What the US needs is to fix its rail system. eminent domain the whole thing, pay off the robber barons and just run it like it matters to get shit from here to there.
When it comes to freight rail, the US is in the top handful of countries in the world by pretty much any metric.
We’re not great at passenger rail, but we beat all of Europe when it comes to the amount of freight shipped via rail per capita, and all of Europe except Switzerland based on the percentage of total freight transported by rail.
This is a myth oft-repeated on HN. US freight rail does cheaply transport a lot of tonnage, but it is a shadow of its former self, after a half-century of digesting the investments of the past. It's squeezed out efficiency by running longer and slower trains (that exceed the length of the rail sidings!) transporting bulk goods on predictable schedules between fixed points (like grain and coal), while slashing routes and reducing maintenance. It ships a lot of freight, but it does not do so effectively, quickly, nor safely, or flexibly.
In a typical year, (USofA) freight railroads haul around 1.6 billion tons of raw materials and finished goods. Redesigned railcars have helped increase average tonnage. In 2022, the average freight train carried 4,089 tons, up from 2,923 tons in 2000.
The total length of line used by the Russian Railways is, at 85,500 kilometres (53,130 mi), one of the largest in the world, exceeded only by the United States.
This is true, and I've made the point myself previously on HN.
But US freight tonnage is dominated by cheap bulk goods, most notoriously coal, though grain and bulk liquids (petroleum, industrial).[0]
There's also a lot of intermodal / containerised freight, but this is almost exclusively long-haul "land bridge" traffic, with very little trade or viability for short-haul freight (< 500 mi) or less-than-truckload (LTL) carriage.[1]
Cross-country carriage still takes 10--14 days, despite the fact that a through-routed train travelling at 79 MPH (peak speed on most freight lines) could in theory make the distance in about a day and a half. For time-sensitive goods, including much fresh produce, this means that truck or air freight is the only viable option.
I've gone digging for any recently published research on new innovations in traditional freight technologies and ... there simply isn't any to speak of.[2] Much of the underlying infrastructure is literally a century or more old. The last major powerplant revolution was the introduction of the diesel-electric locomotive which will have its centennial next year.[3]
Given the present obsession with electrified lorry projects, it seems to me to make far more sense to look at optimising rail-based delivery to provide for far more flexible routing, dynamic trainset assembly and disassembly, higher-speed fright,[4] integration of light freight (e.g., document and high-value product delivery) with high-speed rail systems,[5] or rail-trolly systems, in which local delivery occurs via either autonomous or small-trainset convoys which decouple from a through system and reach endpoints or local distribution centres at lower speeds on local rail or dedicated roadbed routes. Similar discussion from about a year ago here: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32967216>
4. At 120 mph, cross-country transit drops to just over a day, at 25 hours. At 160 mph, 18 hours, for same-day delivery as an option.
5. At 180 mph, typical of many high-speed rail systems, delivery time from San Francisco to Los Angeles is about 2h 15m, and routes such as NYC or Denver to Chicago, Dallas to Atlanta, or Miami to Washington, D.C., or Norfolk, VA, to Boston 5--8 hours.
How much air freight really needs to be transferred by air, though?
Air freight makes sense when you need to get something across an ocean in less than a month, or across the continent in less than a day. If the US were to invest in running the railroads efficiently, getting a package from NYC to LA in less than 72 hours should be possible - that's fast enough for regular Amazon shipping. If you electrify the railroads you could avoid an awful lot of CO2 emissions.
There are currently already container trains running from China to Europe (or at least there used to, before Russia started a war). It's a viable midpoint between ocean freight and air freight.
> If the US were to invest in running the railroads efficiently, getting a package from NYC to LA in less than 72 hours should be possible
Still need air for every other pair of destinations. And in the meantime, I’d be shocked if that freight leg had enough volume to justify that expense over a couple more planes.
