The funny thing in this US-centric view is that we have such a cargo since a century where trains play the role of "self-driving cargo".
In europe, the decline of cargo on tracks (trains) is also partially owed to subsidiation of automobile traffic and highway expansions. It is a pity, because from the raw numbers trains are much less expensive then tracks.
I think that's misplaced, freight is the one area where NA in general and US in particular absolutely blows every other region out the water. Circa 2010 Rail was ~40% of US freight by ton-mile, whereas for the EU it was ~17%, and the US had 10x more tonne-kilometer freight rail than the EU (beyond China and Russia, with India a very distant third) (nb: China carried more tonnes total but shorter distances)
Of course a major reason for that is that the US have (literally) tons of commodities, a significant plurality of the tonnage is coal. I expect roughly the same of Russia, China, Australia and India (the other members of the tonnage top 5, Australia notably haults extremely heavy stuff for very short distances as it's about on par with the EU for tkm but waaay ahead in total tonnage).
Hell one of the reasons passenger trains is shit in the US is that passenger rail does not get priority over freight and thus you get the country's lone "high-speed train" giving way to slow freight leading to an average speed of 130km/h, slower than some non-high-speed intercity service in Europe.
> Hell one of the reasons passenger trains is shit in the US is that passenger rail does not get priority over freight
They do have priority:
> (c) Preference over freight transportation. -- Except in an emergency, intercity and commuter rail passenger transportation provided by or for Amtrak has preference over freight transportation in using a rail line, junction, or crossing...
Passenger rail is supposed to have priority by law, but in practice they don't always get it. Freight carriers don't always yield, enough so that there are ongoing legal battles. You can check Amtrak's historical On-Time Performance and causes of delay here:
https://www.amtrak.com/about-amtrak/on-time-performance/
My quick sampling of ~10 trains came up with an average around 65% on-time during the last year. The only one I've ridden, the California Zephyr, is less than 50%.
Yeah I've ridden the Zephyr from Chicago to Colorado (and back) a few times, and it was off-schedule about half the time, one of them was at least 4 hours of just sitting there in the train in the middle of nowhere.
One hour I can understand, four is ridiculous. The trip is pleasant and the views are great but for me to take it again they're going to have to do better than 50% on-time.
I used to live on a small town on the Empire Builder line a few hours west of Chicago. It was once a day each way, and we'd get one direction in the morning, and the opposite direction in the afternoon. Or that was the theory. Often the morning train was so late that when you heard them sound the horn you wouldn't know if it was the afternoon train or the "morning" train.
Sounds like something that could be enforced by giving the passenger trains the ability to lock out switches further ahead of them. Like, say, an hour ahead of them. (Though, without signalling the particular switches that lower at-grade crossing guards. It’d be a rather fraught thing to engineer, all-told.)
Sure, you couldn’t run densely-packed passenger trains very well on such a system... but they’re not densely-packed. If they were, the system would have been a success and could then be turned off. ;)
What happens is that the freight trains gives Amtrak a window for its timetable. In that window, Amtrak gets priority. Miss the window, and Amtrak has to wait for freight trains. There's a separate issue that some freight operators will decide to screw Amtrak over (even within their nominal window) and just eat the fines instead.
In Tucson AZ it was a constant problem that freight trains would either blow through town at full speed or crawl through level crossings blocking traffic rather than obeying speed laws. It was always cheaper for them to pay the fines than to comply.
The data mostly looks like population data then, if US, India, and China are the leaders. What would it look like for ton-mile per capita (if that's actually a statistic)?
The US has a smaller population than the EU (~300m to ~500m). So does Russia (150m). Australia has a significantly smaller population than the EU (15^H^H25m as golemiprague noted).
It's not population data it's mineral commodities.
> What would it look like for ton-mile per capita (if that's actually a statistic)?
The US would climb to ~15x the tonnes-kilometers per capita of the EU, and australia would shoot up to about the same ratio over the EU (owing to close tonne-kilometer but 1/20th the population). Russia would shoot up as well. Only China and India would get a lower rank overall, and not enough that the EU would come close to edging them for China at least (a bit under 3x the population, but a bit under 10x the tonner-kilometer of rail freight).
The main issue has actually been prioritization. In Europe the rails are fast and well-maintained, which is great for passenger operation but expensive for very heavy freight operations. Passenger operations are also prioritized very heavily at the expense of freight operations on the rail network.
In comparison, the US rail network is slow and low quality, which makes freight operations extremely attractive but is absolute garbage for passenger operations. US rail freight competes well in its market niche, where it is faster than oceanic shipping but much cheaper than air freight.
I moved from western Europe to eastern Europe and public transport by train is absolutely horrible. I still hope that one day I can catch a train that arrives on schedule. We're not talking a couple of minutes delay, we're talking multiple hours. Even when the train finally departs, it'll pick up delay along the way due to poorly maintained tracks and bad scheduling. All of this turns 6 hour trips into 10 hour trips.
I am well aware that this is anecdotal. But from my point of view, not all rails are fast and well-maintained in Europe. Based on my personal experience, that statement applies to western Europe.
American rails are decidedly low quality. [The accident record is much worse](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/21/world/europe/railroads-ar...), and the freight networks spent many years dismantling tracks and electrification to improve the bottom line.
HSR really depends on straight and level right of ways, along with some better signaling equipment and more (complete?) separation with road traffic. China builds a lot of its HSR tracks elevated with lots of tunnels to blast through hills and mountains. Standard track can stand to meander more for less construction costs.
You get advantages from trucks in terms of flexibility and lower inventory due to faster shipment times. It doesn't make sense for things like coal, sure, but there's very real advantages you gain through shipping by truck instead of rail.
Freight by truck is worth it because of flexibility and reduced latency, flexibility and reduced latency are worth it because of just-in-time production, just-in-time production is worth it because of less inventory, less inventory is worth it because of less money locked up in inventory, less money locked up in inventory is worth it because of better cash flow on the quarterly reports, better cash flow on the quarterly reports is worth it because it makes the stock market like your company more, the stock market liking your company more is worth it because ???
We might just find out the things we thought are worth it, are not really. It works the other way around, too, of course, which is that the increased per-mile cost is still way below what it would have to be with the externalities accounted for.
Low inventory is also worth it because it uncovers operational inefficiencies. So it not only helps you become more profitable, but also more reliable.
We might just find out the things we thought are worth it, are not really.
Then give a concrete quantification of that. It's a very complex question. Entire careers have been built on how to price something complex. That's called "economics."
See how this is an example of how the need to take a swipe at some group ends up making you look foolish?
Your point was that trains are "self-driving cargo". If you'd left it at that, this would have been a clever comment.
Instead, you look like someone who doesn't realize the US has massive, massive, massive amounts of train-hauled cargo because all he knows is we don't use commuter trains as much as other countries.
In europe, the decline of cargo on tracks (trains) is also partially owed to subsidiation of automobile traffic and highway expansions. It is a pity, because from the raw numbers trains are much less expensive then tracks.