One thing my late father wanted to do was start his own rail line, one without the track. When Oldsmobile closed there were suddenly a lot of executives in Lansing having to make the commute every day to downtown Detroit. My Dad located some combination train engine passenger integrated car units that had been in storage since the late sixties. He simply wanted to rent the track.
Even at a pokey 50-55 mph he could get to downtown Detroit 30-45 minutes faster than driving because of traffic congestion. He demonstrated that the demand was there. But sadly the railroads wouldn't even take a meeting.
I've always wished for a network of rail flatbed cars that make high-speed runs from state to state.
You could drive onto one of the flatbeds (from a ramp) in your car, then ride the train from center-of-a-state to center-of-the-next-state. After a brief layover (for cars to get off and new ones to get on) the train would depart for the next state.
It just seems like a decent way to enable medium-speed, long-distance travel. And wherver you went, you'd have your car when you arrived.
In Europe, some of the nightjet lines take cars as well.
I think this is a great solution. If the travelling takes too long, just do it overnight. So travel times from 9pm to 9am are actually quite convenient.
Flatbeds would be a bit risky, you can see in both this case and Amtrak's case they are enclosed cars. Apparently the Shuttle is one of the most comfortable rides in the world - as there are three layers of suspension (train carriage, carriage-vehicle mounting, and vehicle suspension) between you and the rails beneath.
There are some small trains in Switzerland that are like this, they are for those places where there are no roads or they are closed for the winter. The train takes on a bunch of cars, leaves and drops them off a half hour later. Super convenient and sometimes even free, and easily the best part of traveling to that particular destination.
Best part of car trains in Switzerland is freeing the mountain passes from cars. Still a lot of cars and motorbikes enjoying hairpin turns and landscapes (Good for them!) but still way less traffic than otherwise.
I rode on a similar service in Switzerland, where it's the only way to get a car across a mountain pass in a couple places. As one would expect from the Swiss it's a model of efficient operation, but even in that context it only seems like it really makes sense when there's a reason, like a giant mountain in the way.
He was really a mobility guy, ahead of his time that way. He loved to collect antique autos from the teens and twenties. He got started early too in the forties when they were available quite reasonably.
But he was passionate too about the Detroit streetcar and made certain I rode them as a wee lad the last week before they were removed.
Sadly in Michigan the politicians keep announcing transit plans - Howell to Ann Arbor and Ann Arbor to Detroit but nothing ever happens. Somehow I think it will take an entrepreneur if it ever happens.
Do trains cause traffic congestion? Like if there were 10 more trains passing through downtown Detroit per day, would it add minutes to the commute of cars due to train track crossings having to stop traffic more?
Trains cause traffic congestion on the train tracks. Trains already stop each other, to take turns on tracks when there are single tracks going through an area with more than one train. Trains have entire dispatch offices to manage where each train is, how long their operators have been working, and have to fit very tight regulations, sometimes even stopping trains to switch people out when their regulated working time is maxxed out.
For the most part, this all works smoothly. But the idea that you can just throw more trains on the tracks without impacting even their own traffic isn't seeing the big picture.
I'm unsure about the Detriot specific case (it might have an unusual number of road crossings on very high traffic streets) but I'd suspect it would reduce congestion by taking cars off the road. Most commuter trains have this effect.
I think you misunderstand Brasess' Paradox. It is when adding to a system decreases the efficiency of the system by adjusting the Nash equilibrium to be further from the optimal system wide solution. "Reducing congestion increases congestion" is a not a logical statement.
My comment left the possibility of Brasess' Paradox open in the specific Detroit case, but practically speaking commuter trains are used by most major cities worldwide as part of a comprehensive transportation system. For many cities rail is among the most efficient subsystems of their transportation system.
Same-level railways crossings are increasingly rare in Netherland. It's safer and less disruptive to have trains elevated a level above the car traffic. Tunnels are only useful when they have to go through extreme dense areas where there's no room for rails above ground, like in city centers.
The problem isn’t having the train, it’s having permission to use the rails.
