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I do not believe the project Rail transport in the United States requires cleanup to meet Wikipedia's standards, and for this reason I am removing the Cleanup Template from the article.
Anthony 15:29, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Like many other Wikipedia rail entries, this concentrates too much on passenger rail and not enough on freight rail (of which the US has much more usage).-- Rotten 09:00, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Agreed. The main reason to have a wiki article exclusively devoted to US rail Transportation should be to educate and inform on how truly unique it is.
1. Virtually the entire network is privately owned and operated. 2. The primary focus is to optimize the handling of freight. Which results in... 3. The most efficient land transportation system on the planet. 4. A network that hauls the highest percentage of total freight of any developed nation. And, 5. Does it all at a PROFIT making the North American Railroads virtually the only railroads in the world that actually pay taxes as opposed to receiving government subsidies.
Because the article shares the global bias that railroads should be mainly used to haul people, more than half of the article is spent defining what North American Railroads aren't rather than what they are. 1.229.130.160 ( talk) 03:10, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
I can think of two key subjects missing.
The first is innovation and technology. Global bias loves to make US railroads look antiquated backward because they abandoned their passenger operations. However, the global economy as it exists today wouldn't exist without the widespread standardized containerization that was the invention of an American trucking magnate and the incredible innovations related to it by US railroads. Doublestacking and articulated freight cars with capacities up to 20 TEUs for example. Others include innovations like air brakes and AAR couplers that made railroading much safer and made trains over 100 cars possible. In much of Europe, hook and loop coupling STILL requires workers to enter the killzone during coupling and limits tonnage and length. DPUs and MUing that allow trains of up to 200 cars and over 20,000 tons are also the result of US railroad and industry innovations. Other innovations: CTC (the grandfather of virtually all modern train control systems) and FREDs.
The second subject is freight car development. Why have a section on passenger cars and not freight cars? Especially since US railroads were responsible for developing much of the specialized car designs that the rest of the world eventually copied. Some examples of car designs would be the previously mentioned well cars, the 10-unit articulated spine car, the aluminum (rotary dumped) deep gondola, the 89 foot flat car, the 145 foot (44m) tri-level autoracks and the special flats adapted to haul Boeing 737 fuselages from Kansas to Washington.
If I can find acceptable references, I might make the additions myself. 1.229.130.160 ( talk) 08:52, 4 December 2013 (UTC) fuck you...
I'm going to change all instances of "railway" and the like to "railroad" to line up with standard US usage. Tmrobertson ( talk) 03:38, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
This region is one of if not the busiest passenger rail area on the west coast, but nothing is mentioned in the article. I'm going to try to find citations and implement what I know about Caltrain, the Bay Area Rapid Transit rail system, and about the Amtrak Capital Corridor route between Sacramento and San Francisco/San Jose. Jorkusmalorkus ( talk) 20:13, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
No mention as far as I can see of the standarzation of gauge; apart from "narrow gauge lines" I believe that there were many non-standard wide-gauge lines particularly in the South. Mentioned under Cornelius Vanderbilt that he achieved standardization Hugo999 ( talk) 07:43, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
If possible, I think this article could stand to discuss more about the role of rail companies and homesteads. When I was researching Mussel Slough Tragedy part of the background was that Congress granted parcels of land to the rail companies in return for laying track. Also, see posters like File:Iowa and Nebraska lands10.jpg where a rail company is advertising land for sale. I don't have the time to do such research, but I think this is an aspect that is not represented well in this article. howcheng { chat} 00:10, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
A couple of things. #1: The idea that 240km/h "is not really fast enough to be called high speed" is ludicrous when you consider that both the UIC definition (200km/h on existing tracks) and the British/German definitions (HST/Pendolino/ICE) all classify the Acela as high-speed. #2: The average DC-Boston speed THROUGH New York is misleading, since New York is the center of the whole system and is more analogous to a Paris or Tokyo than an online stop. In those countries most trains don't even CONTINUE through (Japan in particular the tracks don't even connect, as routes south of Tokyo run on 50Hz while routes north run on 60Hz), so the average speed would be considerably slower if one counts the time to manually change trains.
