Scott Taipale
4 HN mentions · mentioned in 3 months, 2023–2026
7:24 · 12M views · Mar 31, 2017
Footage of a doubleheader of locomotives crawling over badly maintained track on a former Wabash Railroad line, now the ND&W Railway. The uploader explains the track had deferred maintenance for decades.
Cited as a startling example of poor US freight track quality, usually in comparisons with Europe.
4 comments from Hacker News
> The US freight rail network is in excellent shape. The German rail network is in shambles - but compared to how some American freight rail looks like, even that is more like Japan's excellent railways... I've seen far too many examples like [1] for my liking on youtube. This kind of shit would actually land you jail time here if you as a responsible person would let a train run there. Or this legit, on-camera derailment [2] - no way the train would be allowed to just continue to move on, it would get a full-blown investigation and those responsible for the dereliction probably a criminal trial for endangering rail traffic [3]. [1] this video [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK]
Far worse in what sense? More tracks, sure the US rail network is about 1.5 times the size of the European network for the same landmass. But then, I don't think quality wise I don't think you'd encounter a track like this: this video anywhere in Europe. Or the comparison of high speed tracks 9600km in Europe vs 70 km in the US. The reason for this is obviously the completely different priorities US is freight, Europe is passenger. So I don't think you can really compare the two networks and say one is clearly better.
> track like this: this video I can't believe that the train can actually travel down that track. If I had just come upon that track, there's no way I would have ever thought that it was still an operational track. I'm sure the engineers navigating that track have a lot of colorful opinions about it as well
At least they're doing something. I couldn't believe the state of US railtrack: this video Just go slower! We don't want to pay for maintenance. What's the worst that could happen? You derail and your toxic payload catches fire and poisons the neighbourhood? [LINK]