If you’ll allow me to nerd out a little. I love trains as much as the next guy. I also love arriving at the next station alive. Every single time. And i also want my grandchild to arrive at the station Alive. Every single time.
But by the time we start to actually lay down the tracks, a whole lot of work has already been done. Ground has to be sampled along the way. The ground has to be prepared, large boulders has to be cut/blown apart. Engineers and geologist must have had time to calculate that the ground will hold, perhaps certain areas needs to be reinforced more than others The ground has to be owned by an entity that can authorise the use of it.
Signal cables has to be drawn. There has to be space for trains to pass eachother. And then there are probably solutions to things we didn’t even know was a problem.
What’s my point? Of course trains take a lot longer than setting up a bunch of cameras on poles… I’d be more concerned if it was the opposite. And yes, I’m hillarious at parties.
Rights of way need to be negotiated and secured. This is a big one.
This is the biggest one in the US. The right to keep the government from ruining your land makes building trains extremely difficult and the legal process is extremely expensive and time consuming
The US was built on rail. 100 years ago, there were trains going to every little town that a passenger could ride.
Thanks to subsidies of the auto industry, many rights-of-way are not currently in use, and most that are exclusively carry cargo, not passengers.
I’ll admit I like a rail trail as much as the next cyclist, but it does make me a little sad when I’m on a cool trail that’s essentially the skeleton of our former public transit infrastructure.
The rights of way largely still exist, though. Some are still owned by the rail companies and just loaned to municipalities for trails, but the land of a former railway almost never gets completely dissolved into the parcels around it. There’s cost to dividing/recombining parcels, and no one does it without reason. Those lines shouldn’t be splitting anyone’s property, either, because the land was platted with them in place.
Those old rights-of-way often wouldn’t work for high speed due to the radii, but most of the rail we need doesnt need to be high speed. In situations where we do need high speed, there are usually highways that we could and should cannibalize some land from.
The system makes it too hard to get infra built, but the movement looks bad if they seem to think building a train is as easy as it is in SimCity.
FWIW, while you’re not incorrect about the build process part, this person specifically mentions the politics and paper process required just to get approval to start conducting land surveys and the like, so his point is valid too. Also fun at parties, cheers!
No it’s really not.
Flock is a massive evil. But there’s zero planning required. They’re completely self contained, solar powered cameras. You can put them anywhere. Thats their entire selling point.
You do not need any new infrastructure whatsoever.
Got a stopsign? Strap a flock to it.
Street light? Flock camera.
Tree? Flock camera.
There are no land surveys to do. No finding a site. No dealing with property ownership issues. No construction. Nothing at all other than telling Flock “yeah sure strap a camera to this existing pole”.
A flock camera requires about as much planning as slapping a sticker onto a street sign. They’re not even remotely comparable to fucking trains lol.
And you’re right to point out the distinction but I’d mention another distinction that in the states a rail plan crosses multi state jurisdictions, zoning, needs, electorates… all that in a country where there are specific political mechanisms designed to make top down federal imposition difficult.
In other words, a data center, or a flock contract is easy to install. It only needs “corruption” aka approval in ONE location. It’s spread is implemented point by point, it’s not like a gas pipeline, fiber cable or any PHYSICAL infrastructure that must cross multiple borders.
A corridor railway, unlike individual cameras or server farms, needs sign off across multiple states plus multiple sectors of public and private land to get started. It is hard to get all those parties and locations to conform and adhere to a plan; all in a country expressly designed to prevent the fed from forcing it all.
That’s before construction gets ever considered. So compare that to installing a flock cam…
It’s also been known that when laying track over large distances, a site of archeological importance has been discovered, this can delay the project for years whilst it’s examined.
A huge part of the reason the planning takes effort is that you need community support. The train might be running near houses or have to demolish housing or community buildings. Similarly, flock cameras are community surveillance, and ought to require community buy-in, but that process doesn’t happen.
