trains take 37 years of committees
If you go back and watch the second season of True Detective.
spoiler
a major plot point is gangster Frank Semyon buying up land in the desert that’s supposed to be transformed into the California HSR project. But because the plans for the train line fall through, he’s stuck with a bunch of worthless real estate. The season ends with him dying in the desert, having traded away his family, his fortune, and his dignity in pursuit of an opportunity to scam the government.
This TV show was filmed in 2014 and released in 2015. Over the subsequent 12 years, the project has been repeatedly scaled back and still hasn’t been completed.
Well of course. Billionaires are motivated to keep an eye on their livestock, but aren’t motivated to make sure their livestock has a good quality of life. I mean how else can they hunt down a woman trying to have an abortion? That’s their future worker after all…
Ok, and not to defend it, but it is easier to install a flock camera or build a new building than to redo a logistics network.
We should do reasons instead of ai and flock, but yeah, rebuilding a train system in the US is way more complicated and harder to do.
it is easier to install a flock camera or build a new building
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(data_center)
785,000 sq ft (72,900 m^2)
422 MW of power.
Over five million gallons of water consumed daily
I can’t imagine how that would have an impact on local logistics or civil planning.
in March 2025, xAI purchased a 1,000,000-square-foot (93,000 m2) site in the Whitehaven area of Memphis… Plans for the expansion were initially revealed by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation when preliminary plans for the facility were filed on September 18, 2024, for the project “…between xAI, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and Nucor Steel…”
Wonder why they need proximity to the nation’s largest state-operated power generation.
They are consistently full of shit
Billionaires hate trains.
Ayn Rand screaming
Maybe we should make pods and build them really long.
I want working trains. We fucked that one up a long time ago.
Society is based on roads. Business locations, homes, all roads.
Every time a City in the US puts in a light rail line, every target community loses their shit because it connects the poorer parts of town with the affluent parts of town. It fucks up the crime rate a bit.
People don’t want trains here because people don’t ride trains here.
People don’t ride trains here because trains don’t go from affluent houses to places where the affluent work.
affluent being median wage earners.
The poor use trains to access the jobs they can’t afford to get to. The rich need the poors to work the jobs they don’t want.
Everyone is talking about obtaining land and eminent domain and whatnot. …We have streets. 🤷
how expensive would putting elevated rail in the median of the freeways even be?
Overpasses
Move the pillars?
I don’t know where you live but here the clearance on a standard overpass is 14’. This is well under the 12’8 needed for the highway, plus the height of the track base, plus the clearance for the train. So the train would have to be built 30’ in the air. Might as well put it above a road instead.
If you mean “put train on ground in the middle of the highway” we can also do that the hard part is getting to stations not in the middle of a highway.
But what about the cars?
They get one lane now. The rest be for the trains
In America, yeah. Shit country!
All of that is correct however I am also currently watching my government fail to be able to construct a train station along an existing track. So far the process has been going on for about six years and no one has so much has dug a hole yet. It’s barely even a construction project, they just need to pour some concrete into a rectangle and then add some stairs and call it a station. But apparently even that requires six years worth of committees.
Meanwhile in Scotland, somewhere with similarish land and planning laws. We’re electrifying the whole network, dualing large sections that were single track, removing peak fares, upgrading the rolling stock, and opening brand new stations.
Having a decent rail service is entirely a political choice. Whether those in power want to make it happen or not.
Yes, but the US has legalized corruption we call lobbying. And its working out great for us! /s
All about setting priorities. One could start a war instead, leading to closing and reopening the Straight of Hormuz, a fuckton of civilian and material casualties and having nothing achieved. What’s more “fun”??? Boys be boys, aye?
In early 2010s, I worked in a city that was planning to remove a huge useless highway section. When I moved away from that city in 2025, they were still having hearings about plans to potentially start thinking about removing that highway.
So what would happen if I went to Home Depot and rented one of their trucks, added full accident coverage, and then immediately crashed into and knocked over, one of the lamp posts with the flock cameras on it?
It would still cost you more than then to fix it, unless you would get out and make sure the camera and solar panel are destroyed. But then your intentions would be obvious, so why doing all that charade?
Or is easier to mask yourself, not carry any electronics with you and destroy the camera.
BTW: many communities seem successful in convincing their cities to stop working with Flock. That might also be a legal alternative that is also important in this fight.
A dropship would come flying overhead and combine soldiers would drop down and arrest you, if you’re lucky.
Trains benefit people, those other things benefit billionaires.
While this is true, trains are hard because of all the different people and companies need to give up their land to do it. Billionaires can just buy a chunk of land and then pay off local reps to look the other way and shoehorn the permits.
Trains would require
imminenteminent domain at a high rate. People generally dont like the government taking their land.Eminent* domain
Thanks, I didn’t reread this before posting.
