this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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I already commented here, but I think this deserves its own comment. I'd like to see how this stacks up against Japan and China. I can already tell you how the US stacks up. On top of fifty-to-seventy years of rail underinvestment, the freight rail companies have been deliberately fucking with Amtrak for years now by making their trains too long to fulfill their legal obligation to pull off onto side tracks and yield to passenger traffic. And yes, you read that right, the vast majority of Amtrak's alignments are shared with freight rail.
Isn't that kinda normal, though?
My understanding is that most passenger rail in Europe and Asia runs on dedicated tracks. I misspoke, I should have said tracks, not alignments. It would be much less of an issue if Amtrak had its own tracks on a given freight alignment. Instead, they share tracks, and regularly get delayed, speed capped at lower speeds than they could safely operate at otherwise, and generally jerked around by the freight operators.
I think this perception is false.
On many big rail corridors like Antwerp/Rotterdam through Germany/Switzerland to Milan/Torino/Genova a lot or the rails are very shared by freight and passengers.
There are dedicated passengers rails mostly on (expensive to ride) high speed lines and there are dedicated freight tracks within ports and such, but a lot of tracks are still shared by both.
Plenty of saturated lines where you can see everything pass by: intercities, S-bahn style, freight all on same tracks and only at certains stops can they overtake each other.
Thanks for this feedback, it's caused me to re-evaluate some positions!
From my experience in Germany, that's not really true. Freight trains regularly run on the same tracks and through the same train stations as passenger trains (of course they don't actually stop at passenger train stations). There's some dedicated tracks of course, especially to and from freight stations, but I AFAIK that's not the majority of tracks they're running on.
Could be separate tracks in countries that actually have well-run train networks, though.