My view is that this is because:
- A huge part of infrastructure is less about use and more about separating the rich from the poor. A car lane keeps the driver in a little bubble, away from the poors. A train doesn’t, so the train doesn’t get built.
- A bunch of flock cameras, however, do a great job of keeping tabs on the poors. In they go. Obviously the community is for this, they want to stop criminals right?
There are trains that just charge on charge station
And the Chinese build a 50000 km high speed railway network in 18 years. The first high speed train was in 2008. If there is a will, there is a way. Infrastructure benefits the people.
In California for example the high speed railway was authorized in 2008 for only 795 kilometers long. The project is expected to be completed between 2031 and 2033. So in the same time frame, China build 49205 additional kilometers of track.
In western countries, everything and everyone needs to be consulted and 99% of the time a court case follows because of some animal found or it is too close to houses or whatever shit people think of, causing massive delays. Than of course there are the changes in government. Think about the Biden infrastructure bill that got scraped like the second day the current regime took over.
You’re noticing a bit too well citizen…
Everyone is talking about obtaining land and eminent domain and whatnot. …We have streets. 🤷
how expensive would putting elevated rail in the median of the freeways even be?
Overpasses
Move the pillars?
I don’t know where you live but here the clearance on a standard overpass is 14’. This is well under the 12’8 needed for the highway, plus the height of the track base, plus the clearance for the train. So the train would have to be built 30’ in the air. Might as well put it above a road instead.
If you mean “put train on ground in the middle of the highway” we can also do that the hard part is getting to stations not in the middle of a highway.
I vaguely remember something from The Power Broker where an engineer said to Robert Moses with a slight change to the design, at no real cost, they would build the roads so trains could be put in easier at any time in the future. Moses said no. Cars only.
I don’t think putting at grade trains on freeways is a good idea, unless they had a reliable way of warning people minutes before a train comes through
Chicago has a system like this. The main problem is the stations in the literal middle of the highway.
Crazy idea, put the stations at the overpasses. Not all of them, obviously, but you can then make covered walk ways, and hopefully have enough land to put parking decks if needed.
I’ve wondered how impactful it would be to pass a law allowing all interstates to also count as passenger train right-of-ways. Obviously there would have to be some engineering and modifications to turn a highway median into a train line but it would simplify the land rights probably.
But what about the cars?
They get one lane now. The rest be for the trains
I mean… yeah. Trains have had a lot of arbitrary obstacles put in their place. And it goes without saying that Flock and AI datacenters can fuck right off.
But trains also are much, much more complicated projects. A flock camera needs like 4 square get of space next to the road that’s already in the ROW, and data centers are built a single piece of land.
Trains, and especially high-speed trains require securing of land and grade separation/fencing that makes their installation very difficult from an engineering and property-ownership stance.
Roads can just be routed between property lines as much as possible because cars can make pretty sharp turns. High-speed trains have to cut properties in half, build off grade, and put up a fence.
Imagine you’re a farmer and they put a trail line android your property. Now to get between the house and the barn that was 100 yards away you have to travel 2 miles down the track to the nearest crossing, so you’ve made a 200 yards round to 8 miles. Yeah, you’ll get paid"fair market value" for the 50-ft wide strip of land their treasure from you, but with half your land cut off from the rest the damages are much higher.
You don’t want that, so you sue to stop it. And so do thousands of other property owners in the same situation. And the business owners of the roasts that will be bypassed, cut off, or simply used less. And the cities and counties who now have their existing transportation infrastructure fucked.
It’s a huge impact, and even if it’s a net good, there’s severe collateral damage and those imitated will fight to stop it.
The time to secure rail rights was 150 years ago. And that’s what they did and why that’s where pretty much where all the rails are.
you’re ignoring the spirit of the post.
when the wealthy want something done, it gets done.
nothing you’re talking about is outside the power of government… do you want someone’s land? then you just take it. nobody is going to put up a fuss for longer than a few months.
and when they do put up a fight, you crush them or pay them off.
we don’t have anything good because nobody in power is interested.
