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The rail industry would be much better off being better regulated and with large rail companies broken up.
Definitely, but even then, we have a huge amount of freight going on our railroads. I live in a town that's a major cross-point for multiple railroads. Traffic is held up constantly by super long trains going through. Kids are late for school, people are late for work, people miss doctor's appointments and, worse, ambulances have to take circuitous routes to the couple of overpasses they can use to get around them. And then there are the times where a train breaks down just outside of town and cuts off one side of town from the other for hours except for those two overpasses.
I don't know what the solution is there.
The issue is with how we prioritize rail. When grade crossings are installed, they are the least path of resistance, but also are the biggest obstacle in planning. If we really want to see better rail, we need to pay for the infrastructure (ie, elevated crossings). That’s not to say every route needs the best infrastructure, but at least the busiest.
The other issue is how 150 years ago we gave railroads incredible handouts of land ownership, not just in terms of the amount of land, but also in terms of the type of ownership. In a lot of cases, railroads have more sovereignty over their land than do the local and state jurisdictions it runs through. If you're a city trying to improve a railroad crossing and the railroad doesn't feel like cooperating, you're just fucked with zero recourse.
The solution is to make freight rail companies run on timetables again with shorter trains.
Would shorter trains be able to make up for the lack of cargo in trucks?
You need to run more trains, but a schedule will make it easier to hire qualified people to do so.
A lot of what has made current freight rail shitty in the USA is that a lot of freight rail companies seem hyper fixated on only the most profitable routes at the exclusion of everything else. This has caused freight rail companies to adopt some really terrible labor practices, which has led to labor shortages.
But how many trains is more trains? Because you're talking about enough trains to make up for the loss of thousands upon thousands of trucks from the road. That sounds a hell of a lot more than, say, one train an hour. In fact, it sounds like people would be held up at crossings constantly.
One train per hour would be on the very high side. It would likely be a lot less.
Why would it be a lot less? I just looked it up and there are 13.86 million trucks on the road in the US. How many cars would a train need to make up for that in a once-per-hour schedule over a 24-hour period?