One of the problems with rail in the US
is excessive oversight. The FRA is a massive bureaucracy who is attempting to preserve their own relevance by imposing dated and terrible regulations on the rail industry, that not only keeps it in the dark ages but also makes it less safe.
This is a good rundown of how bad the FRA is.Private rail is simply not feasible because there's no way to make it profitable under FRA oversight. In everywhere else in the world, intercity rail is a profitable enterprise.
As for the "organization before electronics before concrete," American bureaucracies are so self-serving and entrenched (and often corrupt) that they try and do the opposite: concrete solutions first. Great example: want to bring trains from Long Island into Grand Central? Let's not share track space with Metro North, because that would mean two separate bureaucracies working together. Nope, the solution here is to build a $5 billion dollar new station under Grand Central. Limited space at Penn Station because you have NJ Transit and LIRR terminating there? Instead of organizing through-running or sharing of space, the solution is to build another huge fucking station when you already have plenty of capacity. Hell, the main reason that the California HSR alignment is so fucking expensive (though price estimates have come way down from the $100 billion) is that the HSR guys don't want to share tracks, space, platform heights, or even the same signalling as Caltrain. They'd rather pay out the ass to have it their own way than work together.
Topic: The P/R-side Chat Thread v.2 (Read 339314 times)
