Freight trains in the US are close to 3 miles long. Similar freight trains in Europe are more like half a mile long. Long-haul trains in the US, carrying standard shipping containers, are typically double stacked using specially-designed well cars. The bridges and tunnels in Europe simply do not have the vertical clearance, and the weight-bearing capacity to manage that.
Also, rail in Europe is typically owned by government, and it is optimized around passenger traffic. Freight gets the leftovers.
All this means that rail, carrying freight, in the US is much more efficient, economically and environmentally, than rail in Europe. That is the amount of fuel used per mile of cargo is much better in the US than it is in Europe.
The fuel cost per ton mile drops as the train gets longer because the locomotives are already burning diesel to move their own weight.
Locomotives use the most fuel when starting a train from rest. (A body in motion wants to remain in motion.) So when you can double stack containers, on trains that are nearly 3 miles long, and run them non-stop for a 1000 miles, as opposed to having to wait for passenger trains to get out of the way in every other town, the efficiency improves a lot.
This is the Steel on Rails video Why Europe's Freight Trains Are So Short — and America's Are Three Miles Long
I live in the vicinity of a Ford truck plant that primarily deals with truck chassis. They regularly have 5-mile long trains coming and going- and we know the length because they block all the track crossings while they wait for the plant to be ready for them :)
ReplyDeleteWhere I grew up, aside from 3 oil refineries within about 5 miles, there were a couple of steel mills. The infrastructure had been in place long enough that there were non-grade crossings at regular intervals. Some viaducts had been dug under the tracks, and a few bridges had been built, taking roads over the tracks, because the viaducts tended to flood in heavy rains
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