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Cake day: May 11th, 2026

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  • Yeah by a long shot. Railroads spend 1-3% of the capital cost on maintenance. So if it cost $3 million to build a km of track they spend roughly $30-90k/year. It might not look like it since tracks are just kind of always “there” but there is a decent amount of work you need to do pretty much constantly.

    The stones underneath the tracks and sleepers is called ballast and it needs to be rough, angular rock of a certain size. It’s an engineered fill material that’s designed to lock together and hold the rails in place. Every train that passes by does a couple of things at once. It cyclically loads the ballast and breaks down those sharp edges that lock it together. At the same time the force of the wheels on the rails contributes to fatigue causing microcracks to form on the rail surface.

    If you leave rails unmaintained long enough (by gross tonnage BTW. Rail can last a long time if it’s hardly used at all) the track will start pumping, where it compresses and expands as each axle passes over it. You’ll start lifting the subsoil up into the ballast ruining its ability to hold the track in alignment even more. Also, microcracks can combine enough that the railhead begins spalling and eventually the cracks can combine enough that the rail itself can fracture well before it’s service life tonnage.

    To fix this you have to tamp ballast every X number of tons, grind the railhead every Y tons, and replace the ballast every Z tons .etc

    Basically every part of the permanent way is some kind of wear item that needs maintenance. Mind you, only mainline track needs to be perfect. As long as speed limits are low enough along with an inspection, you can run on degraded secondary rails or spurs safely. It just wears it out even faster.

    An American rail section that last saw maintenance when reagan was elected



  • The issue is you need to grind the tracks multiple times a year on busy routes, along with ballast tamping or replacement. That’s set by total gross tonnage not by a set time span, and these maintenance items are not optional. Tamping prevents pumping and rail fatigue which can be catastrophic if you allow it to degrade and suddenly fail. Rail grinding removes microcracks created by fatigue due to every wheel passing over it. Grinding deletes the cracks, but if you leave it for too long the cracks grow and can total the rail. 10 minutes per panel is a long time when you need to maintain tens of thousands of kms of track.

    Even a short distance between two towns is a maintenance headache. It could take weeks to remove the panels entirely and that’s before you get started doing maintenance at all… All you’ve accomplished is removing a maintenance obstacle you put there in the first place. Then you have to put it all back when you’re done…

    A railroad typically spends 1-3% of the entire cost to build a km of track just to maintain it every year. That’s a big operating cost that eats into rail budgets already (part of why I believe they should all be nationalized to better align public incentives with a natural monopoly but that’s beyond this conversation.)

    For reference, most rail costs around $1-3 million per km to build, $5-10 million or more within urban areas due to land acquisition. Typical railroad maintenance is somewhere around $10 000-$30 000 per km per year with unrestricted access. 20 mins round trip per panel (probably half an hour with deadtime between panels moving tools and gear) that’s a massive amount of increased costs and more importantly service interruption. You can’t pass revenue traffic when they’re doing this.

    I’m guessing that the picture in the OOP article is standard gauge at 1435mm, so I figure each panel is roughly 2m long? 500 panels per km roughly? 5000 minutes to remove, let’s say 15 min to be more realistic on pace, so 7500 minutes. That’s 125 person-hours per km to remove panels. Maybe a team of 2-6 and a backhoe on track wheels? At an average wage of $60/hr for a team of 2 people that should cost $7500 just to remove panels from 1km of track and it would take 5.2 days of labour, at 8 hour shifts that’s 15.625 days of labour, let’s say 16 days. 2 weeks and 2 days at $7500 and you have to do it all over again to put them back in place. You would need to do that at least once a year, probably multiple times though.

    I’m also accounting for the cost of machinery in the wage number. Maybe it would be closer to $40-50? But I’ve also always heard to take the wage paid to a worker and triple it for the true total cost once everything is considered (unemployment, health and safety, tickets .etc) so the total bill for round tripping panels off and on could cost almost as much as normal maintenance on the permanent way?





  • I would argue the reason modern media sucks so bad is because of min max writing by focus group in pursuit of a test-tube blockbuster. Any originality or risk taking is a no-go so you write for the lowest common denominator and do reboots and remakes. Brand new stuff has to happen using existing IPs that are already popular.

    It’s different from just being collaborative or testing ideas on your intended audience. It’s closer to how companies make dog food than the creative process for making good entertainment or art…









  • iocase@lemmy.ziptoMemes@sopuli.xyzPouring one out for the homies
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    3 days ago

    I’ve honestly been using Claude or chatgpt for it and specifically asking for sources. But as they get more desperate for money they’re going to start to have paid sponsorships…

    Someday soon:

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