Google Is Lighting Up Dark Fiber All Over the Country (vice.com) 124
sarahnaomi writes: For years, San Francisco has had a robust fiber optic infrastructure laying dormant underneath its streets. Google announced Wednesday that it's going to start lighting some of those cables up. Welcome to the future of broadband in major cities. Most people don't know that many cities throughout the United States are already wired with "dark fiber": infrastructure that, for a variety of reasons, is never used to provide gigabit connections to actual residents. This fiber is often laid by companies you rarely hear about, like Zayo and Level 3, which lay fiber infrastructure in hopes the city, a provider like Google, or a corporate customer (like an office building) will eventually make use of it.
Been here since the late 90's (Score:3, Interesting)
Google long ago bought up much of this fiber and has been sitting on it. Patiently waiting for ATT,Comcast, Verizon to all back themselves into a corner.
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So if your city wants Google Fiber, all your taxpayers have to do is pay for all the up-front expense and liabilities of actually laying the fiber lines. Then Google will be more than happy to come in with no substantial investment and make a bunch of money off of it.
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Re: Been here since the late 90's (Score:1)
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Might want to work on your reading comprehension. Zayo, Level 3, and all the other 90's fiber companies were most certainly not taxpayer owned or funded.
Former Level3 employee here (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, Level3 laid a lot of extra fiber (and conduits) throughout major metro areas.
The fiber itself was not very expensive (they use horizontal boring tools that have become the standard for under-street improvements), the real cost is in the gear needed to light and amplify signals on the fiber. My most recent former employer set up a 10GbS link between primary and colo sites for minimal cost by leveraging the Level3 fiber.
If a well-funded organization like Google (Level3 has been cash constrained since the telecom crash) can lease and light these fibers it will be (yet) another major disruption to the metro network players, and frankly, it is about damned time
Re:Former Level3 employee here (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Level3 laid a lot of extra fiber (and conduits) throughout major metro areas.
The fiber itself was not very expensive (they use horizontal boring tools that have become the standard for under-street improvements), the real cost is in the gear needed to light and amplify signals on the fiber. My most recent former employer set up a 10GbS link between primary and colo sites for minimal cost by leveraging the Level3 fiber.
If a well-funded organization like Google (Level3 has been cash constrained since the telecom crash) can lease and light these fibers it will be (yet) another major disruption to the metro network players, and frankly, it is about damned time
I can't find it by googling (amusing that) but I heard that Google over a decade ago snapped up a bunch of dark fiber after the .com bust. I had wondered what they were intending to do with that...
Here's hoping they light that shit up like a christmas tree :)
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There was a big fire-sale going on since 2001
In some cases Level3 (while they still could) made extended bond offerings so that they could pick up companies like Broadwing, in other case companies like Cogent bought up failed fiber providers.
For the most part Level3 sought companies that had technology similar to their own (e.g.the head of Broadwing used to work for Level3) while Cogent bought whatever they could get cheapest and kept ti cobbled together to force prices down and (they hoped) to strangle Lev
Re:Former Level3 employee here (Score:4, Informative)
Not sure if it's the story you were thinking of, but there was a little bit of discussion in the tech press/blogs in 2005 in response to someone noticing [cnet.com] that Google had put out a job posting for a "strategic negotiator" with experience in "identification, selection, and negotiation of dark fiber contracts both in metropolitan areas and over long distances as part of development of a global backbone network". That led to a lot of speculation over what precisely Google was planning to do.
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My recollection was LVLT leased out the fiber at bargain basement prices; they still owned everything through at least 2004, and they still have a huge infrastructure.
I know Google and Netflix were "buying" a lot of fiber back in the CDN war phase.
However, generally speaking this fiber doesn't do anything to get neighborhoods and buildings lit. It is backbones that join HUBs and POPs, often along railroad lines. It is extended down some corridors for metro fiber, but that is much more limited.
Happy my off
Re:Former Level3 employee here (Score:4, Informative)
question is, is this the right singlemode? (Score:2)
I am aware of older SM fiber laid around Y2K that is not capable of quality operation at gigabit speeds.
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You have no idea what you are talking about
When Level3 put in conduit, they placed several to a dozen conduits in a trench and then blew in a single bundle of optical cable, at the time top of the line 3rd generation Corning LEAF optical fiber ( http://news.level3.com/news-archive?item=65649 ). That product was designed to support 40GB communications (http://www.telecomassets.com/docs/3rdGenLeafPressRelease.pdf )
Level3 left so many empty conduits because they wanted to be able to put in newer optical cable
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the real cost is in the gear needed to light and amplify signals on the fiber
Not really. 10G SFP+ transceivers giving 10km distance are around US$30. (40km for $150). The costs for 10G really have come down. (Unless you look at HP and cisco list prices.)