I'm rewording it extensively and will watch this article for future edits. 68.91.122.189 ( talk) 10:52, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
Should there not be another section added for the reforms of the train services proposed by President Obama? It's quite an important announcement for the future of railway transport. 92.12.191.216 ( talk) 23:49, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
I would say the last 5 years have shown the folly of trying to declare partisan political policy as historically significant for political gain and legacy building. Especially considering Obama was only promoting policy and plans that had already seen decades of work by countless community organizers, rail promoters and even politicians from both sides of the aisle. In fact, one could argue Tommy Thompson has had more impact on promoting passenger rail through his support of Amtrak while serving on its Board of Directors (appointed by Bill Clinton) and his support of the Midwest Rail Initiative. If not for the work of folks like him, Obama's one sucess (the Lincoln Corridor) would never have been on the table. Of course, all of this doesn't even belong in an generic overview article on US Rail Transportation and probably violates most of the Wiki "guidelines." See the article "What Wikipedia is not." 1.229.130.160 ( talk) 04:20, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Weak as it is, the history section in this article is considerably better than the history it links to, History of rail transport in the United States (not to mention the really terrible History of rail transport in North America). I'd love to fix it, but I'm not that knowledgeable in this area. -- Mwanner | Talk 12:22, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Dear Mr. Rjensen: Please tell me exactly which of the below statements of fact you consider false or opinion. If any are such, perhaps removing them would be a better response than the wholesale deleting of half the article. If rather you simply find some of the facts inconvenient or disturbing, I believe the managers of Wikipedia will not like your removing such facts. Nor would you like having wholesale paragraphs unilaterally deleted from some of your many Wiki articles. The below piece treats several important aspects of passenger train travel. They are part and parcel of the history of rail in N. America, and I will not suffer their cavalier removal. Tell me which facts you feel are incorrect, be specific. I will then cite you authorities by book and page. If I am Sincerely, James Hannum
A politically laced topic like "Socio-Economic Aspects of Passenger Train" does not belong in an overview article like this. If you feel it belongs on wiki it should be a stand alone article. It was the right decision to remove it from this entry. 1.229.130.160 ( talk) 09:16, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Hello, I removed the following statement: "Similarly, the cumulative effects of decades of excessive government regulation brought the freight rail industry to the brink of ruin..." and replaced it with the content there now. I found it to be highly subjective and not fully proven in the material preceding or following it.
Most rail transportation in the United States today consists of freight train shipments. Passenger service, once a large and vital part of the nation's passenger transportation network, now plays a limited role as compared to transportation patterns in many other countries.
The U.S. rail industry has experienced repeated convulsions due to changing U.S. economic needs and the rise of automobile, bus, and air transport. Many point to what is sometimes referred to as the Great American Streetcar Scandal of the 1940s, in which light rail trolley-based surface transit, once widespread in American cities, was largely dismantled.
The sole intercity passenger railroad in the continental United States today is Amtrak. Commuter rail systems exist in more than a dozen metropolitan areas, but these systems are not extensively interconnected, so commuter rail cannot be used alone to traverse the continent. Commuter systems have been proposed in approximately two dozen other cities, but interplays between various local-government administrative bottlenecks and ripple effects from the 2007–2012 global financial crisis have generally pushed such projects farther and farther in to a nebulous future point in time, or have even sometimes mothballed them entirely.
This sounds like it was written by someone from TheAtlanticCities. I actually like that publication, but this has gone too far. I love trains and commuter rail as much as any transit advocate but please try and keep this article neutral. There are too many silly talking points in this introduction and it's sickening. I can only read snide, know-it-all density and transit oriented development comments so many times. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.82.77.166 ( talk) 06:36, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
Well, as far as US Class I railroads being "the best in the world," there is more than just The Economist to back the claim. In fact, a 115 page report prepared in France by the International Union of Railways also makes the exact same claim. Their report shows how in almost every case, American Railroads not only outperform European freight rail systems, but often by factors of 4, 5 and sometimes even 10. Only a person who is locked into the idea that railroads' primary focus should be hauling people at the expense of freight capacity would tend to diminish these facts. Ultimately, which really makes more sense, more people on the rails and more trucks on the highways, or pushing as much freight onto railroads as we can and reducing the demand for highways.
http://www.uic.org/diomis/IMG/pdf/DIOMIS_Benchmarking_Intermodal_Rail_Transport_in_the_US_and_Europe.pdf 1.229.130.160 ( talk) 09:31, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
Not a word on the temporary nationalization of rail transport during World War I?!?!? Yikes!!! Carrite ( talk) 19:09, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
There is a whole long history of racial discrimination in the US, about which the Interstate Commerce Commission did nothing to the point that it had earned the nickname "the supreme court of the Confederacy" before finally being forced by either the Kennedy administration or the courts to act. Why no mention of any of the apartheid era in US passenger rail? K7L ( talk) 16:37, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
I attempted to update the following reference as a student was seeking access to this resource:
Majewski, John (2006). "American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-bellum Economy." Accessed February 27, 2013. http://eh.net/node/2735
I found the updated link below and attempted to replace it:
http://eh.net/book_reviews/american-railroads-and-the-transformation-of-the-ante-bellum-economy/
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The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Rail transportation in the United States/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.
