www.ntsb.gov/investigatio...

I thought that was a freight only rule

Anecdotally, I know a lot of people who tried it for the first time after 2020 and many whose only real barrier to taking it more is the cost when buying a ticket on short notice for personal travel.

Also, Amtrak ridership growth was going strong throughout the 2010s.

Also, in an increasingly environmentally conscious public, anything on the NEC is more attractive to many, even if often the carbon math isn't that wide of a gulf once you're talking about non-automobile options.

If I had to guess it was a confluence of multiple factors at once both a large wave so soft marketing via social buzz about taking trains in social media, covid making the flying experience even less attractive, the growth of remote work...

If you're lucky, they acknowledge its existence but say it's "just too expensive" or laughably that the country is "just too big".

The industry can only bury its head in the sand for so long before the rot takes ever deeper roots.

Yes, granted the physical volume of lighter goods means that even when in double stack containers to get similar tonnage moved is difficult. Coal tonnage by rail has continued to drop like a rock freeing up track capacity in some areas for more internmodal traffic. www.aar.org/wp-content/u...

The extent to which China has dramatically shifted over most bulk freight from trucking over to rail in the past 10 years has been dramatically underreported in the West
theicct.org/publication/...

We have a ton of structural aspects that make the NA freight rail system look great on paper but it could be so much better if it can get it's head out of it's ass about investing in it's self both for physical infrastructure and equipment modernization to enable better operations practices.

Yeah formerly working for a Class 1 has made the narrative about the US freight rail system being unparalleled is getting exhausting. Seeing China starting to roll out electrification for double stack container routes, India build whole new trunk lines, Europe get closer to a rollout of DACs, ect.

Sure there area areas of successes like BNSF strengthening it's total capacity on the Southern and Northern transcons and even Union Pacific doing the same but as soon as you zoom in you see ever more resistance from Class 1s to engage in the kind of service their status as a common carrier demands.

Union Pacific squanders a mountain of under utilized infrastructure in Texas to both save a penny but also make sure no one else has better access to traffic coming from or going to Mexico. They have costed the tax payer billions in highway expansions and maintenance to do this.

When I lived in North Houston every time I hopped on I-45 I would see dozens sometimes hundreds of container loads that I knew were coming from DFW on truck instead of by rail.

The US has a good freight rail system that has the potential to be significantly better and is coasting on the structural and massive investments of the past. It's still slowly decaying particularly due to an inability to innovate like digital automatic couplers and engage in better local service.

This isn't exactly low hanging fruit.

You can't deck over the curved sections of the yard without spending excessively. So you end up with maybe a football fields worth of very expensive capping when there is single family detached housing next door that could be up zoned and built up for far cheaper.

Yes, it'll be one of the things I miss the most about living in Houston.

Sorry for the late reply. I've been busy getting ready and then now moving to Philly.

Most of Southwest's flights went to the wrong side of Houston for half the city, Hobby is a real pain to get to from anyone north of I-10. Losing out on a lot of oil industry traffic.

Tangentially, I miss Continental.

Everything I have been able to find has been about the previous push in the 1910s before World War 1.