Molten sulfur, like lava, crawled across the grass.

April 10, 2023 8:37 PM

The True Dangers of Long Trains (ProPublica, April 3, 2023)
posted by Not A Thing (25 comments total)

I really like trains, I don't know why but I do. But this is horrifying. Thanks for sharing, it's a well put together article.
posted by freethefeet at 11:11 PM on April 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

Good article. It seems like this is just progressive increase in 'normalization of deviance.' Pretty soon we'll just be talking about how we need to increase our acceptable levels of derailment.
posted by rmd1023 at 6:25 AM on April 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

The people who die and the land that is poisoned from derailments are not the customers of the rail lines.

So safety is not at a premium.

If you lose a certain percentage of goods shipped, that is easily worth a lower shipping rate.

And the proper use of shell companies and purchases of politicians make the financial damage done from derailment to the railroad and client limited.

Win-win.
posted by NotAYakk at 6:39 AM on April 11, 2023 [6 favorites]

The FRA has been captured by the companies that it is supposed to regulate, leading to more and more entirely preventable accidents.

This happened to the Minerals Management Service which was supposed regulate ocean oil drilling rigs, leading to the Deepwater Horizon disaster.

The US government is condemned to repeat its mistakes.
posted by monotreme at 6:46 AM on April 11, 2023 [9 favorites]

Horrifying and enraging. There probably should be a hard cap on “efficiency” in organizations to create incentives for redundancy and job creation, which would also increase safety.
posted by GenjiandProust at 7:05 AM on April 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Meanwhile, by blocking their ability to strike, Biden has imposed a contract on rail workers they previously rejected.

The major underlying issue remains precision scheduled railroading (PSR), the business model adopted in recent years by Class I rail carriers like Union Pacific, BNSF, Norfolk Southern and CSX. Designed to maximize shareholder profits by cutting costs to the bone, PSR has been blamed for a dramatic reduction in the freight rail workforce, increased supply-chain congestion and deteriorating safety — all while investors rake in record profits.

Yes, I understand that a rail strike would cause major economic disruption. THAT'S THE POINT OF A STRIKE. Power concedes nothing without a credible threat to its power.
posted by AlSweigart at 7:14 AM on April 11, 2023 [31 favorites]

Sigh. The more things change... almost 20 years ago the NYT won a Pulitzer for its investigation of the railroad industry, the sheer number of fatal accidents and damaging derailments, and how it covers up the problem and co-opts regulators.
posted by martin q blank at 8:02 AM on April 11, 2023 [10 favorites]

Train tracks are a limited resource - trains are going to keep getting longer absent any rail line increases, or absent the western coast of Europe/Africa gaining additional prominence as a port partner to the US allowing for eastern US port growth.

The industry actually ran light during covid and trucker strikes because it's basically at capacity.

Regulation would be great, sure, but adding more lines would be even better. Induce extra train demand for once.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:08 AM on April 11, 2023

Also long train crashes are large and noticeable and impact a relatively small area, but there were a solid dozen crashed rig trailers on I40 when I went through in February with people's packages just abandoned and littered in the medians and edges of the highway. I guess they were waiting for spring to clean all that up? It was bizarre and macabre.
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:12 AM on April 11, 2023 [5 favorites]

TIL that rail operators can run trains longer than the shortest siding on the route, and I can't even.
posted by scruss at 8:31 AM on April 11, 2023 [8 favorites]

PSR as implemented is actually reducing capacity because as noted these massive trains can't pass each other. It also causes problems with scheduling that means crews time out. It's really good for operating ratios though especially if you treat employees as indentured servants.

And railroads are responsible for laying track and maintenance of existing track. But both of those also increase operating ratios and have been severely underfunded leading to decreased speed limits which also limit capacity.

There is lots of space in existing right away to increase capacity but that won't pay off for years and so no one in charge of rail companies wants to do it.

The engineering disasters podcast with slides Well There's Your Problem did a three hour deep dive {well deep for regular people, kinda par for the course for them} (episode 119) on the issue recently and there are several more in the archives including an examination of how we got here that TL;DL: amounts to the US government abdicating responsibility to operators because solutions would be unpopular. And operators pursuing dividends and share price increases at the cost of safety.
posted by Mitheral at 9:22 AM on April 11, 2023 [11 favorites]

There is lots of space in existing right away to increase capacity but that won't pay off for years and so no one in charge of rail companies wants to do it.