Sorely underreferenced. |
Last edited at 18:19, 25 August 2011 (UTC). Substituted at 03:50, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
This article can really use some citations... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.142.120.66 ( talk) 12:58, 23 January 2017 (UTC) e.g. "Freight rail working with passenger rail" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.142.120.66 ( talk) 13:01, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Rail transportation in the United States → Rail transport in the United States – consistency with other pages, e.g. Rail transport in Switzerland or Rail transport in Myanmar dud hhr Contribs 21:19, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
The article is suitably referenced, with inline citations. It has reliable sources, and any important or controversial material which is likely to be challenged is cited.Controversy was declared by the tags. The timeframe to avoid objections, and allow other editors time to provide sources, likely expired long ago.
Any material lacking an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the material may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation to a reliable source.because,
The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material.
"...but a major lawsuit delayed the project and as of February 2023 there are no signs of construction activity."
this implies that the lawsuit is causing the delay but when reading the source it shows that the lawsuit is because nothing is happening on the land. That does in fact corroborate the claim "...as of February 2023 there are no signs of construction activity" but a bit dubious in my opinion PissAngle ( talk) 14:12, 6 March 2023 (UTC)
This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
I do not believe the project Rail transport in the United States requires cleanup to meet Wikipedia's standards, and for this reason I am removing the Cleanup Template from the article.
Anthony 15:29, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
Like many other Wikipedia rail entries, this concentrates too much on passenger rail and not enough on freight rail (of which the US has much more usage).-- Rotten 09:00, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
Agreed. The main reason to have a wiki article exclusively devoted to US rail Transportation should be to educate and inform on how truly unique it is.
1. Virtually the entire network is privately owned and operated. 2. The primary focus is to optimize the handling of freight. Which results in... 3. The most efficient land transportation system on the planet. 4. A network that hauls the highest percentage of total freight of any developed nation. And, 5. Does it all at a PROFIT making the North American Railroads virtually the only railroads in the world that actually pay taxes as opposed to receiving government subsidies.
Because the article shares the global bias that railroads should be mainly used to haul people, more than half of the article is spent defining what North American Railroads aren't rather than what they are. 1.229.130.160 ( talk) 03:10, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
I can think of two key subjects missing.
The first is innovation and technology. Global bias loves to make US railroads look antiquated backward because they abandoned their passenger operations. However, the global economy as it exists today wouldn't exist without the widespread standardized containerization that was the invention of an American trucking magnate and the incredible innovations related to it by US railroads. Doublestacking and articulated freight cars with capacities up to 20 TEUs for example. Others include innovations like air brakes and AAR couplers that made railroading much safer and made trains over 100 cars possible. In much of Europe, hook and loop coupling STILL requires workers to enter the killzone during coupling and limits tonnage and length. DPUs and MUing that allow trains of up to 200 cars and over 20,000 tons are also the result of US railroad and industry innovations. Other innovations: CTC (the grandfather of virtually all modern train control systems) and FREDs.
The second subject is freight car development. Why have a section on passenger cars and not freight cars? Especially since US railroads were responsible for developing much of the specialized car designs that the rest of the world eventually copied. Some examples of car designs would be the previously mentioned well cars, the 10-unit articulated spine car, the aluminum (rotary dumped) deep gondola, the 89 foot flat car, the 145 foot (44m) tri-level autoracks and the special flats adapted to haul Boeing 737 fuselages from Kansas to Washington.
If I can find acceptable references, I might make the additions myself. 1.229.130.160 ( talk) 08:52, 4 December 2013 (UTC) fuck you...
