This guy trains

Username checks out.

States are using Eminent Domain to support Data Centers.

https://www.tftc.io/ai-data-center-eminent-domain-land-seizures-transmission-lines

Billionaires hate trains.

how expensive would putting elevated rail in the median of the freeways even be?

the power companies have goodwill with the people because they have proven themselves reliable, amtrak has not in the majority of the country (both trains and powerlines have a significant amount of rural land where trains do jack shit)

The same people against this gladly give up their land to pipelines.

Overpasses

Move the pillars?

Still a bit different situation. Pipeline construction is the biggest concern for most but it’s temporary and they get paid for it. Afterwards, sure they must give easement rights to the owner but afterwards? Out of sight out of mind.

Eminent* domain

Thanks, I didn’t reread this before posting.

There's a lot of good comments here, but folks are overlooking a major structural issue in the USA that IMO is largely at the root of why rail development has become so complicated - and that's the fact that local jurisdictions are very powerful compared to many other countries. Every city and county along a route (or even potential route) gets a seat at the table, and will work to represent their constituents and economic interests. This means there's a ton of voices advocating for completing priorities - they want rail to go through their city or county, but only if the HSR gets a stop at their preferred locations. If the jurisdiction doesn't get what they want, they'll often work to grenade the entire project.

China, by comparison and for example, has an authoritarian central government that can just dictate a route, displace individuals or communities in the way, and tell anyone upset to pound sand.

Not trying to say that authoritarianism is the answer. We're well on our way to that, and it's sure not helping things. It's just a structural difference in the USA that makes makes such projects far more complicated, expensive, and inefficient.

And it's disgusting

Those might be terrorist buttholes.

Yes, but the US has legalized corruption we call lobbying. And its working out great for us! /s

Well of course. Billionaires are motivated to keep an eye on their livestock, but aren't motivated to make sure their livestock has a good quality of life. I mean how else can they hunt down a woman trying to have an abortion? That's their future worker after all....

I heard something similar in Vienna - but they were building a hospital near a rail line and then had to retrofit because they underestimated the interference with their equipment.

It's a difference between using eminent domain in an area with a very low population density vs. using it in a high density area with very high land prices. Avoiding it in both areas would be preferable, but the second variant is for sure riling people up a lot more.

That wasn't just for the highway, that was blatant racism to cut through the heart of thriving black communities.

when you are at an 8 lane highway, you are already so far down the wrong path that the status quo hurts as much as ripping the whole thing out and providing alternatives would.

I want working trains. We fucked that one up a long time ago.

Society is based on roads. Business locations, homes, all roads.

Every time a City in the US puts in a light rail line, every target community loses their shit because it connects the poorer parts of town with the affluent parts of town. It fucks up the crime rate a bit.

People don't want trains here because people don't ride trains here.

People don't ride trains here because trains don't go from affluent houses to places where the affluent work.

affluent being median wage earners.

They are consistently full of shit

It would still cost you more than then to fix it, unless you would get out and make sure the camera and solar panel are destroyed. But then your intentions would be obvious, so why doing all that charade?

Or is easier to mask yourself, not carry any electronics with you and destroy the camera.

BTW: many communities seem successful in convincing their cities to stop working with Flock. That might also be a legal alternative that is also important in this fight.

This. American roads are widened constantly for no reason other than paycheck justification. They could rip out existing highways (which cause lots of traffic) and replace them with trainlines.

That video reminded me when, as teenagers (16 years old or so), some friends and I were searching in internet things such as "How to shoot black holes from the ass?" or "How to shoot niggas from the ass hole?" just for the sake to fuck the day of CIA, NSA and Google employees lmfao

They were surely good times.

Ok, and not to defend it, but it is easier to install a flock camera or build a new building than to redo a logistics network.

We should do reasons instead of ai and flock, but yeah, rebuilding a train system in the US is way more complicated and harder to do.

Maybe we should make pods and build them really long.

The poor use trains to access the jobs in the rich areas they can't afford to get to. The rich need the poors to work the jobs they don't want because it doesn’t pay enough but still need done.

trains take 37 years of committees

If you go back and watch the second season of True Detective.

This TV show was filmed in 2014 and released in 2015. Over the subsequent 12 years, the project has been repeatedly scaled back and still hasn't been completed.

it is easier to install a flock camera or build a new building

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(data_center)

785,000 sq ft (72,900 m^2)

422 MW of power.

Over five million gallons of water consumed daily

I can't imagine how that would have an impact on local logistics or civil planning.

in March 2025, xAI purchased a 1,000,000-square-foot (93,000 m2) site in the Whitehaven area of Memphis... Plans for the expansion were initially revealed by the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation when preliminary plans for the facility were filed on September 18, 2024, for the project "...between xAI, Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), and Nucor Steel..."