Re: Former Level3 employee here (Score:1)
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That's backwards. The biggest cost is laying the fibre. It's orders of magnitude more expensive than directional drilling, especially in this lawsuit happy day of liability. A lot of money spent on directional drilling goes into the up front planning to ensure you don't hit anything.
Re:Attributing it to private industry... (Score:5, Insightful)
Once again, we see the government stepping in to solve a problem private industry wouldn't touch.
The problem you describe, is caused by government in the first place. In this case, municipalities offering up "Franchise" agreements to ONE company for Cable (not Fiber) and excluding all others.
Yes, this is typical "Government" causing a problem that only it can solve by itself. And not really solving ANY problems in the long run, but actually causing MORE problems than needed.
IF the Municipalities instead built a single COLO facility and brought fiber to every residence or business (or at least Conduit), we could have private enterprise competing for customers, without needing a franchise agreement. BUT nobody thinks along those lines, and thus, we have government solving problems, that create more problems, that only government can solve!
And in the end, you have bureaucrats and politicians taking over more and more control of our lives, while people like yourself blame businesses for doing exactly what governments are telling them what they can and cannot do!
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Again, government is the solution to government created monopoly. Naturally occurring monopolies are fairly rare.
AND you're missing my main point, the problem IS last mile. Why would you keep insisting that a single company own/control the last mile, when if you remove that from the equation, it opens up free markets? We don't need ATT at the last mile, we need ATT, Sprint, Comcast, Verizon ... all competing for the last mile customer. Let me, the customer, decide which provider I want, and real competition
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Jackass youself,
I didn't even begin to propose consolidation. I proposed removing the last mile from the equation.
My house to COLO facility, infrastructure maintained by Municipality. (Fiber to my house)
At the COLO, I (the customer) can choose between any one of a number of providers, free from Government mandates and franchise agreements, and free to offer up whatever services at whatever prices they want.
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The Australian Government tried exactly this 7 years ago (we even fought an election over this issue) in a national project called the NBN. Commercial interests combined with the Conservative side of politics fought this one down. It was costed, and going to provide a small commercial return. There were a few hickups in the early days, but it was going to be one of the largest national projects ever attempted. The NBN was to be wholesale access only, and you would chose the RSP (retailer) of your choice.
Ho
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Yeah but for some reason Australia is prone to trying to replicate America and ballsing things up as a result.
Local Loop Unbundling seems to be working fairly well in New Zealand, even though Chorus (the local loop owner for both DSL and most of NZ's UFB fiber network) kicks up a fuss from time to time about their profits (which have been around what one would expect given the fairly significant CAPEX over the last few years).
But, thanks to the regulatory conditions, NZ residents can choose from 20-odd (or
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Dear Stupid AC,
We at Archangel's house already have Fiber buried underneath our driveway. It already exists. (yes, I saw them pull it). It didn't even require digging up the street OR the driveway. They did an Horizontal drill and pulled conduit and fiber though the conduit. Amazing huh? OH and you didn't read my original suggestion.
Last mile is the problem, remove the problem by back hauling all the fiber to a COLO where you offer customers to a variety of providers.
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Government SHOULD build the infrastructure. Think Roads. The last mile is the roads, but we let UPS, FedEx and the USPS all use them to deliver mail.
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Think about some of the issues that come with roads though.
1. The federal government uses highway funds to coerce states into all kinds of things, from the drinking age to speed limits.
2. You need special licenses to operate various vehicles on the road and to transport hazardous materials
3. Roads (from what I've heard) end up with huge hidden subsidies that vastly benefit some users over others (e.g. trucks which account for a huge share of road wear but pay very little)
4. There's a huge amount of corrupti
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Most local roads are not "gov't supplied infrastructure". The oldest roads, except some post roads, are horse paths that were eventually taken over and upgraded by the government. Most roads in subdivisions are built by the subdivision's general contractor and turned over to the government when the work is done.
Many water systems were built by private companies. Some were eventually taken over by the government, others are still privately owned.
Ignorant an
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I think laying fiber is more complicated than that. The rights of way can be awfully complex -- a lot of what look like main city streets around here actually are signed as county roads as well. So who controls the right of way? City, county, maybe some state rule that regulates all of them if they pass across multiple municipalities?
My guess is that it's some clusterfuck of all three entities and has nothing to do with cable franchise agreements.
I do think you're on the right track for municipal fiber.
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I think laying fiber is more complicated than that. The rights of way can be awfully complex
Rights of way are easily solvable if the Municipality actually built the last mile infrastructure.