Highways are not nearly as easy to construct as you make them out to be. Especially in metropolitan areas their (not so much) smaller possible radius is counteracted by much larger area requirements, gigantic interchange areas required, pollution and noise that is destroying land values in a wide corridor … Also regarding pedestruan crossings, highways are no better than rail. They are actualy worse as crossings have to be much longer.
What you consider showstoppers for rail are consequences of countless recent highway projects, that were miraculously not impossible to construct.
It is BS that real estate can be routinely sacrificed for highway widening and even brand new highways but not for modern rail infrastructure.
The rails we need for a real rail network are the long-haul rails, and those are much harder than highways.
Yeah, i10 is like 20 lanes forna few miles in Houston, but just a few miles out of town and it’s 2 lanes wide for the next 200 miles to San Antonio where it gets a few more lanes, and is then 2 lanes for the next 500 miles to El Paso, then gets a bit wider, then is 2 lanes for 300 miles to Tuscon, and so on.
And along those 2-lane stretches the roads are very flexible in their placement. It’s why they’re not straight. They constantly turn left and right to avoid splitting properties, cities, etc in a way a train (especially a high-speed train) simply cannot. And they’re built largely at grade. When there’s a hill the road can follow the hill, wheras a train needs a tunnel, bridge, or trench.
Rail’s requirements for flat, straight paths and the extreme braking distance of trains combined with their inability to turn independently or operate off track makes them a much more difficult project in terms of engineering, logistics, politics, and legal issues.
Outside of town is high speed rail also less of a headache to build. Sure, you need more tunnels and bridges but for example the LGVs in France have surprisingly high gradients, so they can follow the landscape better than many people believe.
I am not saying that HSR is easy to build I am merely saying that they are not such an existential challenge as US Americans make it out to be. Even developing countries manage to build them, highly developed ones manage it and everyone in between. The problem in the US is not that that the technology is so challenging. The problem is legislation that is extremely hostile towards such projects, creating overhead costs that are multiple times the entire project costs in other high cost countries. The problem is a lack of political will and the problem is especially ideology, the idea that rail infrastructure has to be profitable to be justifiable (road infrastructure interestingly is not having that requirement more often than not).
PS: “extreme breaking distance” and “inability to turn independently or operate off track” are not an issue at all, why would they be?
The braking distance and inability to turn is why greater physical barriers are required to separate rail. If a cow walks onto a road, the car drivers can stop or swerve. And even if they hit the cow, the entire network isn’t shut down during the cleanup because people can drive around the wreck.
The inability to operate off track means the system is less flexible because it requires rail everywhere, and the rail spec has to match the train.
Cars operate better on nicer roads, but they’re capable of driving on any pavement, on gravel, dirt, and more. A car has no issues transitioning from one type of road to another, can be more easily re-routed, and is just generally more adaptable.
Rail is great. It can move a lot at once between designated points, and as long as that’s all you want to do and it’s all working that’s great. It works really well in specific circumstances that happen to match the needs of much of the world. But the thing with a lot of the US is that it wasn’t really settled until there were air conditioners and cars, and so it was development with both in mind, and is very difficult to adapt rail to those developments. For rail to work in the South, the whole system from first mile to last must be solved at once because none of it works in isolation.
Houston tried. They put in a light rail system and it super duper sucks because you still have to drive to Houston, pay to park in a giant lot, pay to board the rail, then walk the last 3/4 mile in 110° heat or wait 20 minutes to pay to take a bus in 110° heat. The alternative is just to drive to your destination and pay to park in the garage for less money. And even that shitty system uses up half of Houston’s sales tax.
The system needs commuter lines going into and out of the city, but those need the light rail. There also needs to be a way to get from your house to the commuter train. It’s a 4-part system (first mile, commuter train, light rail, last mile) that ALL needs to be in place for any of it to make sense, and that’s extremely difficult to implement.