The same people against this gladly give up their land to pipelines.
Still a bit different situation. Pipeline construction is the biggest concern for most but it’s temporary and they get paid for it. Afterwards, sure they must give easement rights to the owner but afterwards? Out of sight out of mind.
And billionaires only care about one thing.
And it’s disgusting
*nods in understanding
High resolution images of everyone’s buttholes
That video reminded me when, as teenagers (16 years old or so), some friends and I were searching in internet things such as “How to shoot black holes from the ass?” or “How to shoot niggas from the ass hole?” just for the sake to fuck the day of CIA, NSA and Google employees lmfao
They were surely good times.
Username checks out.
Control.
The future of humanity!
Where humanity is defined as billionaires, everybody else are just NPC.
Flock cams don’t even need a power connection because they run on solar+battery, and wireless data connection. You can put one practically everywhere without any preparation - even the post it sits on is pretty optional, could use cable binders to hang them on a tree.
Data centers often get built where land is cheap, and at least in the US there is a (horrifying and stupid) trend to design them to run off-grid with gas turbines, so you don’t even need utilities there, just data connections that you can run underground.
Trains take up a lot of space, and if you want them to be useful, they need to be where the population density is high enough. That means high cost for land, often buying up big amounts of smaller lots where you have to work something out with a multitude of land owners who might not want to part with their - often prime location, because it’s in the city - land. A single land owner not selling their land can grind a project like this to a halt, at least if there is hesitancy using eminent domain, which is a crowbar approach and leads to resistance to your project.
Don’t get me wrong, i really think the USA would benefit greatly from modernizing and expanding their rail network! But realistically, refitting a train line into a city center where you preferably want the station to be is a hard task, doubly hard if you want to actually pass through the city because its not the head end of the line - it doubles the land acquisition woes. A possibility would be going underground, but underground construction is an expensive endeavor, and the US would probably need to get outside expertise from Switzerland or Austria where we construct tunnels through mountains and below cities on the regular to make it work.
States are using Eminent Domain to support Data Centers.
https://www.tftc.io/ai-data-center-eminent-domain-land-seizures-transmission-lines
It’s a difference between using eminent domain in an area with a very low population density vs. using it in a high density area with very high land prices. Avoiding it in both areas would be preferable, but the second variant is for sure riling people up a lot more.
the power companies have goodwill with the people because they have proven themselves reliable, amtrak has not in the majority of the country (both trains and powerlines have a significant amount of rural land where trains do jack shit)
The US famously bulldozes whole districts for their stupid highways, to build a whole highway junction inside cities (or whatever is left inbetween highway and parking lot).
Sure both train tracks and highways are harder than flock cameras or data centers, but the US certainly has no issue with building highways. All the issues are home-made. We have the same fucking issues here in Germany, it just so happened that more of our rail network (relative to size & population) survived the neolibertarian onslaught of the past ~60 years.
At the end of the day train networks primarily serve people, not capital.
That wasn’t just for the highway, that was blatant racism to cut through the heart of thriving black communities.
Trains take up a lot of space, and if you want them to be useful, they need to be where the population density is high enough. That means high cost for land, often buying up big amounts of smaller lots where you have to work something out with a multitude of land owners who might not want to part with their - often prime location, because it’s in the city - land. A single land owner not selling their land can grind a project like this to a halt, at least if there is hesitancy using eminent domain, which is a crowbar approach and leads to resistance to your project.
There’s also interference risks. My city was building out their train network, and had to do extensive testing to make sure that the trains didn’t disturb the university’s experiments. An entire planned hospital was scrapped because it was too close to the tracks, and the trains would interfere with the hospital equipment.
A data centre or cameras wouldn’t have the same risk, so wouldn’t need to go through the same level of approval/testing.
I heard something similar in Vienna - but they were building a hospital near a rail line and then had to retrofit because they underestimated the interference with their equipment.
That’s a lame excuse. There are universities right next to heavy rail, with super sensitive equipment. It is all a question of shielding and vibration management. And when it comes ro vibrations, I have never heard of a highway project getting cancelled because of sensitive hospital or research eqipment, have you?
California high speed rail was something my parents voted on when I was a child.
I had this friend who was a year under me in school. Her kid voted for it too.
It still doesn’t exist. California can’t build something as modern and cutting edge as a train.
There’s a lot of good comments here, but folks are overlooking a major structural issue in the USA that IMO is largely at the root of why rail development has become so complicated - and that’s the fact that local jurisdictions are very powerful compared to many other countries. Every city and county along a route (or even potential route) gets a seat at the table, and will work to represent their constituents and economic interests. This means there’s a ton of voices advocating for completing priorities - they want rail to go through their city or county, but only if the HSR gets a stop at their preferred locations. If the jurisdiction doesn’t get what they want, they’ll often work to grenade the entire project.
