Why don't we use trains more than semi's? Not enough tracks? Cost? I'd think that you'd move a lot more material with trains than you could with semi's and cheaper too. Even if you have distribution centers in cities where semi's pick up the trailers and move them a hundred miles or so.

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Cost.

Semis are simply a lot more flexible. To keep that flexibility would require a complete redoing of the railroad system. Imagine having to build another insterstate highway system AND state AND county highway system from scratch.

You'd just have to build too many distribution centers to make it worthwhile.

Look at air travel and air freight. Passenger service is built on the hub system. FedEx/UPS have several distribution centers plus piggyback on the air travel hubs. But apart from a tiny fraction of "business travelers", no one flies for work. And apart from small packages, no one can afford to ship by FedEx/UPS.

Or look at the insane costs of passenger rail ("mass transit") cities have incurred. They are bigger boondoggles than athletic stadia. The way we do those projects takes decades and megabillions to run a few miles of track. Imagine trying to put down tens of thousands of miles of track.

Frankly if Obama and the Congress decided tomorrow that they were going to try to switch to rail freight through a govt financed plan, it would make the Bush/Obama bailouts of the banks look like petty cash spending.

Freight roadbed per mile is cheaper than passenger roadbed. And rail freight is cheaper than air freight.

Of course. But its nowhere near cheap enough to handle the volume of freight that gets moved in an economy like the USA. Even if people were willing to accept the delays in shipping that trying to manage the load via hubs would require (which they're not).

I love trains. And there's part of me that says if you let the innovators figure out a way, they'll find a better alternative to shipping by semi. Something akin to what Malcolm McClean and associates did with regard to ocean shipping in the fifties and sixties (see Mark Levinson's The Box for the story).

But I have a hard time imagining it happen. Especially not today. McClean had the advantage that most of his shipping routes were over water and there were no rules (save the tech limitations) keeping him from expanding their use. And he still almost failed because of the entrenched political power of longshoremen unions. (All that increased efficiency came at a major price in terms of jobs for traditional dockyard skilled labor.)

But to do it with railroads? A shipping revolution is going to take major technological change, and expensive retooling.

And to make it cost-effective, you've got to get past the entrenched bureaucracy and land ownership/use rules that favor the old and outmoded. (Want to know whyAmtrak always runs late? Because all those passenger trains travel on freight rails, and have to give right of way to any freight train. And the freight still takes forever to get from point A to point B.) Add in the current Washington climate to regulate, strengthen unions (can you say Teamsters), and keep everything satisfying a dozen public policies from sustainability to diversity to consumer protection to alternate energy to yadda yadda yadda....argh!

If there are significant cost savings to be had through tech innovation, I expect there are private sector entrepreneurs out there who would try to reap the benefits. But where are they? Heck, we have a lot of people trying to make space freight cost effective, and that's a miniscule fraction of the freight market. If rail seriously offered a better deal than semis, we ought to see hundreds and thousands of such entrepreneurs out there, just like we did in the original "age of rails".

But we don't. And I expect it's due to a combination of two factors. People haven't figured out the tech to have big benefits to be had very many places. And where there are, the costs of dealing with the anciillary problems and bullshit are just too big.

Replacing the semi with rail, even for the long distance legs, is not an option right now. It just isn't.

Sorry, Kevin.

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From what I've read, the amount of freight being shipped on trains is increasing and that on semis is decreasing. "Intermodal" transport is huge right now: the freight is shipped on trains as far as possible in semi-trailers, with the trailers being driven by trucks to complete the trips to their destinations. It's a lot cheaper to transport by train, and if I remember correctly (investment magazine articles), 2009 represented a record year for intermodal shipping.

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Yeah, forgive me for saying the name, but that's why Warren Buffet bought a bunch of train stock the past few years. Nothing against Buffet, but his name is overused in finance magazines so I cringe when I find myself using him for an example.

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I'm not huge on the idea of these high-speed rails that Obama thinks people are going to start using en masse, at least when we're talking passenger trains. I DO like the idea of more freight being moved on trains.

Has semi shipping fallen in absolute terms, or merely as a fraction of the total?

Part of the reason more is going by train is that a lot more is being shipped every way. All that stuff coming in from abroad on those cheap containers and, especially, all that stuff being produced in the most productive nation over the last 30 years means an incredible demand for shipping. Records always get established when economies have high productivity. Records are about volume, not about return.

There's such a demand that there's not enough of any one kind of shipping to handle it.

Buffett's getting older. "Buy and hold" doesn't mean the same when you are a senior citizen. Railroad investments may be good for 5 years, even 10.

More than that, I'd look at which individual railroad investments he might be touting. I'd love to see a real railroad boom. But I'd like to know if the attractive rails are those that are highly innovative, or merely those that have enough political power plus track that happens to be between important ports/distribution points. If its the latter, the upside from an economy-wide perspective is very limited.

Because "trains as far as you can" just isn't going to get you enough places with the current cost of putting rails on the ground.

Freight by rail is cheaper ONLY when you don't have to build too much track. Rolling stock might be cheaper relative to a fleet of semis (though I wouldn't bet on it). But right of ways and raiibed isn't.

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Bottom line, because semi's can get to places trains can not.

One of the biggest loads my dad hauls is cement (pre-mix). There is no possible way for trains to haul cement to road jobs. Only possible way is via semi.

Now, as for the other stuff he hauls (pebble lime, taconite, sand, etc), I'm not sure, and I could get more info from dad and the company he hauls for.

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of course what we really need is someone to invent a transporter beam.

:)

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For materials, yes.

For people, no. There's a reason why Scottie never takes the transporter beam. He knows what it really does.

What it really does is takes you apart and creates a copy elsewhere. So in actually, you are being killed and a copy of you is created. You'll walk, talk, and act just like Wade and that copy will fool everyone, even your mother. But in actually, it won't be Wade. Just a copy.

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And of course, as Timeline reveals, every time you're transported, you get a few more transcription errors, until in time your body can no longer properly replicate itself.

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