ec_traindriver
New Member
Alas, Canada is not a socialist economy that can't afford modern roads and gives no other option but to send stuff by freight both by practical reasoning and by planned-economy reasoning
How's russia's freight industry doing in the last 30 years now that it has to be actually productive and cost-competitive, especially since Russia now has a some-what modern road network?
I expected the "Canada is not a socialist country" comment to be posted earlier, though. Jokes apart, there's some truth in your remarks.
The last available data (Y2019) put Russia second to China and ahead of the US in terms of volume of rail freight transport (2 617 039,00 million tonne/km), which isn't surprising considering the huge efforts undertaken by Russian Railways to expedite freight trains through the Trans-Siberian railway. The entire 9298 km between Moscow and Vladivostock is a double-track line (maximum speed of 140 km/h) and has been entirely electrified since 1998. Freight trains take approximately 7 days to cross the entire route, which is almost half the time CN takes to take a container from Vancouver to Montréal (302 hours, or 12 days and 14 hours). In comparison, the transit time between China and Germany by rail is 11-to-15 days.
So, Russian Railways makes freight trains cover almost twice the distance in almost half the time, with faster, shorter, but all-electric trains.
That isn't to say that the "Planned economy" is better than the "Free market economy", it just means that with some government involvement and infrastructure investment, maybe the Canadian railway infrastructure would be better equipped to handle both freight and passenger trains with fewer issues dictated by private corporations that are willing to gnaw away pieces of their own rail infrastructure (which, in the case of CN was actually built with government money) in order to gain a penny.