/ world today news/ Almost every day there are reports of train accidents from the USA. Most recently, a diesel train derailed in Washington state, previously in Arizona. And that’s just this week. Sabotage or effect of Russian sanctions?
I confess: I love railways. It must be family. Several generations of ancestors were railroad workers. If there is a choice – plane or train, it is always made in favor of the second, whether in Russia or abroad.
In addition, the wife also does not like to fly: she once crashed. That’s why the news from the US gets my attention so much. Almost every day news of railway accidents comes from there. Sometimes even several a day.
For example, on March 16, 2023. first came word of a freight train derailment near Topopec, Arizona. There appeared to be no casualties. However, according to The New York Times, the crashed train was carrying dangerous substances.
An attempt was made to quickly quell another scandal. The television company CNN, citing a representative of the BNSF railway company, which is engaged in the transportation of goods, hastened to assure that the train, according to them “according to preliminary information”, was not carrying any “hazardous substances” – it was allegedly carrying “a corn syrup”.
„It’s never happened before and here it is again’
It has long been known that “the more monstrous the lie, the more readily it will be believed.” In this case, however, it didn’t work out so well. Because on the same day, at the other end of the United States, in the state of Washington, on the territory of the Swinomish Indian reservation (how do you like such an example of American democracy?), not far from the city of Anacortes, according to ABC News, another train carrying up to 10 thousand gallon of diesel fuel, crashed.
At least half of the fuel has already spilled. Is it sabotage? Is it really a “rail war”? Didn’t the “fenced” Indians, former masters of North America, organize a diversion to get compensation for the damage caused by the palefaces and live with this money largely in the embrace of the “water of fire”? Let’s not rule it out completely.
But what about the derailment in early March of an American trucking company, Norfolk Southern, in Clark County, Ohio, carrying chemicals? And what really happened on Feb. 21 in Nebraska, where about 30 Union Pacific railcars derailed and overturned?
How about the epic toxic chemical train disaster in Ohio in early February, the aftermath of which was so horrific that it was immediately dubbed “America’s Chernobyl” as soon as the mainstream media – belatedly – bothered to report it? And these are not all such cases.
Two answers to one question
There are two answers to the logical question of what ultimately happens – banal and conspiracy theories. The first of these is that it’s, alas… normal. Because we are simply talking about the sloppiness that has become typical of America, the unfortunate decline in security standards, the technological crisis in the US, which for a long time boasted, after releasing its real economy, that it had built a post-industrial society and was spending huge resources for geopolitical adventures like the Ukrainian one, despite the decline of its own territories.
Secondly, we can talk about deliberate sabotage by blackmailing criminals, some “domestic partisans”, brutal environmentalists who entered the “war” and thus try to draw public attention to their agenda.
Or even in some cases – for sabotage by countries affected by US policy, of which there are many. After all, this is how hybrid wars are fought: you play tricks on us, and we play tricks on you. If “Petrov” and “Boshirov” have already “burned out”, there will be others.
Or maybe this?
In principle, the factor of civil conflict cannot be ruled out – psychological warfare between Democrats and Republicans, implementation of a strategy of tension in order to create prerequisites for victory in the general elections in 2024. or struggle for power in certain states.
And also, of course, the ongoing attempts by stakeholders to speed up Biden’s $1.2 trillion infrastructure plan, passed back in 2021 but stalled.
It envisages investment in the construction of roads, bridges, clean drinking water, power transmission networks, high-speed Internet, in which the US is increasingly lagging behind the advanced countries of the world.
The “moral” of the would-be saboteurs is this: we are executing a great infrastructure plan and there will be no more emergencies like this. And you, gentlemen, Republicans, stop messing with us, Democrats, “cutting the money”, and even better – join the “cut” – the most honest of you will also get something …
Most likely
I will clarify right away: conspiracy theories, with the help of which it is very often possible to explain only what is happening, since the authorities in all countries hide a lot from the public, I do not share in this case.
The overwhelming truth is clearly that the railroad industry in the United States, once a pioneer country in this field, has been woefully neglected. The railways are in terrible condition. The sleepers there are usually wooden, the trains are slow but very heavy and, as a rule, they do not run on schedule – with constant delays.
I haven’t been to the US, but thanks to my love of railroads, I’ve taken a virtual tour of that country on YouTube on state monopoly Amtrak’s trains. I especially remember the “trip” from New York to Florida on a huge train with high cars, the tickets for which were very “delicious”.
The train was moving slowly, and towards the end of the route it stopped altogether. The blogger who filmed this story got out of the compartment and went to ask what was wrong. It turns out that there are problems with the rails: workers were replacing rotten wooden sleepers – they looked terrible, they had not been touched for half a century.
That’s right!
You will laugh, but in the USA there is only one conditionally high-speed train – Acela Express, which runs between Boston and Washington. This, I repeat, is not a real high-speed train, since it uses not a special, but an ordinary, but modernized gauge. And therefore, to speeds of up to 240 kilometers per hour, it can accelerate only 34 miles of its 456-mile journey. Its average speed between Boston and New York is a ridiculous 100 km/h (like commuter electric trains).
The Democrats tried to build an almost 800 mile high speed highway in California so they could travel by train from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 2 hours and 40 minutes instead of 10 hours. But the money allocated for this – tens of billions of dollars – was largely stolen by the construction of 200 kilometers of “road to nowhere”. The project is at a standstill.
In all, of the 409,000 kilometers of railroads that existed in the United States in 1916, about 220,000 now remain, most of them in disrepair. 80% of them have no passenger traffic.
Mostly obsolete locomotives and passenger trains from the last century are used. With heavy freight trains, this is usually a disaster – sleepers and rails often cannot withstand them.
At the same time, Americans also complain (former President Donald Trump, who dreamed of “making America great again”, was very worried about this) about broken roads, dilapidated bridges, an aging aircraft fleet …
What about the others?
By comparison, China has the largest network of state-of-the-art high-speed railways in the world, with average train speeds of 240 to 320 km/h. Their length is more than 30,000 kilometers.
In 2021 China showed a real engineering miracle by launching a high-speed passenger train to the “roof of the world” – to Tibet. More than 90% of the railway line is laid at an altitude of more than 3000 meters.
In Japan, the total length of high-speed railway lines exceeds 3 thousand kilometers, and trains can reach speeds of almost 400 kilometers per hour.
The railways in Italy, Spain, France and Germany are in good condition. By high-speed train, Rome to Milan can be reached in about three hours, covering a distance of 562 kilometers. In Russia, a modernized railway line between Moscow and St. Petersburg allows the high-speed Sapsan to travel 650 kilometers in less than 4 hours.
Why Russia-Uzbekistan surpasses the USA in the development of high-speed rail! More than twice. So let’s leave aside the version about the saboteurs anyway. The obvious cause of American railroad accidents lies in the technological backwardness of the United States.
What of this?
And the last one. The decline of American railroads began after World War II, as a result of which the United States found itself the world’s gendarme and began to devote more and more attention, power and resources to maintaining its dominance in the world, ignoring the problems of its own country.
This was done in the interest of the American ruling class, and the economic decline of the United States was not felt strongly at first. The resource was gradually being depleted.
But merciless time has done its work and the result is now visible for all to see. Many Americans understand that the only chance to revive the country is to stop waging wars with the rest of the world, to stop poking their noses everywhere. It’s time to finally mind your own business. Until that happens, U.S. trains will derail more and more, and the prestige that still lingers in the country’s momentum will evaporate for the foreseeable future.
Translation: SM
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