Having worked at a railroad, I will say it’s comically easy to steal a train, for instance. They all have the same key, which is basically just a plastic rod.
The argument of the railroads is... okay, you have our train. Now what? You either go forward or you go backward, and we know where both those directions go.
You can also go really fast and intentionally derail the train, which is both a monetary and (depending on where you can get to) a security concern, or crash into another train on the same tracks (possibly a passenger train).
If you pass over a moderately complicated junction at low to moderate speed there's a good chance the signallers either can, or just by default will, derail you safely.
The phrase is "trap points". A correctly designed junction, where possible, will have points ("switches" if you're American) that default to leading to a dead end, with buffers and then nothing important. If you enter that track section without a signaller choosing where you should end up, that's what will happen.
The reason isn't for the implausible scenario of train theft, it's to reduce the consequence of errors. A wrong side signal defect allows a train into the junction without points being set - what happens? With trap points the train is derailed, probably at low speed, not directed into traffic. Or a driver misses a danger signal, same outcome. Expensive but probably everyone walks away.
Except that you don't control the signaling or the switching, meaning you can't choose where to go and you will very quickly be noticed and depending on the level of signaling automation either stopped completely or at least shunted to the place you can do least damage.
Your "comically easy to steal a train" remark reminded me of the 1980s movie, Malcom: https://youtu.be/7lwqDX3fMzA?t=89 ... I always wanted my own tram after seeing that as a youngster!
Somebody should Airbnb this. Who wouldn't want the opportunity to cross the United States in their own personal rail car? No airports to deal with, no impersonal hotels. Sounds like a retirement dream.
I took my dad on the Via Candian (1) from Toronto to Vancuver. We had an absolutely amazing exeperience. You see Canada in a very unique way, meet interesting people, and time does this interesting thing when you're on a train for 4 nights. Highly recommend it (If you get your own sleeper car!).
I did the whole country on that (although didn't do a sleeper car).
Tips: If you're gonna get off and on, especially in Western Canada, know when the next train leaves. Sometimes it's 4 days in between. Also don't get off the train in Thunder Bay, no matter what they say, you don't have time to get to the Subway sandwich shop and back.
I see a sleeper cabin for two listed for $1558 (discounted from $2428 reg price) and there are often even steeper discounts available. [0]
You can get an "upper berth" sleeping ticket with meals for $968.50. Considering that's a 4-day sightseeing trip compared to a 4-5hr flight I don't think a $300 premium is outrageous, do you?
In fact, the cheapest business class ticket one-way I can find is $871. That makes the difference less than $100!
(In fact I am amazed that the prices are in fact comparable between a 4-day train trip and a 5-hr flight. Definitely something I didn't expect.)
I would not recommend the upper berths. You have just a bed behind a curtain. For the trip with my dad I got us each a single sleeper cabin. I think it was $1,500 each, and having your own little room to go to was great to have.
The trip was for my dads 70th birthday, and a long promised gift (He took me to Italy, Croatia and Bosnia where we almost got killed and the deal was I’d take him on a trip) so it was worth spending a little extra for the comfort.
How much are you willing to pay? There are (a very few) luxury train trips in Europe. Maybe $5-10K NY-SF or NY-SEA would cover it in the US? It's totally doable if there were a market; basically upscale the long-haul Amtrak routes with higher-end accommodations and food. The evidence suggests there's not the demand.
I think it's partially a chicken-or-the-egg problem. Honestly, I didn't even know these private rail cars existed until this article. I feel like if the Kardashians took a cross-country tour in one of these things and Instagrammed it that it would be all the rage.
You need a critical mass of volume though. You can get pretty nice suites on Amtrak today on the long-haul routes. It's admittedly not luxury in the sense of really first-class food and everyone dressing up but probably a nice slow travel experience so long as you don't care too much about arriving as scheduled. I'm not convinced there's that big a market for don't care about cost + don't care about time.
Sleeping cars, while still existing, are pretty much a dying species in Europe.
Significantly higher speeds made them pretty much obsolete.
