A Union Pacific-Norfolk Southern combination would redraw the railroad map

> the US has an incredibly advanced and dense rail network, paid for with federal land grants

Note that only a small portion of the US rail network was built with land grants, about 18k miles out of ~250k miles in the peak of the US rail network. Also, most of the land-grant railroads are in the Western states, which is actually generally the least-dense portion of the rail network (in large part because the population density of that area is quite low--which is a large part of the reason for the land grants in the first place!).

It was also paid for by ripping the face of 19th century bondholders who went bust many, many times.

Europes rail network is far worse - but it appears better because you see passanger traffic and don't think what else. That and europe mostly can't see beyond national borders (there is a language barrier with most) and so they fail to create good eu wide rail of any sort.

Incredibly advanced? Bullshit.

Among the G8 we probably have the least-electrified, slowest rail network with the worst Positive Train Control. Probably the most dangerous, too, given how disastrous Precision Railroad Scheduling has been for safety. We also likely have the highest crash and derailment rates.

This is a sad joke: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_train_control#Deploym...

ASES, ACSES, ETMS, CBTM, CBOSS, E-ATC, ITCS, and whatever Union Pacific is using. That's over half a dozen different systems and none of them are inherently compatible with each other - specialized systems are required to tie the systems together on railways that might have trains with different systems.

I'm guessing no other country in the G8 has issues with freight train movement such that trains routinely bisect towns and entire counties for hours or more and force police, fire, and medical services to reroute, as well as require children to crawl underneath the trains (which could start moving without warning) to get to/from school.

Why? Because the feds are not regulating train lengths nor mandating that trains cannot block road intersections for more than a certain amount of time, so the railways do whatever they please.

I'm guessing no other G8 country has problems with the government (federal, state, or local) having no idea what hazardous materials are being shipped and where...no way to look it up, not noticed by the railroad, nothing.

Consolidation reduces competition and increases margins. The rest of the market and the people are sacrificed at the altar of shareholder value.

> What's the argument for the Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern merger [1]?

'Cost savings through synergies which will be passed down to customers.'

(And certainly not shareholders and suits making more money.)

They share essentially zero miles of track or routes. A move only creates a monopoly if it reduces consumer choice.

No freight customer is deciding "Oh I can either ship from LA to Seattle, or Miami to DC." They are shipping from one fixed location to a different fixed location. These railroads merging does not reduce their choices or give the combined entity more leverage.

Monopoly? No. Union Pacific plus Norfolk Southern would have a monopoly on single-line end-to-end rail service in the US, true, but that's the kind of thing that you can get a "monopoly" in. BNSF and CSX interchange with each other, after all. And BNSF and CSX could (and almost certainly would) merge in response. So there's no monopoly argument.

Which doesn't mean that a rational regulator would not turn it down anyway. But rational regulators may not be running the show at the moment. UP sees that there may be an opportunity during the Trump administration. (Note "may" - nobody knows whether there is an opportunity, but there is more of a chance than there was under Biden.)

Portland is kind of weird because it has big yards for two Class Is in town. But they're both right on the waterfront (which is bad for urban transit, since it means half the walkshed is wasted). The BNSF line doesn't go anywhere useful on the west bank of the river. The useful parts of the UP line on the east bank of the river are essentially duplicated by the MAX lines to Expo Center and Milwaukie. The main useful thing you could get out of the Class I lines in Greater Portland is a S-Bahn-like service to Vancouver, WA IMO.

It’s because you seem to not understand how America functions. The railroads are largely private enterprises, running on private rail on private land owned by those private enterprises. Many of the cities and towns you may be wanting passenger rail literally only exist because those private rail companies were built and existed there.

Those private enterprises do what is profitable for them, which is largely hauling material in a market where cars that provide degrees of freedom and autonomy, trains simply cannot provide under even the best circumstances.

It also ignores that the passenger trains of places like Europe and Asia are extremely subsidized and no one actually pays the full cost of those rail systems directly; especially not naive Americans traveling to/in Europe being amazed at how nice and cheap it is to travel by rail in Europe, because they are paying a price that is heavily subsidized by the tax slave called the European worker, who also is far more controlled in his actions and freedoms through the mobility limitations that rail imposes.

You can build all the rail you want in America, but there are so many structural and cultural things that are headwinds that it simply does not work.

A rather successful and good bus service that has exploded onto the European market, FlixBus recently tried entering the American market by buying Greyhound (yes, it still existed), but that has not gone well and they’ve been cutting routes and shutting Greyhound stations for reasons that any reasonably informed American could have warned them about.

Car sales are up in America, cars being sold are getting bigger and more expensive in America. Not even any of the wonderful immigrants want to use Greyhound or Amtrak, they bit cars too, especially the European immigrants that like buying trucks the second they hit American soil. They don’t ride Amtrak and Greyhound either, or ride their bikes for that matter.

You can rage against the system all you want, but reality is that there are some forces that will defy any and all wishful thinking and obsessions for reasons that are not actually based in reason or honesty.

We have made large strides towards electric vehicles in America, yet people like you are still not satisfied and it exposes that it really was never about emissions or combustion or pollution, you either wanted to control people’s freedom of movement and/or can’t stand that people would have freedom of movement you don’t have, and want them to also be miserable with you.

And ethanol plants, which I was surprised to find out is actually a big deal for rail (or rail is a big deal for ethanol?). I guess I never put much thought into how much of it was being produced and how it was being moved around.

https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_railNA_a_EPOOXE_RAIL_m...

Britain tried that. Network Rail, a unit of the Government, owns the tracks, and 28 or so Train Operating Companies run the trains.

The UK started out with railroads in private ownership. They were nationalized in 1948, as British Rail. Then they were de-nationalized in the 1980s and 1990s. Now, they're being re-nationalized.

None of this is considered a huge success.

What does this comment mean?

I don’t see how Amtrak survives the next 3 years

Ticket to Ride is thought to be RB's natural successor.

ref: https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/94883/rail-baron-comparing-...

I think about a book I found in Texas at a thrift store. Poor's 1925 Railroad Section [1] is a thick book containing details about every (?) railroad in the US such as miles of track, tons hauled, revenue, recent mergers, etc.

I'm not sure whether there is digitized data for railroad performance from the era, but it seemed like it'd be a neat dataset to assemble and research.

https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/Poors-1925-Railroad-S...

> FWIW, while the instinctive response here will be that this is a monopolistic and anti-consumer play, the reality is that these companies share almost zero routes.

And cable companies also don't have overlapping territory, so from the consumer point of view it did not reduce competition. But from the 'other side' when there are fewer ISPs then tech companies can be squeezed because there are fewer paths to eye-balls overall and each path has more influence because instead of two ISPs have 10% of Netflix customers, now one has 20%:

* https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...

Similarly with Amazon and books: while cheap consumer prices may look great, from the book publishers' perspective there's a choke point to readers, and so now the publishers have to consolidate to get market power over Amazon.

And if this goes through, do you think the other Class Is will sit around?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._Class_I_railroads

CSX is mostly east of the Mississippi, while BNSF is west: what about that kind of merger? Or CN or CP doing the same thing?

They built the railroads, often on their own dime, and paid taxes by the fistful for them.

Their competition was subsidized by the general government, and continues to be every year.

If you want to argue that nationalizing railroads should be done for the public good, do that - dont just demonize them, because its not a fully winning argument.

> There are over 1000 train derailments a year.

No surprise when the rails are utter dogshit. Something like [1] - you can clearly see how incredibly uneven the track is - which flies over my youtube feed way too much for my liking would yield immediate regulatory action here in Germany.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/shorts/A0ZYKJm-tno