Re: Fairmont Line Upgrade
Tokyo railroads mix commuter rail and subway.
I would say they're quite a bit more sensible than us in railroad stuff.
Of course, their commuter rail trains aren't the idiotic "1971 Buick boat" style, though.
Weight is not "idiotic". It's a reflection of diversity of cargo (human or otherwise) on a region's common carrier network. For the same reason allowing pedicabs to share traffic with Mack trucks on the Interstate is a bad idea, running a common carrier rail network means the physics of the weight differentials have to agree with each other enough to be safe. You don't solve that problem by banning the Mack trucks then wondering how the hell you're going to get your pedicab parts delivered to the warehouse now that you've "fixed the glitch". You compromise where the demand is. Each region's rail network does different things in different proportions.
-- Japan: almost zero freight because it's a narrow island surrounded by water ports. Almost total electrification because of small/high-density land area and no fossil fuel reserves. Less need to have every line interoperable with every other line because they can be segregated by purpose with fewer limitations (HSR here, regional there, intermix there but not there). The only thing they have to correct for is speed differential...so, yes, sturdier-built metro stock can intermix. Japan manufactures a lot of worldwide rolling stock, but "Japanese" rolling stock is pretty much only used in Japan because it's too lightweight for most other mixed networks.
-- Everywhere else: there are some significant degree of diesel routes. More land to cover, less density, more cheap gas to not need to electrify the low-density routes. You could never mix metro stock when the railroad stock has to mix large quantities of electric vehicles with large quantities of vehicles carrying internal combustion engine + fuel bulk.
-- More freight vs. less freight: northern Europe has more freight than southern Europe. Scandinavia in particular. Russia has a lot less freight than you'd think given its land mass and natural resources. India has a lot more than you'd think. The U.K. has low volumes, but much higher freight frequencies than mainland Europe. China's sitting on a dilemma as to how much rail freight it needs to develop to ease congestion (and may have erred too much on the side of "lightweight" on some newly built lines to have an easy answer). The type of passenger stock some of these countries buy wouldn't work so well in other countries because their freight profiles are so different.
-- Europe is its own red-tape nightmare. Not because of a nanny state, but because of fragmentation. Lightweight stock in one region can't travel to other regions where there's a heavier mix. They have a headache-inducing array of platform heights and loading guages. So when something has to cross between one area and another it's got to go on
this lightweight-designated line, and not
that one where it won't fit around the platforms, and requires a transfer
here to different equipment. They do transfers immaculately well over there because they don't have a choice; some trains just can't get there from here. But it's got its own downsides for EU officials by making moving people and goods around that integrated economy exceedingly more resource-intensive on the back end than it needs to be. With no easy fix, especially for fixing the disparity where some countries' trains have far less 'portability' than others.
I think it's a gross misrepresentation that the FRA is making us all ride in Mack trucks to punish us out of spite. This buff strength stuff is a
semantic difference where they're overly obsessed with the steel in the nose dissipating the force of impact instead of treating the physics of the carbody as a whole. Semantics. With the kind of rail traffic that's run in the U.S. the weight's going to have to be 90%+ the same as it is now to be physically able to dissipate the same force safely. PTC doesn't prevent slow-speed accidents in yard limits where accidents are most common...and yard limits being where nearly all of the continent's largest union stations are located. Signaling doesn't lower the weight differential at all at grade crossings where our roads permit the heaviest trucks in the world (with Congress and the feds considering heavier-still). And you can't ban heavy stuff out of distaste for freights when, like it or not, the U.S. and Canadian economies are the most economically dependent in the world on heavy rail freight and heavy trucking freight.
Likewise, we can't just dictate "BE EUROPE!" and fragment the everloving shit out of our common carrier network to give every special interest their special toys. The U.S., Canada, and Mexico ship freight to every corner of the continent...and
each neighboring country owns thousands of miles of freight rail in the
other neighboring country. Amtrak has to be able to get from anywhere to anywhere including across the Canadian border; VIA Rail has on-and-off run similar border-crossing routes into the U.S. It is entirely possible within the next 25 years that we'll even have our first border-crossing commuter rail system. GO Transit already hits the Canadian side of Niagra Falls with limited service. Seattle's and Vancouver's CR systems have endpoints separated by only 50 miles (less than the length of the Fitchburg Line). The new Detroit system goes online in about 18 months, and Michigan is tying it in to the hilt with its state-sponsored Amtrak corridor services that it badly wants to get back across the river serving Windsor.
We've comparably lucky that the only network fragmentation North America has to deal with on the whole continent are the high platforms on the NEC and associated Northeast commuter rail vs. the low platforms everywhere else. Big deal...Amtrak uses Superliner coaches in the Midwest and West, Amfleets on anything that touches New York or New England, on-platform ADA (wheelchair lifts, mini-highs, etc.) when high-boarding stock has to go in low-boarding territory. Northeastern commuter rail builds collapsible-edge mini-high platforms when it has to run on a designated freight clearance route. Trains passing through differing signal or PTC systems are equipped with 2 different types of signal readouts in the engineer's cab. Freight shippers in any of the 3 countries check the
plate letter of the railcar vs. the route they're taking...match the car's letter with a routing of equal-or-higher letter and you're good to go on any rails from Colima to Hudson Bay.
Standardization is a good thing. Canada and Mexico do not complain at all about being led by the nose by 95% of the U.S. FRA's regs. Euro-land with its spaghetti regs and not-totally portable rolling stock is envious of how "common" this continent's common carrier network is. All we want are their passenger services
without the headache-inducing network fragmentation.
So...this is all about semantics, not some revolution of cool stuff the evil FRA is repressing. Ditching the buff strength obsession for
equal aggregate crashworthiness opens up the market enough for some good options that require less overcustomization. But options on stuff we've already been buying for 30 years. Those ubiquitous old
AEM-7's that pull nearly every Northeast Regional are little more than exported
Swedish Rc4's that have been pulling nearly every Swedish regional train (and some Swedish freight) for just as long. We just tacked on expensive mods for that buff strength obsession and slapped some purely bureacuratic "Buy American" cost bloat on it for good measure. The "Buy American" bloat for damn sure isn't going away, but the former can and lower the amount of pointless technical overcustomization we do here. But we're already buying the stuff that's appropriate. Amtrak's new Sprinter locomotives are just tarted-up
EuroSprinters...boxy, utilitarian, workhorse, kinda-heavy-even-in-their-native-land EuroSprinters. Remove the buff strength steel bloat but keep the even bigger "Buy American" paper bloat and it doesn't change the conversation all that much. I guarantee the same critics are still going to be shrieking about evil gov't bureaucracy and their train not having their cherry-picked favorite features from that S-bahn they used to ride on semester abroad and that badass Shinkansen they saw that one time in Japan (forgetting that Japan rails ≠ German rails ≠ U.S. rails).
It's just not that kind of game changer. It's removing one stubborn layer of inanity from the buying process, not removing every or even most layers of inanity...or changing what it is we're buying. There will never be a situation where the North American common carrier network compromises aggregate safety, or fragments the network. Either of those outcomes would be way worse. And that means will never see one of those DLRV's or other stock that trends a lot closer to subway or light rail use the same yard and terminal as the Acela. Nor are you going to solve that problem by banning the Acela so you can fragment with DLRV's or Japanese stock. Build a new subway line to Route 128 or dedicated maglev to New York if common-carrier rails are too suffocating a constriction to do useful enough things.