While, for example, it used to take 7+ hours to get from Zurich to Paris (and artificially longer, if it was a night train) the trip now takes 4 hours by TGV.
I've actually contacted for a quote before. I've thought about doing it for a birthday ;)
I was quoted 7500 per day minimum. Plus staff, food, etc.
My trip would be Den -> San Fran the problem is the most realistic response from a charter company I got was based in Chicago! So you have to think about days to get to your location, plus the return. Plus your trip.
I've also really wanted to do a Belmond long trip but they book sooo far in advance and I usually dont book trips until a month or two out. Maybe I'll treat myself for a 2021 ticket for my 30th birthday lol
These "extreme railfans" occasionally make the already atrocious Amtrak service unbearable for the rest of us. Case in point: we once tried to take the Coast Starlight from Oakland to Los Angeles. The train was delayed out of Oakland by more than 3 hours, and into LA by about 5 hours (the difference between a 7 PM arrival and a midnight arrival). The crew had to change in an unexpected location, and conductors left the train unstaffed toward the end of the route.
The train had had two extra private cars tucked on to the end of it in Portland. When we looked at this particular train's schedule, we found that it started to fall behind schedule when it stopped to hook up those private cars (conductors confirmed this to us). That schedule gap started at 2 hours and grew to 5.
I know I'll never ride that Amtrak route again, and this experience soured me on all of Amtrak in general (except maybe for the NW Corridor - I know it's run differently).
We took the trip before the March 2018 memo that the article quotes: "These operations caused significant operational distraction, failed to capture fully allocated profitable margins, and sometimes delayed our paying customers on our scheduled trains ... one-time trips and charters are immediately discontinued." To us, that's too little too late, Amtrak's brand is ruined.
Clearly you had a bad experience, but considering that Amtrak obviously kept an eye on the issue, determined a fix and resolved it to make sure it doesn't happen again -- wouldn't that make you more likely to take Amtrak in the future? Not all companies are as pro-active about fixing problems.
Just not sure why their brand would be ruined considering the one issue you had with the service was proactively resolved.
A lot of the delay probably isn't the fault of Amtrak or the private owners. Remember that Amtrak only owns about 5% of the rail it runs on, and private operators own the rest. Passenger trains don't make the private owners as much money, so they're not given priority.
The one thing I've concluded about being in tech is that if I get rich, I need to put a model train line on my retirement property. But unlike everyone that gets 1/8 or 1/6 scale, I want to commission a 2 scale train.
I looked into this a few years ago and found that it would cost about $350k to get started. It did look promising, and I read through all of the regulations and inspection certifications required, the requirements from Amtrak, and decided I just couldn't do it. It was a fun fantasy for a few months though.
Autonomous luxury RVs will fill a bit of this niche, and at a much lower cost.
In the gilded age owning your own rail car was like owning your own private jet. A lot of moguls owned one or more. Rockefeller was too cheap to buy one, but one of the railroads gave him one to curry favour with him. THAT is power.
> “I’m not in this business to make money off of it,” says Lowe, a 33-year veteran of the airline industry. Some trips he has taken, he says, have cost him more money than the dollars spent on tickets by passengers in the Amtrak trains his cars are hitched to at the end.
It costs him more than the entire train of passengers? $3.67/mile is insane.
$3.67 per mile is just the "cost of gas". I bet he has to pay to get the train from storage to the spot where they'd pick it up, do the same on the other end to come back home, and do it again to get back to his parking spot.
There was even a hackathon on Prague (Czechia) - Kosice (Slovakia) train a few years back. It's quite easy (but not very common, for sure) and not so expensive to rent a car or a whole train in CZ (from the train companies). There are also some historical trains for rent (run by enthusiasts, usually).
Another interesting service Amtrak offers is its relatively low-cast shipping. If you're willing to bring your boxed stuff to the station, and pick it up on the other end.
Huh. Looks interesting, but there are some odd limits. The 3 feet by 3 feet by 3 feet seems unusually restrictive, but I suppose if you can palletize the shipment then you get 60" x 48" x 60" (1.5m x 1.2m x 1.5m).
