I was listening to an NPR program about a year ago about the fuel efficiency of different kinds of travel (the sample trip, was, I think New York City to Chicago). A regular car packed with four people was pretty good. A commercial airliner wasn’t so bad. A passenger train was terrible. It surprised me because freight trains are so efficient, but then I reflected that the total weight of an AMTRAK car is huge compared to the payload of people inside. The following article is interesting because it talks about why passenger rail cars in the U.S. are so heavy: http://www.ebbc.org/rail/fra.html (also has some stuff about why Acela is such an unreliable service, despite the fact that it is so much slower than anything in Europe or Japan).
13 thoughts on “Interesting article on the fuel inefficiency of passenger rail”
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Further complicating this inefficiency is that passenger rail ties up freight rail, ruducing freight rail efficiency as well.
There are some good comments on this article here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3060105
yup: The discussion of unsprung weight being the main factor in track wear is pretty mind-bending. Thanks! Common sense certainly would suggest that springing the weight isn’t going to get rid of the, uh, elephant in the room. A train car that weighs 100,000 tons has got to do more damage to a track than one that weighs 10 tons.
Don’t forget how frequently Amtrak trains, especially in the Northeast Corridor, have to stop, since every Congresscritter makes sure to hold up Amtrak subsidies if the train doesn’t stop in his district. Always fun to see a 12-car-long train slow, come to a stop, sit idling for 10 minutes, and then accelerate back to speed, with no passengers getting on or off. Then do it all again 15 minutes later. Even the Acela makes 6 or 7 stops to get from Boston to New York City!
Your findings seem to contradict these:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c20/page_128.shtml
And now I understand why trains in the US are so ugly, heavy, and mostly useless. Just like most American cars.
Tiago: The mileage figures are not “my findings”. They were just something that I heard on our government-sponsored radio network.
Another reason why, in the aggregate, Amtrak trains are so inefficient? There are no passengers! If the trains were running full, the fixed cost of lugging all that heavy steel would be divided up among a number of passengers. However, other than around the holidays, the trains hardly ever run to half capacity. Result — all the dead weight shipping air from hither to yon.
Some quote the example of the Northeast Corridor as an area where train service is popular and useful. Well if it were that good, why not hand it off to a private company to run it on a commercial (non-subsidized) basis, and shut down train service everywhere else in the country?
Jagadeesh,
Amtrak can’t afford it! The Northeast Corridor is the only profitable line Amtrak has. If they sold it, they’d be losing that much MORE money every year, as the Northeast Corridor (and Congress) subsidize the rest of the network.
The figures Tiago quotes are overly optimistic; they only look at full trains. True for peak hour, but most run almost empty most of the day.
However, there is one thing that must not be overlooked when comparing trains to anything else. With fe exceptions (Amtrak being the big one) the trains in the world are electric, meaning they can take their power from renewables and other less-poluting sources quite easily and economically.
The same can not be said for any other mode of powered long-distance transport.
This is perhaps a unique time in history to rectify this problem. The vice president (king?) of the united states rides amtrak frequently, and there have been billions of dollars in unspent stimulus money allocated towards trains. A letter writing campaign to the vice president would certainly get a sympathetic reception. An investment in harmonizing (i.e. copying) european/japanese regulations would certainly be a good investment of stimulus money.
Bas — trains are a great mode of transport if people use them. By your own assessment, they don’t. Even if every train were to run on wind power, it would not make an iota of difference to pollution because the riders that aren’t there are riding other, polluting forms of transport. Also — not sure what kind of power Amtrak buys but I’m betting that there’s not a significant renewable component to it.
Well the way Americans are gaining weight, we should be able to make up the inefficiency! In all seriousness, this is depressing. What can we do?
Jagadeesh:
Which train? For many Amtrak routes, this is probably true. But one could hardly argue that New York area trains (underground or otherwise) are under utilised and pollution inefficient compared to cars.
As for longer distance service: if you build a good service that competes in door-to-door time and fares with air travel, people will use it. Most people will prefer the train. This has been proven time and time again in places like France, UK, Germany, Japan and others.
And on those routes, one way to reduce the empty seats it not to schedule trains twice-an-hour-empty-or-not, they should just be scheduled like airlines do it: when needed.