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A 14-year-old took home $10,000 for his award-winning investigation into train derailments. Here's what he found.
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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This kid just got 10k for saying rail infrastructure is failing due to a lack of maintenance. Specifically the springs at junctions. The main failing here in the US though is that rail maintenance falls to rail companies that have little financial incentive to spend the money on safety. That may be changing, however if the federal government just hands over money with inadequate oversight it will just enrich the companies.
https://www.transportation.gov/briefing-room/fact-sheet-rail-safety
https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-us-rail-system-works
https://www.publicrailnow.org/site/assets/files/1036/putting_america_back_on_track_final_6-30-24_single_pages.pdf
The worst part of this is that that money is not just wasted, it's used to lobby politicians to make it worse.
And to be clear, the railroads don't need more money, back when Biden banned Warren Buffet's railroad from striking, I did the math, they could afford to double their work force, giving them all half the year off, and pay each one of them 100K/year, and still give the shareholders multiple billions a year.
Absolutely, Robber Barons have been a thing since the rails were laid. It's a shit system and the main reason we don't have highspeed rail.
I took Amtrak across the country once. The freight trains are supposed to give priority to the passenger trains so they leave and arrive (mostly) on time, but (outside the NEC) they mostly don't bother and they've never been held to those requirements. Once again, prioritizing "stuff" over people.
Oh it's simpler than that. They just go around the requirement via loopholes in the agreements. They know they're required to give priority, so they just make the freight trains too long to fit on the side track on those routes. So if there's a conflict, the freight train physically cannot get out of the way and the passenger one has to.
They're prioritizing profits. This is just capitalism working as intended.
Not to mention the inflationary effects of shareholders skimming a set percentage in profits off everything that gets transported over rail. If the government ran it at cost, a huge drag on the economy would be removed.