“The braking distance and inability to turn is why greater physical barriers are required to separate rail.” That’s nonsense. HSR does not require any extraordinary barriers. Nothing more than you commonly find at modern highways in Europe.
Your “inability to operate off track” argument still doesn’t make any sense. I think you fundamentally do not understand how rail works. They don’t need to be able to operate on roads and for pure transportation purposes, they can be moved across any freight rail track of the same gauge. The US is full of those and even where there is no network at all, units can be transported also by ship and even via road if need be. If there are reasons why a HSR can’t be operated, well, it doesn’t operate. Easy as that. Same as if an airport is blocked due to bad weather. My experience with HSR is that it operates much more reliable than aviation.
Houston lilght rail sucks because it is an inferior system in a city completely designed for the car, with a barebone light rail tapered on at the side. Singapore is a hot city too, yet it has a well working rail system. And much of China is also hot and humid with great working rail systems, HSR as well. I know there are a lot of excuses that the US can’t have any of that because it is so big, so hot, so cold and what not. Those are excuses with countless real world examples proving that they are.
I find it rather bewildering how people don’t seem to think that airports can’t work because of the lack of transit, but with HSR stations it is absolutely impossible to have them working without. Yes, local transit is highly beneficial for both, but it is not a requirement for either to work.
My entire point is that Hpusolton is already developed around cars and tacking transit on top of that doesn’t work without an entire system being deployed at once, which is essentially impossible.
And the inability to work off track matters because trains don’t have flexibility. If something happens to the track in the middle of a 500 mile stretch between cities, that entire area of the network is down until a repair crew can be transported to the site and complete the repair because the trains can’t just drive around the issue like a car.
That is where you are going wrong. US cities were not transformed overnight to car oriented places either. That took decades. Maybe where the error arises is from the idea that only transit needs transit oriented places to work well, but cars do need car oriented places to support a car only design as well. Yes, cars can drive on all sorts of roads but that is true for one car, if you put everyone into a car in a transit oriented city, the whole traffic is going to collapse, commute takes forever …
Transition to transit oriented places can work, but you need long term dedication and political support. The Netherlands demonstrate that quite well. In the 1970s they were on their way to become transformed into a US style car hell hole, even had US city planners to make it a reality. The first oil crises and rising popular opposition against it, saved them.
You don’t transform an entire car oriented city into a transit oriented overnight. It is more like a crystallization process. A transit oriented city condensates along axis. This is happening in some places already today. One example is the Washington DC metro area. But of course, due to lack of political support if not open ideological opposition, it happens even much slower than it has to.
Well of course. Billionaires are motivated to keep an eye on their livestock, but aren’t motivated to make sure their livestock has a good quality of life. I mean how else can they hunt down a woman trying to have an abortion? That’s their future worker after all…
Billionaires hate trains.
Ayn Rand screaming
Maybe we should make pods and build them really long.
In America, yeah. Shit country!
The fascists weren’t the ones trying to build high speed rail, the decorum folks were. In fact, elmo’s entire role was to suck out budget/enthusiasm for the promised future, fail like he’s best suited to do and say oh well, too late.
The Chinese build a 50000 km high speed railway network in 18 years. The first high speed train was in 2008. If there is a will, there is a way. Infrastructure benefits the people.
In California for example the high speed railway was authorized in 2008 for only 795 kilometers long. The project is expected to be completed between 2031 and 2033. So in the same time frame, China build 49205 additional kilometers of track.
In western countries, everything and everyone needs to be consulted and 99% of the time a court case follows because of some animal found or it is too close to houses or whatever shit people think of, causing massive delays. Than of course there are the changes in government. Think about the Biden infrastructure bill that got scraped like the second day the current regime took over.