China, by comparison and for example, has an authoritarian central government that can just dictate a route, displace individuals or communities in the way, and tell anyone upset to pound sand.
Not trying to say that authoritarianism is the answer. We’re well on our way to that, and it’s sure not helping things. It’s just a structural difference in the USA that makes makes such projects far more complicated, expensive, and inefficient.
Real trains are cutting edge though. But yeah the usa just cannot.
We can’t manage a steam engine.
no you were really good at those! it’s just that you should probably have continued after that.
Indeed, the PRR S1, and the UP BigBoy are purely American, and the first is the fastest steam engine ever, and the second is probably the engine that can handle the heaviest loads with the steepest grades, without a chain. Though there are some honorable mention locos in Madison, IN that have the world record for steepest grade without a chain, but those guys can’t haul what BigBoy can. BigBoy can’t make that particular grade, not because it is too steep, but because the rails are too narrow and curvy. Deisels can’t compete for load weights, neither can electric engines. Un/fortunately both diesel and electric beat the crap out of steam on maintenance costs and downtime.
Fucking shame about Roger Rabbit.
This guy trains
We were, we aren’t.
If California became it’s own country and stopped funding the red States it could find the funding to build anything really
I think the amount of funding is kind of irrelevant. Our government has lost (or perhaps given away) the ability to actually build anything without an infinite array of subcontractors all trying to fleece the taxpayer for as much money as possible. If the budget was higher, the expenses would simply grow proportionally to absorb it.
If you want to build a train in empty space I’m sure you could get that approved pretty quickly. Of course, it’d be useless. The biggest problem with trains is getting land for it since they are most useful where there’s a lot of people.
I hate these data centers and flock cameras as much as the next guy, but they aren’t really comparable. Flock cameras don’t even take up much space and they are put up on land the government already has. It’s like asking why it’s so easy to put stop lights.
Sorry, I’m Mr Buzzkill.
The USA has no problem bulldozing housing to build highways.
Not sure how true that is. New highways aren’t that common and all the ones I know about took forever to actually get built.
Yeah, but only because that land belonged to blacks and cut prospering communities in half to drown them in traffic hell. You wouldn’t want a repeat of that.
Rip out the extra lanes of the damn roads and highways that induced demand, and we got all the space we need without destroying much in the way of existing buildings. A double track is only about as wide as one lane of our surface stroads.
One direction of high speed rail track would require at just under two freeway lanes worth of width (two directions need ~4 lanes).
And that’s before dealing with the additional freeway/rail safety separation, barriers, shoulders, drainage, etc.
While there are sections of highway that could support this amount of removal, if definitely not as easy as “swap road for track, done.”
I don’t see much of an issue since we already have 8 lane interstates connecting the vast majority of the cities in this country. The HSR could even connect with the light rail using existing bypasses. We have already emminent domained more space than we need, both inside and outside of the cities.
Easy? No. Easier than continuing to support a broken system of highways that hasn’t been revisited in policy since at least the 1970’s? Yes.
The double track I was referring to is the light rail that one would use in urban areas. HSR has no need to expand all the way into most city centers.
In the ideal situation where there are 8 lanes sustained throughout the entire proposed path, that still means removing at least 50% of the current inter city infrastructure. While adding more lanes is always a temporary fix, removing that substantial an amount is simply not feasible and the reason it hasn’t happened yet.
when you are at an 8 lane highway, you are already so far down the wrong path that the status quo hurts as much as ripping the whole thing out and providing alternatives would.
And yet it is possible and feasible in every other country, including ones like The Netherlands that followed us down our idiotic path, until the early 2000’s, and ripped out the roads and gave the cities back to all forms of transportation.
It isn’t possible because no one is willing to do it, other than some of the coastal cities on the west Coast, where it is slow, but works damn well.
This. American roads are widened constantly for no reason other than paycheck justification. They could rip out existing highways (which cause lots of traffic) and replace them with trainlines.
None of this is written in stone. Critical infrastructure should always be prioritized. We see how China did it. In the end it’s all about political will.
We all know that China prioritizes critical infrastructure like flocks of cameras and the associated data centres to closely monitor its population. Hence they are built quickly, whereas trains take way longer then a month to be set up.
Somehow ut still works in pretty much every other country
Yeah, this is cheap ragebait. Most of the stuff online is optimised for that outcome so I end up rolling my eyes most of the time.
I am all for calling out privacy-invading cameras but comparing the putting up of small wireless cameras on already existing poles with prepping existing rails for high speed train connections, not to speak of actually buying the trains and maintaining them properly, like what? The cameras have no risks of causing accidents either, aside from people accidentally cutting them down (as one does). So the comparison feels pretty silly to me.
Now compare it to something like building another 3 lanes on a highway, thats more appropriate.
Just one more lane and traffic will be gone. Trust me on this.