Wonder why they need proximity to the nation's largest state-operated power generation.

Ayn Rand screaming

I don't know where you live but here the clearance on a standard overpass is 14'. This is well under the 12'8 needed for the highway, plus the height of the track base, plus the clearance for the train. So the train would have to be built 30' in the air. Might as well put it above a road instead.

If you mean "put train on ground in the middle of the highway" we can also do that the hard part is getting to stations not in the middle of a highway.

I don't think putting at grade trains on freeways is a good idea, unless they had a reliable way of warning people minutes before a train comes through

You get what you build. The US still builds basically only road infrastructure and as long as that doesn't change, the US will remain underdeveloped in the personal mobility department. The country could do something about anytime but it doesn't. Sure, it takes decades until a change in direction really starts to change the country and how it works but that wasn't different when the country was bulldozed for cars either.

Ask Gavin Newsome how long it will take to finish his train? O that’s right, never

If you'll allow me to nerd out a little. I love trains as much as the next guy. I also love arriving at the next station alive. Every single time. And i also want my grandchild to arrive at the station Alive. Every single time.

But by the time we start to actually lay down the tracks, a whole lot of work has already been done. Ground has to be sampled along the way. The ground has to be prepared, large boulders has to be cut/blown apart. Engineers and geologist must have had time to calculate that the ground will hold, perhaps certain areas needs to be reinforced more than others The ground has to be owned by an entity that can authorise the use of it.

Signal cables has to be drawn. There has to be space for trains to pass eachother. And then there are probably solutions to things we didn't even know was a problem.

What's my point? Of course trains take a lot longer than setting up a bunch of cameras on poles... I'd be more concerned if it was the opposite. And yes, I'm hillarious at parties.

There’s a really weird misconception about Amtrak and U.S. railroads.

Amtrak is not some ordinary private corporation. It is a federally chartered corporation, with the federal government as its controlling shareholder. Its board is largely made up of presidential appointees who require Senate confirmation. So, functionally, Amtrak is a government-controlled corporation that happens to operate as a for-profit company.

The stranger part is the infrastructure underneath it.

The vast majority of Amtrak’s route mileage runs on tracks owned by private freight railroads. Those freight railroads are enormously important to the U.S. economy, but the industry is also highly consolidated. A handful of Class I railroads control enormous regional networks, creating what is essentially a series of geographic monopolies/oligopolies. Amtrak itself says 97% of its route-miles operate over tracks owned by other railroads.

So you end up with this bizarre situation where the federal government owns and controls the country's principal intercity passenger railroad, but much of the physical railroad infrastructure it depends on is privately owned.

And expanding passenger rail isn't as simple as "just build more trains." You need track capacity, signaling, bridges, grade crossings, stations, dispatching capacity, maintenance facilities, etc. In many places, you're trying to add passenger service to infrastructure that is already being used by private freight companies. Amtrak frequently doesn't even control dispatching on the tracks it operates over.

That's why the U.S. rail situation is so strange. We have an enormous private freight-rail system that is absolutely critical to the economy, a federally controlled passenger railroad, and an infrastructure network that has been extraordinarily difficult and expensive to expand and modernize.

It's not simply "the government sucks at trains" or "private companies suck at trains." The institutional arrangement itself is bizarre. The U.S. essentially split passenger and freight rail into two different systems while leaving much of the underlying infrastructure in private hands.

And then everyone wonders why building modern passenger rail is so damn difficult.

I vaguely remember something from The Power Broker where an engineer said to Robert Moses with a slight change to the design, at no real cost, they would build the roads so trains could be put in easier at any time in the future. Moses said no. Cars only.

Chicago has a system like this. The main problem is the stations in the literal middle of the highway.

The funding, yes. But if we had to actually make a train, a curb, a bollard, a bridge, a consumer gpu? We'd be so fucked.

I'm not saying this thing I'm saying, because we're getting what I attribute someone else's success to and it's not helping

Okay? Maybe there's some other difference.

Rights of way need to be negotiated and secured. This is a big one.

You watched the second season?

We basically do need to eminent domain the rail network. That should be government owned like the highways.

Data centers aren't a good example. Most of them won't actually be built.

bro you have trains but only freight trains

1, 2, and 4. It was during COVID, when the pickings were a bit slim.

The system makes it too hard to get infra built, but the movement looks bad if they seem to think building a train is as easy as it is in SimCity.

This is the biggest one in the US. The right to keep the government from ruining your land makes building trains extremely difficult and the legal process is extremely expensive and time consuming