Yeah the changes in government is a big thing I think. In the US nobody can be president for more than 8 years (in theory at least, I guess you guys will be testing that in 2028) and in place like the UK no Prime Minister really lasts more than about 10 years at most, and that’s pretty rare. Nobody wants to do all the work and spending on something that will pay off for the next person, so it’s sort of hard-coded into these systems that any project which takes more than a decade to finish probably won’t get done.
China can do it faster because it’s a dictatorship that simply takes the land on which it wants to build rail and pays the previous owner. In the US, there are far more legal hurdles for the government to acquire that land. Too many hurdles IMO, but going full dictatorship in order to have rail built faster is not the way.
China has had the most dramatic high speed rail transformation, but plenty of European countries have developed solid systems without going “full dictatorship.”
Also, the USA used to skip over a lot of those legal hurdles when it came time to build a railroad (hence the phrase, “getting railroaded”) but for various reasons we’ve lost the political will to do this.
I wonder about that with the UK. We already have a rail network, it’s just old. Presumably we could upgrade it if we really wanted to without having to worry about securing the land, but there’s presumably just no will to do it.
I think part of the problem is that in order to achieve such high speeds, high speed rail lines have to be really, really straight, and as flat as possible. Older railroad right-of-ways are often too twisty, curvy, and hilly. So, sadly it’s not just an issue of new tracks & trainsets, in some cases there will need to be new routes.
At least, this has been an issue for Amtrak here in the USA. Their new Acela trains are pretty fast, but most of the line between Boston/NYC/DC was laid out in the 19th century. So it can only get up to its full speed on short sections of the track.
Again with the propanda. China is not a dictatorship. People actually have a lot of rights and power.
Even more than in the US, strangely when it comes to privacy for example. China has a system almost stricter than the European GDPR. American citizens can only dream of this sort of protection because your government is run by tech lobbyists.
Anyway you’re making excuses for the inability of ‘the greatest country on earth’ to even build proper infrastructure for the people. Not only high speed rail, but the state of the roads, bridges and other crucial infrastructure is deplorable.
If you protest the government or attempt to unionize, and then the government disappears you or threatens to disappear your family, it’s a dictatorship.
There’s a really weird misconception about Amtrak and U.S. railroads.
Amtrak is not some ordinary private corporation. It is a federally chartered corporation, with the federal government as its controlling shareholder. Its board is largely made up of presidential appointees who require Senate confirmation. So, functionally, Amtrak is a government-controlled corporation that happens to operate as a for-profit company.
The stranger part is the infrastructure underneath it.
The vast majority of Amtrak’s route mileage runs on tracks owned by private freight railroads. Those freight railroads are enormously important to the U.S. economy, but the industry is also highly consolidated. A handful of Class I railroads control enormous regional networks, creating what is essentially a series of geographic monopolies/oligopolies. Amtrak itself says 97% of its route-miles operate over tracks owned by other railroads.
So you end up with this bizarre situation where the federal government owns and controls the country’s principal intercity passenger railroad, but much of the physical railroad infrastructure it depends on is privately owned.
And expanding passenger rail isn’t as simple as “just build more trains.” You need track capacity, signaling, bridges, grade crossings, stations, dispatching capacity, maintenance facilities, etc. In many places, you’re trying to add passenger service to infrastructure that is already being used by private freight companies. Amtrak frequently doesn’t even control dispatching on the tracks it operates over.
That’s why the U.S. rail situation is so strange. We have an enormous private freight-rail system that is absolutely critical to the economy, a federally controlled passenger railroad, and an infrastructure network that has been extraordinarily difficult and expensive to expand and modernize.
It’s not simply “the government sucks at trains” or “private companies suck at trains.” The institutional arrangement itself is bizarre. The U.S. essentially split passenger and freight rail into two different systems while leaving much of the underlying infrastructure in private hands.
And then everyone wonders why building modern passenger rail is so damn difficult.