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IF the Municipalities instead built a single COLO facility and brought fiber to every residence or business (or at least Conduit), we could have private enterprise competing for customers, without needing a franchise agreement. BUT nobody thinks along those lines, and thus, we have government solving problems, that create more problems, that only government can solve!
That's how we more or less do it in Sweden in many/most places. I'm sending this post via just one such line. Owned and operated by a single (previously municipal) company, with my choice of about eight different ISPs offering service.
But of course, we couldn't do it without the "government". So it's not really a question of "government" vs "no government" but between proper management of resources vs. improper management. And with a political system in place that lets telecoms giants lobby for law that mak
Google also putting down lots of new fiber (Score:5, Interesting)
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Seattle...Director's Rules.
I'm sick of my ISDN line at home. Fifteen years ago when I lived in Rock Hill, SC, just south of Charlotte, NC mentioned by the GP, I had a connection over a hundred times faster than I now have in Seattle, WA. This is supposed to be a tech city, but everyone I know outside of work hates the Internet and wants to limit access to it. The city is very anti-Internet. They won't allow CenturyLink to upgrade to fiber in my area, and they won't allow Comcast, despite their government-granted monopoly for the
Re:Google also putting down lots of new fiber (Score:5, Funny)
I'm sick of my ISDN line at home. Fifteen years ago when I lived in Rock Hill, SC, just south of Charlotte, NC mentioned by the GP, I had a connection over a hundred times faster than I now have in Seattle, WA. This is supposed to be a tech city, but everyone I know outside of work hates the Internet and wants to limit access to it. The city is very anti-Internet. They won't allow CenturyLink to upgrade to fiber in my area, and they won't allow Comcast, despite their government-granted monopoly for the area, to dig up the street to bury cable.
I apologize in advance but I don't get many opportunities to do this... but...
I have Time Warner, bitch!! Envy me!! AHAHAHAHA!
Okay, sorry about that. It's one of those bucket-list things I never thought I'd ever get to check off.
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Here in Charlotte, there are crews all over trenching in new fiber conduit - both for Google and for AT&T. I found it interesting that the AT&T crews that I've seen are putting in a single 1-inch conduit, whereas the Google crews are putting in multiple (sometimes as many as five) 2-inch conduits. Maybe Google is just trying to catch up. Or maybe they have bigger plans.
Most likely AT&T is putting in 2" flex duct for major thoroughfares/feeder fibers. The orange kind on big spools. It's cheap, and installs quickly.
For individual residential drops you can expect 1", or direct burial fiber.
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Most People Don't Know (Score:4, Interesting)
Most people don't know that many cities throughout the United States are already wired with "dark fiber"...
except those who have been a part of Slashdot because it's been talked about before, more than once. E.G. (ca. 2005) http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
If they actually start lighting it up in more places, however, that would indeed be good news.
Zayo and L3 are also ISPs (Score:2)
Zayo and Level 3 don't just lay fiber and hope someone else will use it, they also provide ISP service to businesses. I've worked with both companies to light up buildings for either multi- or single-tenant use. Single tenant may require a multi-year commitment to make it worthwhile, but they can and will provide complete service from physical layer on up.
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If the equipment/personnel is there to run one cable, then why not run 2, or 3 or more.
Also one cable can have hundreds of fibers. For example, this one [corning.com] has 432 fibers.
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Are they standard fibers or BOFA?
hahaha (Score:1)
"for a variety of reasons, is never used to provide gigabit connections to actual residents"
This means you've paid billions in Tax subsidies to telecom's only to get absolutely nothing in return but price gouging . The deal was for telecom's to wire everyone with fiber, but the United States Government is so corrupt and in bed with so many bribes by telecom's that the USA is behind like 30 countries as far as internet speed goes, and your tax dollars simply line the pockets of CEO's at these companies.
All over the country? (Score:2)
I'm glad google is doing this but the title here is over the top. Running fiber in a handful of high population cities is not 'all over the country'. This is like a half dozen cities at best. And they only cover the highest density areas. Google came to Austin last year and my address isn't covered even though I'm less than 25 minutes from downtown. This is great PR for them, but they are not really impacting that much. Still glad they are doing it but we should't act like they are hero's disrupting t
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Running fiber in a handful of high population cities is not 'all over the country'.
Goggle bought tons of fiber optic lines that ran across the country and around metropolitan areas during the aftermath of the dot com bust, often paying pennies on the dollar in bankruptcy proceedings. The vast majority of those lines laid dark for the last 15 years. What Google haven't done until now is to build out "the last mile" in the local markets.