I think freight trains in Europe are much faster than in the US, but also much shorter (though there are plans to make them a little longer) and lighter (no double-stacked containers). So they are more costly but you get stuff from A to B faster.
Electrified locomotives are better than diesel electric (e.g. an electric locomotive has 2x - 3x the power, ~6MW-9MW compared to ~3MW, so you need less locomotives, less moving parts means less maintenance etc.), but while it works in dense Europe, it's too costly to build and maintain cross US.
it's probably too expensive for some of the country (mainly the great plains etc), but on the west coast and east of the Mississippi there's definitely the density to support it.
US freight rail companies have already invested heavily in efficiency and are now pretty much the most efficient in the world. What you seem to be asking for is a reduction in latency. You can't have both high efficiency and low latency: those metrics are in direct conflict with each other.
Trucks with team driving can already run coast to coast in about 3 days. This works fine for somewhat time sensitive loads.
72 hours is too long. You need 48 hours or less for e-commerce or you’ll lose business to Amazon. You could go multiple warehouses but that’s a huge expense with splitting inventory especially if you have lots of low volume skus.
Hmm, if we ever built the Alaska-Siberia overland railway connection (bridges + tunnels) it would become a possibility to make efficient from what is now an impossibility.
It’s doable. Tunnels and bridges necessary would not be beyond what we have built elsewhere with current technology.
That’s several thousand miles of additional journey on your way to Shenzen or wherever? Massive amounts of track, tunnel and bridge that has to be maintained in extreme conditions and across multiple nations at odds with each other?
I don't think it would be as problematic as you suggest. The Trans-Siberian railway already operates at similar distances. Also China is building their belt-and-road network. We could get goods from China, Japan, Korea and Russia all on this rail system.
The one sticky point might be gauge. We'd want something all agree upon. We'd want to avoid variable track gauge bogies.
If there was actually demand for faster high-volume shipping between East Asia and North America then logistics companies would just buy faster ships. The technology for that already exists and is far cheaper than building a railroad tunnel across the Bering Strait. Shipyards are capable of building freighters with more hydrodynamic hulls and powerful turbine engines. So far no one is really asking for those, which indicates the market doesn't exist.
it exists in the form of air freight, which is stupidly more expensive, but also stupidly faster. so there is a market, just apparently not one in-between.
How is building a rail system for transporting freight to and from the U.S. that runs through Russian territory a good/feasible idea?
Even if Russia agreed, Putin or whatever strong-man dictator they have next could suddenly decide it was a bad idea, and to block U.S. freight. Then we have no rail transport AND a grounded air fleet that would take time to get operational at the same output it is today.
I didn't mean tomorrow ("if we ever.."), or the day after. I meant one day when the US and Russia get along as well as China and the US do. It's not like we'll be at not-war war long into the future. Building the bridges and tunnels would take probably a decade or two, the way we build things. But if we did, then much of China's trade that goes over airfreight could come over via rail... one day.
Eh, the USA’s history seems to confirm it. I’m not really sure about others, but I’d be surprised if countries that are dependent upon one another were at war with one another.
Pareto principle means you should prioritize the 80%+ use case. Most of the time is what you want to spend all your time/money optimizing while making also the other use cases possible.
There’s such a huge time gap between our current rail and air that many things that are somewhat time sensitive end up flying which would use a reasonably quick rail network. NYC to LA is well under 2,800 miles so getting just about anywhere in the continental US on rail in under 48 hours is a completely reasonable standard.
Yet, people moving from Texas to Florida don’t just park a U-Haul on a flatbed and fly, because it’s not just slow but also unpredictable. It can take weeks or even months in some cases because the network is optimized for coal and wheat etc which don’t care about delays just cost.
You think a completely reasonable standard is for a train to average 58 mph all the way across the united states without stopping?
What about all the slowdowns due to extremely rough terrain? The fact people have to be swapped out? The fact that not all cars are going all the way across the country and also have to be swapped out?
