extension with a 350-seat capacity.
[14] To avoid this, passengers were to deposit their luggage in underfloor compartments as they entered the airliner.
Ideas similar to the "luggage at hand system" were briefly addressed in the West.
Airbus studied such an arrangement in the mid-1970s.
[15] Lockheed implemented it into the
L-1011 TriStar in 1973 at the request of
Pacific Southwest Airlines (who used the baggage compartment as an entertainment lounge) and possibly also to suit potential Soviet buyers (see below).
[16]