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Gotta start SOMEwhere. (Score:2)
Running fiber in a handful of high population cities is not 'all over the country'. This is like a half dozen cities at best. And they only cover the highest density areas.
They have to start SOMEwhere.
Google came to Austin last year and my address isn't covered even though I'm less than 25 minutes from downtown.
Tell me about it.
My ranch in Nevada has slow dialup - like 32kbps. (Options: Satellite. The local WISP stopped beaming my area.)
My Silicon Valley townhouse has legacy half-MEGAbit DSL that flakes
Capex vs Opex (Score:1)
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This business model makes sense for Google since they can essentially sublease this fiber that they are leasing for more than they are paying.
Google owns those fiber optic lines, they're neither leasing nor subleasing those lines. They made a 15 year bet that the market would someday turn around for excess fiber lines that were built and left for dark following the dot com bust.
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cite or gtfo
I got a better idea. Learn how to search the Internet or GTFO.
Railroad right of way. (Score:1)
Google isnt the only one (Score:4, Informative)
Google isn't the only company doing this. CenturyLink just lit up old dark fiber in my neighborhood. I just got my gigabit install setup last night with them. It is really sweet to finally see some serious competition in the fiber to the home space after almost two decades of failed promises.
Not residential mostly... (Score:2)
None of it by me (Score:2)
Right now, I'm stuck with Time Warner Cable at 15/1. ("Up to" 15Mbps which sometimes means 17Mbps and sometimes means 8Mbps.) There's no FIOS or anything else where I live. Faster speeds - up to 50mbps - are available, but cost a ton. I'd love if Google could light up some dark fiber in my neighborhood (Capital Region of New York). I'm not going to hold my breath, though.
What happened to countrywide wifi? (Score:2)
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Another much talked about project was the countrywide wifi network, wi-max or something. Google was supposedly trying to completely bypass all the cellular companies, provide free wifi for everyone in exchange for the permission to snoop even more deeply into your email traffic. What happened? It sold out to the cell companies?
It requires infrastructure. Google tends to build and then announce, not announce and then let it become vaporware for years.
Google and me (Score:2)
Google is lighting up dark fiber all over the country, and I'm lighting up blunts all over the country.
Win-win.
This has been going on for some time! (Score:2)
Where else? (Score:2)
Are there maps of these dark fibers?
CALL FOR INFO: domestic NSA dark fiber (Score:2)
CURIOUS as to how much 'dark fiber' the NSA may be leasing within the United States for purely domestic purposes, and where. If there are any Mark Kleins [wikipedia.org] out there who have noticed anything funny, do share! This includes fiber leased to anything you may suspect is a shell corporation, for which you (the technician) can see that the paperwork is a bit odd; or an unusual number of individual fibers terminating in a locked room, where the normal requirement is a few.
With the rise of cloud computing the issue
The Whales Vagina is locked cocked and ready (Score:1)
I've seen a ton of houses with a taped off fiber line sticking out of a pipe in the back yard. A decade or more ago.... WTF
The rhetoric of bandwidth bottlenecks are kinda moot when the 1beeeelionBaseT light pipe is being chewed on by rover....BAD DOG!!! I might need that some day to get my email....
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We got enough railroads. What don't have is new boxcars to replace old boxcars at the end of their 50-year lifecycle.
The number of boxcars in service in North America fell by 41% in the past decade to just under 125,000 last year as 101,600 cars were scrapped and only about 13,800 replacement were added. That downsizing accelerated a decades long shift by railroads to more specialized railcars and intermodal carriers that allow shipping containers to hop from trucks to trains.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/shortage-of-railroad-boxcars-has-shippers-fuming-2015-06-21 [marketwatch.com]
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We got enough railroads. What don't have is new boxcars to replace old boxcars at the end of their 50-year lifecycle.
Interesting, but I think what they meant was "we should have more passenger rail in the US". The only passengers for whom boxcars are relevant are hoboes, and they're a sadly unrepresented demographic these days.
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Interesting, but I think what they meant was "we should have more passenger rail in the US".
The majority of traffic on the railroads is freight. Passenger railroad often means high-speed rail, which has become something of a joke. For example, the high speed line between San Francisco and Los Angeles should have run straight up the coast. The line is currently being built through the Central Valley to connect one end with the other end. Amtrak already has a service line in place that does job at a better price.
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People proposing more Passenger Rail in the US, don't understand a few things, and typically are comparing the US to some small European country (like Denmark).
