In the places where the average commenter lamenting US rail lives the track are crap because there's no reason to have everything be "cruise at 80mph" level smooth when you can't get a train up to such speeds before the next curve and even if you could there's invariably other rail traffic or a grade crossing soon thereafter.
In BFE Texas or Utah or whatever the rails are like glass because crossing 300mi of nothing in 4hr instead of 8 has enough positive impact on the rest of the system that they deem it worth paying for.
It makes sense if you think about everything in terms of time between points.
95%+ of North American intercity trains run on freight tracks, which are not designed to be as "smooth". On top of this, freight having priority means passenger schedules get messed up all the time.
Freight trains carry heavy loads and have cars that are not inspected to have perfectly maintained wheels to the same level as trains that run on tracks for only passenger traffic, especially high speed rail (which runs on dedicated , highly engineered tracks).
The big reason that passenger rail, even overnight, isn't as economical in north america is because rather than sleeping on a train, it's cheaper and more reliable to just fly in a few hours across the country.
HSR makes sense in the dense US northeast or between Windsor and Quebec city in Canada (and probably California if it wasn't politically ruined with it's meandering lines), but sleeper trains for further distances would have to be dirt cheap to compete with flying. It'd essentially be for college kids or poorer people.
Most people who do long distance trains in North America are doing it as a cruise-like vacation/adventure.
> 95%+ of North American intercity trains run on freight tracks, which are not designed to be as "smooth".
All over the US, the tracks are being upgraded to 110mph standards. It just a slow process: 5 miles here, 20 miles there. Whenever they can find the money they do a new section. Every single grade crossing must be upgraded, every single curve regraded, etc. Amtrak can run at 90mph on those sections with the locomotives they currently have.
Sometimes they string together enough upgraded rail. Essentially everything in Michigan has been running 110mph for 10+ years, with the newer Siemens locomotives that can handle it. Also, the Texas Eagle and Lincoln Service - the entire time they are in Illinois they are running 110mph.
Upgrading 5 miles of rail doesn't make the news. That doesn't mean it didn't happen :)
Historically US passenger service was secondary to express mail service. Without express mail service provided by the same trains, passenger service became unprofitable.
>95%+ of North American intercity trains run on freight tracks, which are not designed to be as "smooth". On top of this, freight having priority means passenger schedules get messed up all the time.
Pretty much. It is obviously a for-profit freight system - In areas where the RR's top-dollar freight customers (especially domestic parcel delivery companies) want speed, they'll happily spend big to make that happen. And in areas where the RoI on speed (whether upgrades, or ongoing maintenance of existing track) ain't there, they can be happy with 25MPH maximums:
> In BFE Texas or Utah or whatever the rails are like glass because crossing 300mi of nothing
Europe is densely populated, you'll rarely see 300mi of nothing. High speed rail is still common. Only realistically limited by cost, not by the difficulty to get the train up to speed before the next curve, or other rail traffic, or grade crossings.
If you're not aware, these are federal laws, and the force responsible for investigating and arresting people who break them are a part of the executive branch.
And the attorney general just confirmed in a cabinet meeting that the U.S. marshals would not be arresting any of them (marshals handle court orders, e.g. if you're in contempt)
If you really want to blow your mind, think about the fact that Hunter Biden was being prosecuted by the DOJ run by Joe Biden, just a few months ago. Can you imagine anything like that happening in the Trump administration if a Trump family member was accused of a crime?
Judges are investigating and holding trials. The Executive is being obstructive and outright ignoring court orders. Rule of law and the balance of powers have collapsed. Turns out that running a decade+ long misinformation campaign to sow distrust of all legal institutions, as well as expertise and professionalism in general is sufficient to topple the world's oldest democracy. If only there had been any effective counter-messaging things may have been different, but that's impossible with our "left" hollowed out by capital.
How many politicians have you seen blatantly breaking the law like this and having no problem? It happens over and over again. A lower-level flunky would be in prison, but a political appointee is going to be just fine, forced resignation is the worst that could possibly happen to him. Our system is just that corrupt. The same thing happens with leaks - politician or cabinet member leaking is normal, rando bureaucrat leaking is enemy of the state.
Because Trump does not investigate himself, and the once independent Attorney General is now just another political arm of Trump, but with prosecutorial power and discrtion. We are in dark times.
This has never been the case; JFK appointed his little brother AG. The problem is that the Congress should be investigating and prosecuting the president but will not.
It's been a nice kind of fig leaf, but constitutionally the president is the AG's boss, so it doesn't make any sense for the AG to investigate the president. There's an entire branch of government given this power in the Constitution, they've just decided they don't want it.