I'm going to change all instances of "railway" and the like to "railroad" to line up with standard US usage. Tmrobertson ( talk) 03:38, 3 February 2008 (UTC)
This region is one of if not the busiest passenger rail area on the west coast, but nothing is mentioned in the article. I'm going to try to find citations and implement what I know about Caltrain, the Bay Area Rapid Transit rail system, and about the Amtrak Capital Corridor route between Sacramento and San Francisco/San Jose. Jorkusmalorkus ( talk) 20:13, 2 May 2008 (UTC)
No mention as far as I can see of the standarzation of gauge; apart from "narrow gauge lines" I believe that there were many non-standard wide-gauge lines particularly in the South. Mentioned under Cornelius Vanderbilt that he achieved standardization Hugo999 ( talk) 07:43, 2 October 2008 (UTC)
If possible, I think this article could stand to discuss more about the role of rail companies and homesteads. When I was researching Mussel Slough Tragedy part of the background was that Congress granted parcels of land to the rail companies in return for laying track. Also, see posters like File:Iowa and Nebraska lands10.jpg where a rail company is advertising land for sale. I don't have the time to do such research, but I think this is an aspect that is not represented well in this article. howcheng { chat} 00:10, 4 March 2009 (UTC)
A couple of things. #1: The idea that 240km/h "is not really fast enough to be called high speed" is ludicrous when you consider that both the UIC definition (200km/h on existing tracks) and the British/German definitions (HST/Pendolino/ICE) all classify the Acela as high-speed. #2: The average DC-Boston speed THROUGH New York is misleading, since New York is the center of the whole system and is more analogous to a Paris or Tokyo than an online stop. In those countries most trains don't even CONTINUE through (Japan in particular the tracks don't even connect, as routes south of Tokyo run on 50Hz while routes north run on 60Hz), so the average speed would be considerably slower if one counts the time to manually change trains.
I'm rewording it extensively and will watch this article for future edits. 68.91.122.189 ( talk) 10:52, 3 April 2009 (UTC)
Should there not be another section added for the reforms of the train services proposed by President Obama? It's quite an important announcement for the future of railway transport. 92.12.191.216 ( talk) 23:49, 10 May 2009 (UTC)
I would say the last 5 years have shown the folly of trying to declare partisan political policy as historically significant for political gain and legacy building. Especially considering Obama was only promoting policy and plans that had already seen decades of work by countless community organizers, rail promoters and even politicians from both sides of the aisle. In fact, one could argue Tommy Thompson has had more impact on promoting passenger rail through his support of Amtrak while serving on its Board of Directors (appointed by Bill Clinton) and his support of the Midwest Rail Initiative. If not for the work of folks like him, Obama's one sucess (the Lincoln Corridor) would never have been on the table. Of course, all of this doesn't even belong in an generic overview article on US Rail Transportation and probably violates most of the Wiki "guidelines." See the article "What Wikipedia is not." 1.229.130.160 ( talk) 04:20, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Weak as it is, the history section in this article is considerably better than the history it links to, History of rail transport in the United States (not to mention the really terrible History of rail transport in North America). I'd love to fix it, but I'm not that knowledgeable in this area. -- Mwanner | Talk 12:22, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
Dear Mr. Rjensen: Please tell me exactly which of the below statements of fact you consider false or opinion. If any are such, perhaps removing them would be a better response than the wholesale deleting of half the article. If rather you simply find some of the facts inconvenient or disturbing, I believe the managers of Wikipedia will not like your removing such facts. Nor would you like having wholesale paragraphs unilaterally deleted from some of your many Wiki articles. The below piece treats several important aspects of passenger train travel. They are part and parcel of the history of rail in N. America, and I will not suffer their cavalier removal. Tell me which facts you feel are incorrect, be specific. I will then cite you authorities by book and page. If I am Sincerely, James Hannum
A politically laced topic like "Socio-Economic Aspects of Passenger Train" does not belong in an overview article like this. If you feel it belongs on wiki it should be a stand alone article. It was the right decision to remove it from this entry. 1.229.130.160 ( talk) 09:16, 4 December 2013 (UTC)
Hello, I removed the following statement: "Similarly, the cumulative effects of decades of excessive government regulation brought the freight rail industry to the brink of ruin..." and replaced it with the content there now. I found it to be highly subjective and not fully proven in the material preceding or following it.
Most rail transportation in the United States today consists of freight train shipments. Passenger service, once a large and vital part of the nation's passenger transportation network, now plays a limited role as compared to transportation patterns in many other countries.
The U.S. rail industry has experienced repeated convulsions due to changing U.S. economic needs and the rise of automobile, bus, and air transport. Many point to what is sometimes referred to as the Great American Streetcar Scandal of the 1940s, in which light rail trolley-based surface transit, once widespread in American cities, was largely dismantled.
