I've never argued that a dirt track could handle regular heavy freight.
We were talking about passenger travel. Yes of course if you have heavy
freight needs built a track, it's most efficient, but it makes little
sense for light duty or medium duty.. A simple oiled sand/gravel road
will handle light freight, local automobile traffic and the daily or
thrice daily bus. As traffic increases the road can be improved. Once
you reach a certain level of commerce then the debate over the correct
balance of rails vs roads is appropriate, but most likely you'll get too
much of one and not enough of the other especially if a government is
involved.
Bob Sullivan wrote:
PJ,
As others have noted, there are roads and there are dirt tracks and ox
cart paths.
Compared to an ox cart path, a railroad right of way is expensive. It
takes 2 steel rails, cross ties set in a gravel roadbed, ditching and
a subsoil to support the roadbed and carry the weight. Modern paved
roads are even more expensive. They require a wider right of way, the
same or better subsoil and ditching preparation, then several layers
of materials to distribute the weight back down to the ground,
finishing with several inches of concrete. (The US has heavier trucks
than Europe and can require 10 inches of concrete.)
But it all comes down to cost per ton of traffic handled. A dirt path
is fine for 5-10 horses a day but would never do for the 10 million
tons of coal that pass me on the railroad track on a daily coal train
(100 cars at 100,000+ tons each). Imagine trying to get 10 million
tons of coal into Chicago on a dirt path in the rain.
Regards, Bob S.
On Mon, May 25, 2009 at 10:00 AM, P. J. Alling <[email protected]> wrote:
Roads are cheaper and easier to maintain than railways, starting with the
fact that the minimum standard for a road is a dirt track, the minimum
standard for a railway is damn near the maximum standard for a railway. The
people who use the roads usually own their own means of transport. Unless a
large corporation owns the trains then the government owns the trains.
Anything the government owns is an operating expense, anything the
individuals own is a source or revenue, (it can be taxed and the government
doesn't have to pay for it's maintenance). Need we go into the fact that
Large corporations can buy legislatures to get preferential tax treatment,
something much harder for individuals to do? You don't need a road lobby, an
enlightened government will pick roads over rails any time they do a
reasonable analysis. Then there's the fact that reasonably well off people
seem to prefer to travel in their own cars, they like privacy, they like to
control their own schedules, they don't want to sit next to this guy
http://www.spock.com/i/H01ljdNSw/The-Scary-Guy.jpg
Bob W wrote:
John,
The arguement breaks down on the cost to build rail service to every
small town in order to feed the big towns.
Regards, Bob S.
In the mid 60s here there was a wholesale and much-lamented closure of
small, unprofitable railway lines that linked tiny communities. Many of
them
were turned into walking and cycling tracks through beautiful and fairly
remote country (but no train to take you there!). My schoolmates and I
helped with the building of one in Derbyshire called the Tissington Trail.
The railway station in the town where we boarded was pulled down and
redeveloped as a swimming pool, which was a great improvement over the
awful
unheated outdoor pool we had previously had to use.
If you read literature of the early 20th century you notice that these
small
lines were quite embedded into the social fabric of the day, even if they
were unprofitable. Some of the stations were built solely to serve the
local
big house, and in PG Wodehouse's books you see Wooster and Jeeves and the
like making extensive use of them for weekend country house parties.
It's considered to be an inevitable tragedy that so many were closed,
because of the impact on rural communities, and it's quite possible that
many of them could have been made payable, or subsidised to keep them open
for social reasons. The distribution of support for different transport
schemes has been unfairly loaded in favour of roads for decades.
Most of the lines were probably never profitable even when they were
built.
The early railway boom in this country turned into a bubble rather like
the
dot.com boom. The railway lines were built as vanity or speculative
projects
off the back of inflated share prices. When the bubble burst a lot of
people
lost a lot of money and we were left with a wonderful infrastructure that
could rarely pay for itself and which was dealt the death blow after WW1
when road transport came into its own.
I'm still convinced that if the government spent as much money on the
railways and had the level of commitment to them that they have now to the
road lobby we would all be a lot better off, and so would the environment.
Bob
On Sun, May 24, 2009 at 2:08 PM, John Sessoms <[email protected]>
wrote:
From: Bob Sullivan
It's the distance between cities that kills rail here.
Except on the east coast, travel times between big cities
require an
overnight ride.
Planes are so much faster for anything over 200 miles.
Been that way since 1947...
Regards, Bob S.
There are a couple of flaws I find with that argument ...
Who says service has to be only between big cities? Seems
to me local
services are what makes rail transportation viable. Feed
from the small
towns into the big cities and back again; and take the high
speed expresses
between big cities.
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