First, the USA is quite large, compared to Europe. See: http://i.imgur.com/GML5Ei0.png [imgur.com]
This creates huge problems for people who think France is big. Who in Europe would take a train from Madrid to Tel Aviv ? Yet these same people would be happy to tell us that we should build a rail line from LA to Atlanta. Or Seattle to New York. Or San Francisco t
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This creates huge problems for people who think France is big. Who in Europe would take a train from Madrid to Tel Aviv ?
Nobody. But plenty of people take the train from Paris to Lyon, or from Brussels to Antwerp.
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Exactly my point. Except you probably missed my point.
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have you been to Texas? Mostly cows and tumbleweeds.
Paris to Lyon is about the same distance as Dalla to Galveston
Hey look there is a rail line between the two. http://ftp.dot.state.tx.us/pub... [state.tx.us]
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And now focus on the missing part of the question, how much does it cost to go from place to place by rail, and how often does it run?
I'll give you a hint. I just drove from Nor Cal to Seattle and back, and it took around 12 hours each way driving. There were four of us in the vehicle, which didn't get great mileage. Total cost of the trip was around 175 in fuel. Traveling by train would have taken around 1.5 times longer , and cost per person one way at around $90 each ($1440 total for all four) and on a l
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Nobody. But plenty of people take the train from Paris to Lyon, or from Brussels to Antwerp.
Brussels to Antwerp is 30 miles. Paris to Lyon is 300.
Our major population centers are further apart than Europe's.
In the US, LA to NYC is 2700 miles. Even a Chicago-NYC line would be about 800 miles.
High speed rail is about 200 MPH, so you're looking at 4 hours for Chicago-NYC and 10-15 hours for LA-NYC.
Flying is the same speed or faster---generally faster---and it is only affected by ground conditions at the takeoff and landing sites.
To justify the enormous capital expense of high-speed rail, it needs to
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Our major population centers are further apart than Europe's.
In the US, LA to NYC is 2700 miles. Even a Chicago-NYC line would be about 800 miles.
You're defining major population centers as only the very top cities by population? If you want to do that you'd find Europe is also quite spread out. The top 3 cities in Europe by population are Istanbul, Moscow, and London. They are quite far apart. Istanbul to Moscow is like 1500 miles. Istanbul to London is 1800 miles. I don't think there's high speed rail between those cities.
But really there are hundreds of population centers of interest that could be connected in the US and many of them are much clos
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I don't disagree with anything you said.
I think that the romance of trains vs. planes might be related to how miserable commercial airline travel has become. Of course, it's still cheaper than rail for pretty much any distance, so perhaps you get what you pay for?
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Except Rail costs more, takes longer, and isn't in rail cars for much of the trip in many cases.
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Blah blah blah. Even China and Russia build high speed rail - China is about as large as USA and Russia is twice the size. High speed rail would work just fine for routes like New York to Boston or, say, LA to Las Vegas. Or Miami to New Orleans.
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Great! You want us to become more like Russia and China, and fail to see the real connection between trains and economic systems ;)
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This creates huge problems for people who think France is big. Who in Europe would take a train from Madrid to Tel Aviv ? Yet these same people would be happy to tell us that we should build a rail line from LA to Atlanta. Or Seattle to New York. Or San Francisco to DC.
Well you typically don't build a long HSR line because you expect everyone to ride it end to end. I agree that that coast to coast I'd rather fly. But the east coast from Miami to Portland could easily have HSR, not beacuse you'd go all the way but some go Portland-Boston, Boston-New York, New York-Washington, Washington-Raleigh, Raleigh-Atlanta, Atlanta-Jacksonville, Jacksonville-Daytona Beach, Daytona Beach-Miami. Usually you can estimate around 3 hours @ 150 MPH as the break-even, including acceleration/
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We got enough railroads. What don't have is new boxcars to replace old boxcars at the end of their 50-year lifecycle.
The number of boxcars in service in North America fell by 41% in the past decade to just under 125,000 last year as 101,600 cars were scrapped and only about 13,800 replacement were added. That downsizing accelerated a decades long shift by railroads to more specialized railcars and intermodal carriers that allow shipping containers to hop from trucks to trains.
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/shortage-of-railroad-boxcars-has-shippers-fuming-2015-06-21 [marketwatch.com]
I'm a bit baffled why this is a problem. Who uses boxcars nowadays? Everybody has shifted to 20ft and 40ft shipping containers. There's plenty of rail cars to handle these. They can even be double stacked in many parts of the country. A shipping container has the added advantage of being able to be loaded before the train comes, then simply lifted onto the car. If you load by forklift or pallet jack, it is a lot easier to fill up the container since the door on all standard containers is at the end, n
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Who uses boxcars nowadays?
Probably manufacturing companies that still have a railroad siding next to the warehouse.