- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
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The railroad isn’t selling itself as a very safe method of transportation these days.
Seems almost intentional. Destroy the train system to feed the car industry
It is intentional but you have the wrong reason. Right now all of the class one railroads are trying a business strategy called precision schedule railroading in order to boost their stock prices. The meat and potatoes behind PSR is to lower the railroad’s operation ratio as lower as possible by reducing anything that isn’t absolutely critical to making the business run. That means cutting your staff to below a skeleton crew level while fighting the FRA to allow for one man crew trains, running extremely long trains even if it literally divides a community, and deferring maintenance unless uncle Sam wants to pitch in. In some extreme cases of PSR some railroads have even gone as far as closing down tracks in sections with multiple main lines.
How is this shit not illegal?
I feel like the car industry doesn’t compete at all with cargo rail. You don’t move tons of coal with a semi. That would be astronomically more expensive.
You should seek out the conspiracy community.
There’s a good video on that I’ll see if I can find it
Isn’t it the safest?
No, that would be planes.
Depends on the definition of safety. Though, it’s not unreasonable to consider it as deaths/distance.
Planes would still be safer when considering deaths per distance. In 2020, trains had a death rate of 0.03 per 100,000,000 passenger miles, while planes had 0.00095 per 100,000,000 passenger miles.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics/deaths-by-transportation-mode/
All the rail companies are doing at this point is making the case for their shit to get nationalized stronger every single day. This is critical infrastructure, and they’re intentionally running it into the fucking ground.
Not the onion
Sounds like Don Sanders is a hero.
It seems like the issue is that the safety inspector ISN’T saving them any money by catching issues before they’re fined for them. If they were actually ever held accountable for safety issues, his job would pay for itself.
BNSF is absolutely a gilded age-level corporate villain. But no one is coming after them if Don doesn’t find these issues and that’s a problem too. If the rail safety bureau (or whoever manages rail safety) wants to hire him for the same job, I think BNSF would rethink that position VERY quickly.
