What are the rough costs of
- constructing, and
- maintaining
a kilometer of a 1+1 road and single track rail? Is rail at all competitive in this regard?
^(I realise it also depends on the type of cargo – I’m curious about rail transporting everything as was the case in the 1800s)
If you need the bare minimum connection, a road is cheaper than a railroad. At scale, a railroad is cheaper than a road.
The ancillary equipment and infrastructure for a railroad influences things quite a bit as well. If you just need to privately move things from A to B, it is “theoretically” cheaper to lay rails than build a road of equivalent capability. But a locomotive and cars plus a railyard and a turntable and sidings and switches and all the other stuff you’ll need to run trains effectively is going to cost a lot more than just getting a box truck or a even an 18 wheeler and just plonking it on your new road.
A modern freight locomotive will cost you $1.5m to $2m just by itself. Then you need boxcars and all the other stuff, too. Big rigs aren’t exactly cheap, either, but you can drive one of those off the lot for less than $250,000.
Connecting your railroad to the rest of the railroad network – a significant portion of which is privately owned, for an extra special added layer of clusterfuck – is also a headache. This is trivial for roads, even after you take all of your local government regulations into account. You can make roads go more places more easily.
You are correct that scale is a very important factor for the financial viability of a railroad.
We really should have nationalized the entire rail infrastructure, just like we did with highways and airports.
But your analogy is incomplete. If you count things like rail yards, you should count rest areas and distributions centers and service centers. Doesn’t really change anything though: it’s a question of scale, weight and distance
Airports aren’t nationalized in the USA. They are usually set up by local governments to facilitate trade.
The FAA must be an hallucination then. There is no ATC, no TSA, no ILS, no airways or airspace, no radar or radios.
Sure airlines might pay for their own parking and facilities, might pay for a cushy spot to place your butt while you wait. They might pay for things that you the sheep see as you’re herded this way and that, but none of that is important to flying
Yes, we probably should have.
But meanwhile, my point was that due to their inflexibility you absolutely cannot operate rail vehicles without the ancillary equipment required to perform certain tasks. It’s not as easy as saying, “It costs x per mile for railroad tracks therefore everything should be trains.” That doesn’t tell the whole story, and all of those add-ons are, in fact, mandatory.
With a steerable roadgoaing vehicle you can work around much of it if necessary. Rest areas and even traffic controls and guard rails are not actually technically necessary for a vehicle to successfully go down the road and you can wing it re: parking lots by parking in the dirt if you have to, and so on. The whole arrangement would certainly be horrid without those things but it can and does still work. There are thousands of miles of rural roads in America alone that are served by absolutely no external infrastructure except stationary signs and some guard rails.
However, you cannot turn a locomotive around no matter how much redneck creativity you apply unless you have turntable, a loop track with a switch, or a big crane… period. You cannot add or remove cars from a train without a long enough spur or a railyard, and in many cases a second “yard” locomotive, period. You cannot have one train pass another without a siding, period. You cannot store currently unused cars without a railyard full of tracks, period. A train cannot change tracks without a switch and someone (or some computer) to man it, period. Etc., etc.
During the initial railroad boom this was actually a very real problem. Anyone who was anyone and who was rich enough wanted to have their own little spur railway going to their factory or estate, and it turned out that the logistical clusterfuck and ancillary equipment needed to serve all of those individual low volume needs was so expensive and was such a hassle that the very moment trucks were viable the huge majority of all those little endpoints were abandoned and demolished pretty much overnight. Rail has an insurmountable problem with the final mile, and the more individual locations it has to serve the more untenable the ballooning cost becomes in both money and space, which must be counterbalanced by a sufficient economic benefit.
Where trains excel is by moving a whole shitload of people or product from one source to one destination, which unsurprisingly is almost exclusively how they are used outside of the context of intra-city people movers like subways and surface light rail. Within the confines of this use case they are cheaper and more efficient per unit of cargo moved than cars or trucks.
Well explained, thanks!
Plus the final mile from the rail to destination.