Train’s don’t need to slow down for rough terrain because they can’t handle rough terrain and either route around it or tunnel through it. What they do need to slow down for is the rail network itself.
Poor track conditions, missing block signal systems, and Trains without an automatic cab signal, automatic train stop or automatic train control system "may not exceed 79 mph."
Freight trains really could travel a mostly Class 6 network at 120MPH in the US, we have regulations all the way to class 9. They don’t because that’s not rail is optimized for.
I often advocate this position! The Union Pacific is surprisingly affordable and after you gain a controlling interest it's not as if you've just torched $80 billion, because you bought a valuable asset.
For the state of California to do a hostile takeover of the UPRR, spin off an operating company for the train part, and retain the rights of way while adjusting the attitudes of the executives, would save a large amount of money just by simplifying the High Speed Rail project. It would be well worth it and we can afford it.
>Eminent domain (United States, Philippines), land acquisition (India, Malaysia,[1][2] Singapore), compulsory purchase (Ireland, United Kingdom), resumption (Hong Kong, Uganda), resumption/compulsory acquisition (Australia, Barbados, New Zealand, Ireland), or expropriation (Canada, South Africa) is the power of a state, provincial, or national government to take private property for public use.
I assumed the interstate system would benefit from no longer being in a constant state of needing repair.
And I'm not sure if you're suggesting more train tracks would be laid in cities to divide communities? I assumed the discussion was about better utilizing the infrastructure we already have for rail.
We're like a couple years away from having the tech to just give all autonomous electric vehicles the leftmost lane on the interstates from 10pm-6am, then raise the speed limit to 90 or 100 mph. Let trucking companies drive these vehicles a few feet apart from each other for aerodynamics. If you could book a sleeper taxi in New York and be in Chicago in the morning, or San Francisco to Seattle, for cheaper than a flight, without destroying the environment, would you do it?
I don't know who you've talked to about this, but just because it's electric and robo-driven doesn't mean they get to skip aerodynamic drag. Air resistance increases at the square of velocity. 4 miles/kWh at 55 becomes < 2 mi/kWh at 85. 100 mph and you're measuring in kWh/mile.
If you double the speed, the air resistance gets quadrupled. Power output needed for constant speed travel is octupled (P=Fv). Now you need a higher-power motor and more expensive batteries that can sustain this kind of power output. The typical electric vehicle available today can't sustain a speed of 100 mph without thermal throttling kicking in.
Sure making the electric motor more powerful isn't that big of a problem: just look at electric trains. But making the batteries more powerful will require significant more research.
That sounds lovely. Of course, you'll never achieve that with automobiles, so we'll be needing the trains to make it possible. No tires and significantly less chances of a collision that will kill you.
The cargo a plane can carry isn't limited only by the volume of the interior, but also by the amount of weight that can be carried safely in the plane. Airlines try to balance the amount of dense and non-dense (a.k.a. volumetric) cargo to solve for the joint constraint by charging different prices for cargo depending on the greater of its weight cost vs. its volume cost.
Even if it turned out to be practical to double the volume of cargo you could carry, it seems unlikely that it would allow you to double the weight of the cargo, since the engines and the airframe have all been designed around the same set of engineering requirements. The best case scenario would be a decrease in the cost of volumetric cargo, with dense cargo staying the same.
The article is about having a completely separate plane (glider, really) that is towed by a conventional plane. The glider gets to ride in the powered plane's wake, and presumably the fuel cost to tow the cargo plane is less than the cost of flying two independent planes.
This isn't about making a larger conventional plane that has more volume to put cargo in.
Right, but if a plane has a maximum takeoff weight of 600k lb, I doubt if it can safely takeoff while being 600k lb AND towing another x00k lb in a glider, which is what would be required to reduce cargo costs by 65%.
IANAAE (...not an aerospace engineer), but I smell a metric boatload of utterly delusional thinking here.
