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Comment by _0w8t | Hacker News Reader

My father in Belarus in eighties and nineties used to travel few times per week about 35 milles in one direction by a local electric train with overhead wires (called "elektrichka" in Russian). Not a single time the train was cancelled. Even delays more then 10-15 minutes were extremely rare including on the days with heavy snow or strong wind. Even all maintenance were done at night and never disrupted the traffic.

So if 40 years ago Soviet Union managed that, I am sure US should be capable to build electrical lines that are not destroyed by a bad weather.

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Belarus doesn't get winds as strong as western Europe. Other weather is worse (heat and cold).

I think the GP comment was wrong anyway. The trains are delayed due to fallen trees and landslides much more frequently than damage to the catenary. (And neither is common enough that you'd think about it.)

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2018/01/Wind_speed...

In photos from the USSR, I noticed that forests around the railway tracks are cut down in a pretty broad strip, perhaps 100 m wide?

This is an efficient countermeasure against the trees falling on tracks and taking the wires with them, but some countries aren't willing to cut down that much of a forest.

Or willing to pay so much to the current owners of land for all the miles of railways you would have to purchase to do the same here

Forestry land is really cheap.

Not in the U.S., it isn't. There's not much forest left in the interior of the country that wouldn't be snapped up for residential real state if it weren't already privately owned for logging or as National Forest/National Park acreage. Or, it's so mountainous that it would be impractical to use for railways.

Clear cutting an acre gives you about $1500 for wood that took 20 years to grow. This is not an intensive industry in terms of what it generates per acre. I don't see how you are going to have to pay a lot to keep a strip clear on either side of the railroad. $75/acre/year would seem to be enough.

https://www.forest2market.com/blog/how-much-money-is-an-acre...

Ah interesting, I was actually thinking less about the cost for the maintenance but rather the cost for land acquisition. Even with imminent domain you're going to be fighting lawsuits for years, if there's any real infrastructure built in the new area you need that's going to be quite expensive to acquire and tear down, etc. but maybe they're already zoned out from building that close to the tracks

The context up-thread is removing trees in a wider strip to avoid them falling on the cables and tracks. It's not about tearing down buildings, which tend not to fall over in the wind.

That’s fair. The US South has far less expensive timberland and land in general than the West does.

Nothing like 100 meters, more like 15-20. I guess that was based on height of trees.

We love cars, trucks, NIMBYism, and the petroleum industry way too much to ever build sensible trains in the US.

You've got that right. A sensible passenger train that runs north/south along the Rocky mountains? That would be too easy.

I though taking the train from Montana to Utah would be nice break from driving it - then I saw the only route was to go out to the coast, down the coast and back inland. What should be a one day trip takes three.

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