The main restrictive thing, to me, is the list of prohibited items. Everything from stamps to watches to poles, perishables, office equipment (calculators, computers, printers, telephones...), medicine, liquids, furniture, mattresses, appliances, electronic equipment of any kind (explicitly mentioning TVs, radios, stereos...) engines, motorized vehicles, fragile articles... the list goes on.
I literally can't think of anything that would fit those requirements that would be large or heavy enough to need to be moved by Amtrak.
It surprised me when I heard about it too. I had an opportunity to ride in a private rail car for a few hours [1] (http://boston.conman.org/2015/08/05.4) and that spoiled me for life. Alas, I can't afford to travel that way.
[1] My friend rented the private car at cost from a friend of his for a family trip from Miami to Chicago and back. It was not cheap, but it was a rolling hotel (porter and chef, four bedrooms (one for crew), bathrooms, lounge, dining room and kitchen).
> One way to travel in the Philippine capital, Manila, is by trolley. Passengers choose this unofficial transport service because it's quicker and cheaper than other options. For the homeless community that runs the illegal service, it puts food on the table. But it's also incredibly dangerous.
The problem with buying your own train is that you don't own the rails that you are dependent on. At least in Europe you have to submit a letter to an agency and request timeslot reservations some time in advance if you want to go for a ride.
From the article, it looks like the American way is to own a carriage or two, and attach them to a passing Amtrak passenger train. This is disruptive to Amtrak's passengers (!).
The European way is much less disruptive (the private train will fit in around whatever is already scheduled), though having to rent or own a locomotive and driver in addition to the carriage must be significantly more expensive.
I don't know about elsewhere, but in Britain there are fairly regular trips by private steam trains, or other old trains. A relative used to take these trips every few months.
People who aren't interested in the train itself can just rent an ordinary, modern train. Again in Britain, this happens for cases like a large group of football supporters (probably in the official fan club) who need to travel a long way for a match. Presumably, this isn't much different to hiring a bus with a driver.
The problem is in America we don't have open access to the tracks.
They are all owned by different railroads vs the UK were they're all owned by one (formerly government) organization.
Here in the US, even if you could rent a locomotive and crew, you'd have to get permission from each individual railroad whose tracks you wanted to cross.
One of those things on my bucket list, to ride across the country in my own rail car.
Reading the article and how dependent the whole thing is on Amtrak though makes me wonder if we're talking to the wrong railroad. The freight folks have a better system for building custom consists and sending them around the country.
The problem with hooking up to freight trains are numerous. First, the ride is bumpy. Freight trains add/remove cars throughout the journey, which generates large bumps.
More troublesome, though, are freight rail yards. They don’t have potable water hookups, wastewater disposal, or other passenger amenities. And they are notoriously dangerous at night. Drifters, break ins, no lighting... it’s no place for your family to sleep. Plus they are located on the outskirts of town, making disembarking difficult. Passenger rail yards accommodate for all of these issues.
In the UK, there's a privately-owned steam train that runs on the National Rail network. It was built from scratch starting in the 90s and completed around 2008. You can read about the history of the project here https://www.a1steam.com
The aspect of it that I found most interesting is how they solved engineering and manufacturing problems. These issues were commonplace in the heyday of steam, but few-to-no companies have the capacity or skills to complete them in the modern day.
It fun imagining what the equivalent will be for our generation. An iPhone which no-one knows how, or has the capacity, to recreate in less than 100 years!?
Googling "Wittgenstein missing train" returned me page 44 of "Ludwig Wittgenstein" by Edward Kanterian from "Critical Lives" series, which attributes this story to David Pinsent's diaries, but talks about "hiring entire train" instead of buying it:
Bing returned this HN thread and a link to the relevant part of Wikipedia article where this is also stated and "Portraits of Wittgenstein, Extracts from the Diary of David Pinsent 1912–1914" are referenced:
In an earlier episode Wittgenstein and Eccles, his friend from Machester, were planning to catch a train from Manchester to Liverpool. However, having missed the train, Wittgenstein suggested hiring an entire train to bring them to their destination. The plan was eventually dropped, but he still opted for a costly solution, namely hiring a taxi.