I'm saying it's a national issue and track should be subsidized, as much as federal highways are. It's a national security issue, it's a capacity constraining issue, it's an environmental issue, it's holding passenger train speed and capacity down - it's a lot of issues.
posted by The_Vegetables at 9:38 AM on April 11, 2023 [8 favorites]

I can’t find the piece now but an interesting consequence of increasing the safety and therefore expense of rail freight would be to shift some portion of that freight to the highways. Which in all probability would be more dangerous overall but in terms of smaller but more frequent accidents.

This isn’t to say that safety and working conditions shouldn’t be improved, but in a world with subsidized highways and underinvestment in railways, safety and working conditions come out on bottom.
posted by sjswitzer at 10:04 AM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

Nationalize the tracks. They don't fit the classic definition of a public good (non-rivalrous and non-excludable), but there are just SO many examples of why hard-to-replicate networks should not be in for-profit hands. Roads, broadband internet, electricity, social media...
posted by McBearclaw at 11:55 AM on April 11, 2023 [13 favorites]

Along with nationalizing the tracks, I would set a relatively / very low threshold on using eminent domain to seize land in order to build / maintain them. Perhaps only certain types of land (I’m thinking farm and ranch, mainly). Or are there other singular primarily causes to the unbelievably high cost and slow pace of track building for new lines? My context here is the high speed rail in CA that I vigorously supported but which now just feels disappointing on every level.
posted by pkingdesign at 1:03 PM on April 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

Or are there other singular primarily causes to the unbelievably high cost and slow pace of track building for new lines?

The US has basically no experience building any kind of rail lines, so it must rely on expensive consultants for the design phase. Actual construction: that's like 1/3 of the budget of any rail project. All the stuff prior to moving dirt is 2/3.
posted by The_Vegetables at 1:13 PM on April 11, 2023 [1 favorite]

it's holding passenger train speed and capacity down

PSR is also a middle finger to passenger rail. The government has mandated that passenger rail be given priority on tracks but because these massive trains don't fit in sidings and the passenger trains do, whoops the passenger train has to wait.
posted by Mitheral at 1:29 PM on April 11, 2023 [8 favorites]

I learned from [1] that the optimisation pushes freight operators to be rewarded for longer and longer trains, efficiency clogging up the rails.

1: https://youtu.be/qQTjLWIHN74
posted by k3ninho at 1:36 PM on April 11, 2023

I'm not too worried about the construction part, because there is a stunning amount of rail in the US already.
posted by McBearclaw at 1:46 PM on April 11, 2023

I'm not too worried about the construction part, because there is a stunning amount of rail in the US already.

Check out the west. There's like 6 lines to cover a huge amount of shipping from Asia. Once you get to St Louis, then we are good. LA and Long Beach each alone do equal amounts of business to every other port on the east coast combined, except for NY/NJ of course which also fights for the #1 slot.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:08 PM on April 11, 2023 [3 favorites]

I've played that "Ticket to Ride" game and was saddened that there's less railway in real North America. There's so much space and there could be so much more railway.
posted by k3ninho at 3:30 PM on April 11, 2023

Sure, there could be more rail in North America, but the topography of the interior western US does impose real constraints.
posted by mollweide at 3:53 PM on April 11, 2023

I came her to recommend Well There’s your problem, but Miteral beat me to it. There are also other good train episodes such as on the decline of urban freight rail and the Naperville train disaster(led to speed limits on passenger trains.

My grandfather was a union railroad man, and I have a bunch of safety awards he got. It’s shame what management had done in pursuit of profit.
posted by CostcoCultist at 8:03 PM on April 11, 2023 [4 favorites]

I have a serious love/hate thing going on with WTYP, but the train-related episodes are always enlightening.
posted by wierdo at 11:23 PM on April 11, 2023 [2 favorites]

I've started watching/listening-to WTYP and I am so conflicted! I'm simultaneously annoyed because parts of it are the worst of "some folks sitting around shooting the shit and chatting with in-jokes and no fucking editing" bullshit that I hate in a lot of podcasts and the rest of it is frequently *fascinating* engineering disaster stuff that is absolutely my catnip and that I want to absolutely hoover right the fuck up. I'm trying to figure out a good time to watch it so I can do other stuff when it's being all randomly chatty but still pay attention when it's captivating.
posted by rmd1023 at 9:50 AM on April 14, 2023 [1 favorite]