The sole intercity passenger railroad in the continental United States today is Amtrak. Commuter rail systems exist in more than a dozen metropolitan areas, but these systems are not extensively interconnected, so commuter rail cannot be used alone to traverse the continent. Commuter systems have been proposed in approximately two dozen other cities, but interplays between various local-government administrative bottlenecks and ripple effects from the 2007–2012 global financial crisis have generally pushed such projects farther and farther in to a nebulous future point in time, or have even sometimes mothballed them entirely.
This sounds like it was written by someone from TheAtlanticCities. I actually like that publication, but this has gone too far. I love trains and commuter rail as much as any transit advocate but please try and keep this article neutral. There are too many silly talking points in this introduction and it's sickening. I can only read snide, know-it-all density and transit oriented development comments so many times. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.82.77.166 ( talk) 06:36, 20 February 2013 (UTC)
Well, as far as US Class I railroads being "the best in the world," there is more than just The Economist to back the claim. In fact, a 115 page report prepared in France by the International Union of Railways also makes the exact same claim. Their report shows how in almost every case, American Railroads not only outperform European freight rail systems, but often by factors of 4, 5 and sometimes even 10. Only a person who is locked into the idea that railroads' primary focus should be hauling people at the expense of freight capacity would tend to diminish these facts. Ultimately, which really makes more sense, more people on the rails and more trucks on the highways, or pushing as much freight onto railroads as we can and reducing the demand for highways.
http://www.uic.org/diomis/IMG/pdf/DIOMIS_Benchmarking_Intermodal_Rail_Transport_in_the_US_and_Europe.pdf 1.229.130.160 ( talk) 09:31, 5 December 2013 (UTC)
Not a word on the temporary nationalization of rail transport during World War I?!?!? Yikes!!! Carrite ( talk) 19:09, 9 May 2013 (UTC)
There is a whole long history of racial discrimination in the US, about which the Interstate Commerce Commission did nothing to the point that it had earned the nickname "the supreme court of the Confederacy" before finally being forced by either the Kennedy administration or the courts to act. Why no mention of any of the apartheid era in US passenger rail? K7L ( talk) 16:37, 15 August 2013 (UTC)
I attempted to update the following reference as a student was seeking access to this resource:
Majewski, John (2006). "American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-bellum Economy." Accessed February 27, 2013. http://eh.net/node/2735
I found the updated link below and attempted to replace it:
http://eh.net/book_reviews/american-railroads-and-the-transformation-of-the-ante-bellum-economy/
Hello fellow Wikipedians,
I have just added archive links to one external link on
Rail transportation in the United States. Please take a moment to review
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Cheers.— cyberbot II Talk to my owner:Online 04:19, 21 March 2016 (UTC)
The comment(s) below were originally left at Talk:Rail transportation in the United States/Comments, and are posted here for posterity. Following several discussions in past years, these subpages are now deprecated. The comments may be irrelevant or outdated; if so, please feel free to remove this section.
Sorely underreferenced. |
Last edited at 18:19, 25 August 2011 (UTC). Substituted at 03:50, 30 April 2016 (UTC)
This article can really use some citations... — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.142.120.66 ( talk) 12:58, 23 January 2017 (UTC) e.g. "Freight rail working with passenger rail" — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.142.120.66 ( talk) 13:01, 23 January 2017 (UTC)
The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
Rail transportation in the United States → Rail transport in the United States – consistency with other pages, e.g. Rail transport in Switzerland or Rail transport in Myanmar dud hhr Contribs 21:19, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
The article is suitably referenced, with inline citations. It has reliable sources, and any important or controversial material which is likely to be challenged is cited.Controversy was declared by the tags. The timeframe to avoid objections, and allow other editors time to provide sources, likely expired long ago.
Any material lacking an inline citation to a reliable source that directly supports the material may be removed and should not be restored without an inline citation to a reliable source.because,
The burden to demonstrate verifiability lies with the editor who adds or restores material.
"...but a major lawsuit delayed the project and as of February 2023 there are no signs of construction activity."
this implies that the lawsuit is causing the delay but when reading the source it shows that the lawsuit is because nothing is happening on the land. That does in fact corroborate the claim "...as of February 2023 there are no signs of construction activity" but a bit dubious in my opinion PissAngle ( talk) 14:12, 6 March 2023 (UTC)