> ...remarkably simple way to slash air cargo costs as much as 65% – by having planes tow autonomous, cargo-carrying gliders behind them, big enough to double, or potentially triple their payload capacity.
A 65% cost reduction via tripling the payload would require that costs not increase, no? Are these huge cargo gliders free to purchase/operate/maintain? And hauling them around puts zero additional load on the engines of the air freighter that's towing them, to increase maintenance or fuel costs?
> ...payload-carrying gliders were towed toward combat zones in World War 2, full of troops and/or equipment, then released to attempt unpowered landings in the thick of things – with widely variable results, particularly where stone-walled farms were a factor.
True, but glider losses due to mishaps (starting with broken tow ropes) were damned high even before they got to the target area. What % of cargo being lost in transit do these folks figure is acceptable, in the modern air freight business?
> These "Aerocarts" will be pulled down the runway by the lead plane just like a recreational glider. They'll lift off more or less together...
Ask anyone with a pilot's license about this. Especially if he has experience with taxiways at large & busy airports, or with taking off in anything less than picture-perfect weather, or with airplanes that lack "sporty" thrust/weight ratios.
> With no propulsion systems, you save all the weight of engines, motors, fuel, ...
Even if your towing airplane magically does not need larger engines or more fuel to haul 2x or 3x the weight around - what happens when you land, and the tow plane engages its thrust reversers?
> A 65% cost reduction via tripling the payload would require that costs not increase, no?
I think it's a cost reduction vs. shipping that 2x (or 3x) cargo using 2 (or 3) conventional planes, not somehow making it cheaper than a single plane with its normal amount of cargo (or a magic plane with 2x the capacity).
> Are these huge cargo gliders free to purchase/operate/maintain?
No, but they're presumably cheaper in those metrics than running a conventional plane. If it costs $50k to run a single conventional plane, but you can tack on one of these towed gliders and it only costs $15k more, that's cheaper than running 2 conventional planes at $100k.
> And hauling them around puts zero additional load on the engines of the air freighter that's towing them, to increase maintenance or fuel costs?
Certainly this will add a cost, but if the towed glider has essentially zero fuel cost, presumably you still come out ahead. And presumably the glider will have lower maintenance costs, since it lacks engines and presumably other stuff a powered, crewed conventional cargo plane would need.
Totally agree with you on the skepticism around safety and reliability, though.
But it’s one thing to try and win an existential war by any means necessary including downgrading safety, but I think it’s another thing when you intend to use this for civilian freight transportation.
What’s the contingency for a snapped tow rope? Or electro/hydromechanical failure on either aircraft during take off or landing? One plane involved is plenty to handle; how do you handle two?
Light glider planes with one passenger or two is one thing, but an unpiloted freight aircraft, I’d think has greater risk. I get they might have remote operators for the glider, but some situations need proximate feedback.
If you're happy for your gliders to travel at 100 mph instead of 500 mph, you can glide almost fuel free, making use of thermals and winds most of the way.
However, the finances for such a business are hard to make work since, while you save on fuel, your very expensive aircraft does fewer flights per year.
The only way to make it work would be very cheap airframes, probably without humans aboard (meaning factors of safety and maintenance costs can be dropped).
Only sport gliders carrying a maximum of 2 people achieve those speeds fuel free. A large, heavy cargo glider carrying a full load is just going to crash without a tow rope, regardless of winds or thermals.
You probably wouldn't go totally fuel free - you'd go mostly fuel free.
And yes, the craft would have to be absolutely huge for a decent payload - and it might make sense to use different construction techniques considering that - for example an inflatable fully pressurised craft.
Could probably add relatively inexpensive drone systems to the gliders with some solar and a battery to enable it to assist in landing and taxiing, as well as dealing with weather and the inevitable crashes.
I am aware that flying is the safest form of mass transportation but crashes do still happen and should be accounted for, after all, and it would be nice if the autonomous glider drone systems had a touch of brains in it to try to not land on a house or into a highway or something.