We basically do need to eminent domain the rail network. That should be government owned like the highways.
They would have to seize new land, build new tunnels and bridges and essentially start from scratch to build functional rail, and if you want it to pass through major cities that gets extremely expensive. Flock relies on existing mass produced tech (they’re essentially a bulky cell phone with fewer features, a small solar panel and a pole. They already had the land, just needed govt permission to use the existing easements. And Flock is making money vs spending trillions with no ROI.
Ok, and not to defend it, but it is easier to install a flock camera or build a new building than to redo a logistics network.
We should do reasons instead of ai and flock, but yeah, rebuilding a train system in the US is way more complicated and harder to do.
it is easier to install a flock camera or build a new building
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(data_center)
785,000 sq ft (72,900 m^2)
422 MW of power.
Over five million gallons of water consumed daily
I can’t imagine how that would have an impact on local logistics or civil planning.
in March 2025, xAI purchased a 1,000,000-square-foot (93,000 m2) site in the Whitehaven area of Memphis… Plans for the expansion were initially revealed by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation when preliminary plans for the facility were filed on September 18, 2024, for the project “…between xAI, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and Nucor Steel…”
Wonder why they need proximity to the nation’s largest state-operated power generation.
Yeah, that’s huge and it sucks on a local level, but making a functioning train network for the US would be something that would have to overhaul the entire logistical network for the whole country. Even if every local and state government was on board and all the citizens were five with it, that’s still a massive undertaking.
It’s one we should do, but it’s still Herculean in scope
making a functioning train network for the US would be something that would have to overhaul the entire logistical network
We have a massive network of legacy rail to exploit. What has been talked about largely involves upgrading and retrofitting existing lines, building out new terminals and expanding old small ones. In particular, just increasing the frequency of service on neglected lines - the San Antonio to Austin route is notoriously neglected, despite being a prime candidate for cheap and easy improvement that would save millions of road hours for intercity transit and exurban commuters.
It’s one we should do, but it’s still Herculean in scope
On a national scale, it is Herculean. But at a thousand individual points, it is a very straightforward and doable job.
this goes into more detail about the problem in a better way than I could
They are consistently full of shit
trains take 37 years of committees
If you go back and watch the second season of True Detective.
spoiler
a major plot point is gangster Frank Semyon buying up land in the desert that’s supposed to be transformed into the California HSR project. But because the plans for the train line fall through, he’s stuck with a bunch of worthless real estate. The season ends with him dying in the desert, having traded away his family, his fortune, and his dignity in pursuit of an opportunity to scam the government.
This TV show was filmed in 2014 and released in 2015. Over the subsequent 12 years, the project has been repeatedly scaled back and still hasn’t been completed.
You watched the second season?
1, 2, and 4. It was during COVID, when the pickings were a bit slim.
I want working trains. We fucked that one up a long time ago.
Society is based on roads. Business locations, homes, all roads.
Every time a City in the US puts in a light rail line, every target community loses their shit because it connects the poorer parts of town with the affluent parts of town. It fucks up the crime rate a bit.
People don’t want trains here because people don’t ride trains here.
People don’t ride trains here because trains don’t go from affluent houses to places where the affluent work.
affluent being median wage earners.
You get what you build. The US still builds basically only road infrastructure and as long as that doesn’t change, the US will remain underdeveloped in the personal mobility department. The country could do something about anytime but it doesn’t. Sure, it takes decades until a change in direction really starts to change the country and how it works but that wasn’t different when the country was bulldozed for cars either.
ething about anytime but it doesn’t. Sure, it takes decades until
No politician seems to want to take on a job these days that takes longer than the 2 allowed presidentail terms
That is part of the reason I guess, but large long car infrastructure projects are still much more likely to happen even if they take longer than that.
The poor use trains to access the jobs in the rich areas they can’t afford to get to. The rich need the poors to work the jobs they don’t want because it doesn’t pay enough but still need done.