Exactly. Congress doesn’t want any of their duties. War declaration? Nah, let the President do it and call it “not a war.” Budget? Well, technically we’ll appropriate funds, but we’ll only do a big CR once in a while. Tariff policy? Nah, let the President do it all with the “national security” loophole, no matter how absurd. Impeachment and removal? Well, not when it’s your party’s guy.
For all the hate Trump gets, it’s Congress who’s created and who props up this monarchy.
And you have hit the nail on the head for how Trump is operating this term.
How can he do these things?
Turns out they all could've, they just chose not to.
Maybe we should strengthen the checks and balances, and Congress shouldn't abdicate ANY of its authority to the president. Maybe the system should work how it's supposed to instead of how is easiest.
The US moves more of its freight by rail than any other country in the world, and it’s not even close [1]. This just isn’t a very thoroughly researched article.
That doesn't really contradict what that person was saying. They just said that only Americans call trains old fashioned. That can be true at the same time as it's true that American industry makes heavy use of freight trains.
The lower ranking is total mileage tons while the highest ranking is percentage of freight moved by train.
The US ranks decently high in passenger miles as well, but that's just because we're a huge country, not because trains are regularly used by people in the US.
I guess I should have used a different word but I meant huge to imply a large population as well as area. The US is the 3rd most populous country in the world after all.
I know this is a reflexive "America bad" tic that some people just seem to have, but by whatever measure you use, the US is in the top 10 of rail freight:
Here's a metric: remove iron ore/coal shipments that only use a single fixed repeat route on a decaying network at <10MPH on un-electrified rail that hasn't been majorly maintained in 50 years.
If you remove that particular outlier (that basically drowns out everything else), the US's rail is pretty trash.
Or look at coverage; US rail companies will abandon profitable routes because they're fixated on improving the average profitability instead of absolute profits.
Nobody who knows much about railways is impressed by the US's railway system. Electrification is cheaper in the long run, and yet the US railway system is <1% electrified, because it's not profitable in the short term and all the railway companies are horrifically allergic to anything that won't be profitable within the decade. The US rail system is slowly falling apart, because while it makes sense in the long term to maintain it, it won't earn a profit now.
These comparisons between countries are always difficult.
Each place is adapted to the geography.
In Europe, the coal or ore may well be loaded onto a barge. The rivers here follow some useful routes, and the continent is surrounded by sea on three sides.
The USA doesn't have such convenient waterways.
Similarly, a container ship will make multiple stops around Europe, so there's less need to have a huge freight railway from Greece to the Netherlands.
I think most people, including journalists, don’t know or think much about trains. Or whatever they know it’s about passenger trains and they compare those with European ones.
There's a huge gap between ie6 and what's happening now. I don't think anyone arguing for slowing down what's been happening for the last (let's say) 10 years is talking about the stupidity of ie6. Ie10 has been out for 12 years now!
> Cutting funding essentially returns us to the IE6 monoculture with no progress.
1. It doesn't return us to monoculture - Monoculture of ie6 gave us multiple browsers, which recently all merged into Chrome. We already have a monoculture which will now lose funding.
2. We're not losing any of that progress. Actual documented standards exist now, all players implement the same basics, and you can create most websites without browser specific quirks. That's not going away.
3. We've had so much progress that Electron is its own massive OS now. We could do with a bit less progress and a bit more "how do we make this mess maintainable".
Perhaps you haven’t noticed but Safari has shipped about 20 updates in the last 3.5 years.
If you check the Interop 2025 numbers, you’ll see Safari is neck and neck with the other browsers and has implemented the latest CSS features [1].
The WebKit team was first to crack the code on how to implement :has() that eluded browser teams for 20 years and was the first to ship it [2].
As for wishing that they didn’t have to maintain Safari, it’s a mission critical framework on macOS, iOS, iPadOS, visionOS… it’s the only thing saving the web from the monoculture of Chrome-based browsers; unfortunately Firefox is in the low single-digits as far as market share goes. Safari on iOS has about 25% market share.
That's not true. My freshly printed passport was denied by a computer at the UK border, they ran forensic checks for 2 hours while I waited in detention and then it was all good and they let me go.
No, if you don't come with a database solution, any paper or physical only solution is 100% counterfeitable, with just enough means poured into it.
Mafias all around the world will buy expensively any valid or even used identity document just for this purpose, i.e. to study it and perfect their forgery skills.
The process you witnessed is a remnant of the past, a feature of the necessary transition period, and I hope it disappears soon, because that's a giant gaping security hole.
Btw, your fingerprints are in the database, as some facial features too. That could be in addition to retinal scans and, why not, DNA features too in the future.
Thanks to all those biometric data, in case of a problem, the process will be much more reliable using the database than using old fashioned paper IDs.
Also, all these tests are very fast to perform (excepted maybe DNA tests), much quicker than the unreliable administrative cross-checks that were performed until now when there was an ID issue.
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