Amtrak ridership up, funding for more rail built by states.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Here's a table of railroad reconstruction and construction costs, incidentally for those interested in the subject.

[CmdrWilkens]

Oh? What about the ballast? And ties? And high speed rail is dependent on welded track which, last I heard, requires modern machinery and not gandydancers.

There's also the fact that, during extreme temperatures, welded track must be continuously monitored for thermal expansion and contraction and any accompanying breakage must be fixed. Highways, on the other hand, just crack up; they are not impassable, though they do need to be repaired eventually.

Yes and the number of fly-overs and support structures for modern highway operation means a huge number of extra bridges and aerial structures which need constant monitoring REGARDLESS of the weather and if they start to fail then we are talking about major multiple-month long destruction and reconstruciton obstructing major parts of the roadway. Also if we don't mind limiting speeds we can always go back to jointed track. Given the state of signalling apparatus in most parts of the country you would see a drop in ride quality (though that doesn't matter to a frieght load) but not all that much change in MAS.

[Sea Skimmer]

Oh? What about the ballast? And ties? And high speed rail is dependent on welded track which, last I heard, requires modern machinery and not gandydancers.

Highways need ballast too, like twelve feet of it if not also a slab of concrete under the pavement while your at it. Ties meanwhile are simple and the wood ones are cheap (the advantages of concrete ties are becoming questionable). Continuously welded rail is 1920s technology and the work CAN be done by hand; in fact it still commonly is done by hand when pieces of track are simply being repaired rather then completely replaced. The machines they use for track work are hardly bleeding edge rocket science anyway, and are no more complex then the fleets of machines you need for road maintenance.

In fact it is completely possible to perform all track maintenance without anything more then some power operated hand tools (a welder and a rail cutting saw) and raw manpower. Meanwhile it is impossible to properly asphalt a road without a paving machine and steam rollers. I’m sure we’ve all seen how quickly some hand tamped cold patch pulls out of potholes.

There's also the fact that, during extreme temperatures, welded track must be continuously monitored for thermal expansion and contraction and any accompanying breakage must be fixed. Highways, on the other hand, just crack up; they are not impassable, though they do need to be repaired eventually.

Any roadway or railway needs to be monitored in extreme weather conditions; think about the enormous cost of constantly plowing and salting a four lane highway in winter even if the snowfall is only 1 inch deep and you have 1 car per mile using the road. In comparison a railway wont even have its rails buried until you have a major snowfall, and until the snow is coming down feet deep you don’t need anything more then a snowplow on your existing trains to keep the tracks clear.

BTW, the monitoring required to check for thermal expansion breaks consists of making the rail a circuit, and waiting for the circuit to break…. Hardly the most expensive proposition in the world. All US track is yet to be protected by track circuits mainly because most of it only runs freight, and freight rail really does not care one bit about having derailments from time to time.