No kidding. The fact that we never electrified any of it kind of shows where our priorities lie. It was a dumb idea even before climate change to run our entire rail system on wasteful diesel generators carried by the damn train instead of power plants. Now folks want to use batteries and fucking hydrogen, when we've had the solution for more efficient trains forever.

Y'all can down vote me all you want but it still won't change the fact the United States has a functioning railroad system outside of passenger service. I only mention network size because it was the easiest metric to pull up. But the point is whatever metric you use outside of passenger service the US is in the top three countries which is something not possible unless you have a functioning railroad system.

• The US is third for tonnes per kilometer.[1]

• The US is second for tonnes hauled per year.[2]

• The US moves more intermodal containers by rail then all of Europe combined. [3]

It might seem like the United States doesn't know how to run trains but in reality we have one of the best freight networks out there.

I'd also like to add that on the passenger side of things the US is really trying to improve but the investments haven't had time to come to fruition yet. Amtrak has 768 siemens venture cars and 175 ALC-42 locomotives on order so it can expand to 39 new routes [4]. There's been a significant amount of funding into high speed rails for other corridors outside of the northeast corridor [5].

Lmao I don't know why, but this fucking killed me