>>1751968>How?Because the energy cost of moving item X from location A to location B is fairly constant and mostly dictated by traversal up and down of a gravity well. Using proper technologies this cost can be recovered to reasonable degree.
There is non recoverable cost of following a path that incurs non-recoverable losses in a form of friction ( physical or aerodynamic ). Those however, for trains, are fairly minor up to quite significant speeds. Only above certain threshold the cost to physical plant in a form of wear and tear becomes too great. Which is why nobody runs 20000t ore trains at 100mph.
The sweet spot appears to be somewhere in the 30-50mph range.
The problem that american railroads seem to be falling into is a faulty notion that power of the head end is somehow tied to fuel consumption (I mean, maybe it is on the poorly constructed EMD engines, I dunno), so if you increasingly see trains being dispatched with low hp/t ratios 'to save fuel'. This leads to lowered average over-the-road speeds.
The trap is that if your railroad's average speed drops by 50%, in order to keep the same throughput, you need to run twice as many trains ( thus using twice as many locomotives, cars, crews, track etc ), which lowers efficiency.
Which gets as back to here:
>>1751948>But for the same cost you could run at 40mphFor the same ( or even lower ) aggregate cost of crews, physical plant, equipment and fuel railroads could operate at higher speeds and would provide better service.
But it seems that they increasingly follow the path of being afraid of 'Switching Costs' and are deep into 'Not Invented Here' management anti-patterns. I think that one major Class I failure will lead to nationalization of US railroads within 20 years. Unless some major management changes happen.
Pic rel - they should have, at the minimum, perfect these instead being stuck on 4000hp diesels.