There's a private car club that does daily runs on one of the commuter rails lines in Chicago. I used to see it from time to time when my commute took my over the line it's on.
You can't expect that raising prices is going to cut it as Amtrak is very inefficient like many, if not most, state-owned companies [that even receive subsidies], though.
So can't a private railroad company build new tracks? For instance we know that traffic is bound by a interstate highway to get from City A to City B. It clogs with traffic due to a aging bridge and losing lanes.
Can my railroad company, acquire all the land necessary to build a station on both sides and track between them and then start to fan out from there?
Getting mostly straight line access between A and B is going to be amazingly difficult, and more so as you get closer and the property owners get more and more stubborn, because you're invested. 99% of a rail route isn't very useful, and doing a jog around a stubborn parcel owner isn't very possible.
Realistically, you need eminent domain, a frontier environment, or a super motivated population.
To build a rail line (or extension) in the US, you must ask the Surface Transportation Board for authority [1]. They also conduct an analysis of environmental impacts.
Technically, yes, but in practice it is an enormous expense that will likely never pay for itself. In New Jersey, laying less than 8 miles of tracks on an existing (abandoned, de-tracked) right-of-way in the middle of nowhere and building one station cost more than $60 million:
That seems too cheap. For many routes and cars, if you even half-fill the car, you're paying less per person than you would for an ordinary ticket on that route.
So as I understand it Amtrak doesn't own the track. Could these owners not negotiate access with the track owners? They could use vintage engines also, if that's their thing.
I'm sure there are some sort of rules on mixed consists of freight and passenger, the freight railroads also wouldn't have access arrangements to use station facilities. If you're talking about buying a locomotive and running a completely private consist, that would work, but you would have to start your own private railroad company, get FRA certified crew, and satisfy the Class I host railroads that your company was able to follow their rulebooks and not be more trouble than you're worth to their traffic.
It's probably doable though, there are some very short Class 3s with only a few employees that use small portions of Class I tracks and yards.
Mixing freight and passenger is allowed although rarely done because the passenger service would be very poor. In modern cars the lack of an electrical hookup from the locomotive would also be problematic.
Amtrak used to carry US mail up until the late 70s and still ferries cars on some routes.
Financially impractical as all this already is, as the article points out, dealing with private railroad cars is such a tiny blip that it's hard to imagine anyone responsible for the logistics of a large-scale rail operation wanting to deal with it. It's pretty much only (sort-of) supported by Amtrak for legacy reasons.
As you say, there may be short sections where this sort of thing could work but that's probably not what people looking to do long cross-country trips are looking for.
No way dude, I live in semu-rural Pennsylvania and the freight train that passes 10+ times a day does 45-50 mph. I've driven alongside dozens of times.
In addition to the scheduling comment below, there's a few really big issues that make this harder:
- There are a lot of rail lines owned by different companies, Amtrak already has agreements with all of them. Depending where you're going, you might need to negotiate with multiple just to schedule your private trip.
- Given the risk of collisions between trains, rail lines are very unlikely to permit random schmucks to drive trains down their tracks. Who's going to give a private engine owner permission to do that? And who's going to insure it?
- The article talked a lot about the expense to get a plain old rail car certified for use on an Amtrak. I'd imagine in addition to the much costlier nature of the engine itself, certifying it might also be an issue. For long haul trips, are there any environmental regulations in play?
The trick would probably be in scheduling your access to the tracks. I'm don't know but I suspect that it's not as well formalized as filing a flightplan with the FAA. Probably many man hours involved in tracking down the right people to talk to, getting them to agree, and figuring out the fee structure, and that's before you even plan the trip.
Even at a pokey 50-55 mph he could get to downtown Detroit 30-45 minutes faster than driving because of traffic congestion. He demonstrated that the demand was there. But sadly the railroads wouldn't even take a meeting.