Like way way more expensive. I know that in France electrification is around 1M€/km, so when you’re working on a long line with a few train, it might be cheaper to use batteries, diesel train or even hydrogen (even though it’s mostly prototypes for now).
And I’m only talking about economic cost, think of the ecological one, if you have to deploy +100kms of wires, sub electrical stations and maintain them, all for a handful of trains a day then there’s simply no interest
I mean, ecological cost of electrification vs burning diesel seems like a pretty clear choice. In terms of economic cost, though, the US would probably balloon that price out to $20M/km, because how else would contractors get to take the taxpayer over the coals?
Again, the ecological cost of electrical infrastructure is bigger than the one for diesel train, so when you got 2 trains a day it might make sense to keep Diesel
US rail infrastructure is also more expensive just as a simply supply and demand problem – we have very, very little supply compared to in Europe. We’ve fallen so far behind in the technology that most major projects involve bringing in contractors from Italy, Germany, and France to do the work. We even import most of our new rolling stock (and the Class 1s nearly never buy new rolling stock anyway, if they can help it). We’re buying and building so little rail that we’ve lost the capacity to do it well ourselves and so have to import it at a premium.
Plus the US federal system – and its general philosophy with e.g., city departments competing with each other for budget – just makes infrastructure projects super expensive in general.
We need to start investing in it again to see the cost drop but people refuse to invest in it because the cost is so high. That might just be starting to change with Cali HSR, Brightline, the mid-Texas HSR project, Amtrak ConnectUS, etc., but we’ll see.
There’s a confluence of factors that make infrastructure projects such a nightmare in the US, but the big ones seem to be:
-Not institutional knowledge. State DOTs don’t retain people who can plan and manage this stuff, it all gets farmed out to contractors or their people get scalped by contractors willing to pay 2-3x the wage the state will pay. So, they’re completely at the mercy of contractors.
-Overreliance on contractors and subcontractors. Nuff said. There’s a lot of shitty contractors out there whose whole game is to take the taxpayers for as big of a ride as possible, regardless of whether the work actually gets done. Because of Reagan era “reforms” (those are sarcasm quotes, to be clear), we use contractors for all kinds of stuff, and it’s easy for shitty contractors to game the system.
-Stations: the US has a hard-on for building large stations, when they’re very reliably the most expensive part of building any kind of rail infrastructure. We could substantially reduce rail project costs be re-examining our station designs and opting for more utilitarian choices. I’m not against making stations look nice, mind you, I’m not advocating for a brutalist, khaki concrete cube approach here; just saying that we can make more pragmatic choices than CAHSR’s fantasy-future ribcages.
All the class 1 RR companies on the US are absolutely allergic to any kind of capital expense. They will literally turn down very profitable business expansions to avoid increasing their costs because they view maintaining a good cost/revenue ratio as more important than increasing profits.
It’s pretty mind-blowing how poorly-run these companies are.
Well, they’re basically in the early stages of vulture capitalization. This is where businesses just sort of coast, they stop trying to grow, and just don’t replace things as they break. I think the long term plan is to milk it for whatever they can before getting bought/bailed out by the federal government. We’ll get CONRAIL again for a few years and maybe some pretty sick Amtrak expansions as the government goes around fixing about half of the most critical rail lines, but then the cycle will start over and we’ll sell CONRAIL and our freshly repaired alignments off to some genius investor for pennies on the dollar just so they can vulture capitalize anew and talk about what a business genius they are.
If you’re already laying miles of tracks, how much more expensive is it really to dig a trench for an electric cable?
Like way way more expensive. I know that in France electrification is around 1M€/km, so when you’re working on a long line with a few train, it might be cheaper to use batteries, diesel train or even hydrogen (even though it’s mostly prototypes for now).
And I’m only talking about economic cost, think of the ecological one, if you have to deploy +100kms of wires, sub electrical stations and maintain them, all for a handful of trains a day then there’s simply no interest
I mean, ecological cost of electrification vs burning diesel seems like a pretty clear choice. In terms of economic cost, though, the US would probably balloon that price out to $20M/km, because how else would contractors get to take the taxpayer over the coals?
Again, the ecological cost of electrical infrastructure is bigger than the one for diesel train, so when you got 2 trains a day it might make sense to keep Diesel
US rail infrastructure is also more expensive just as a simply supply and demand problem – we have very, very little supply compared to in Europe. We’ve fallen so far behind in the technology that most major projects involve bringing in contractors from Italy, Germany, and France to do the work. We even import most of our new rolling stock (and the Class 1s nearly never buy new rolling stock anyway, if they can help it). We’re buying and building so little rail that we’ve lost the capacity to do it well ourselves and so have to import it at a premium.
Plus the US federal system – and its general philosophy with e.g., city departments competing with each other for budget – just makes infrastructure projects super expensive in general.
We need to start investing in it again to see the cost drop but people refuse to invest in it because the cost is so high. That might just be starting to change with Cali HSR, Brightline, the mid-Texas HSR project, Amtrak ConnectUS, etc., but we’ll see.
There’s a confluence of factors that make infrastructure projects such a nightmare in the US, but the big ones seem to be:
-Not institutional knowledge. State DOTs don’t retain people who can plan and manage this stuff, it all gets farmed out to contractors or their people get scalped by contractors willing to pay 2-3x the wage the state will pay. So, they’re completely at the mercy of contractors.
-Overreliance on contractors and subcontractors. Nuff said. There’s a lot of shitty contractors out there whose whole game is to take the taxpayers for as big of a ride as possible, regardless of whether the work actually gets done. Because of Reagan era “reforms” (those are sarcasm quotes, to be clear), we use contractors for all kinds of stuff, and it’s easy for shitty contractors to game the system.
-Stations: the US has a hard-on for building large stations, when they’re very reliably the most expensive part of building any kind of rail infrastructure. We could substantially reduce rail project costs be re-examining our station designs and opting for more utilitarian choices. I’m not against making stations look nice, mind you, I’m not advocating for a brutalist, khaki concrete cube approach here; just saying that we can make more pragmatic choices than CAHSR’s fantasy-future ribcages.
All the class 1 RR companies on the US are absolutely allergic to any kind of capital expense. They will literally turn down very profitable business expansions to avoid increasing their costs because they view maintaining a good cost/revenue ratio as more important than increasing profits.
It’s pretty mind-blowing how poorly-run these companies are.
Well, they’re basically in the early stages of vulture capitalization. This is where businesses just sort of coast, they stop trying to grow, and just don’t replace things as they break. I think the long term plan is to milk it for whatever they can before getting bought/bailed out by the federal government. We’ll get CONRAIL again for a few years and maybe some pretty sick Amtrak expansions as the government goes around fixing about half of the most critical rail lines, but then the cycle will start over and we’ll sell CONRAIL and our freshly repaired alignments off to some genius investor for pennies on the dollar just so they can vulture capitalize anew and talk about what a business genius they are.
I don’t know but even in Germany there are rural areas with diesel trains, and they keep building rail everywhere. So I bet its pretty pricey.