Day 42: How much stuff is shipped by train?
Published in
1 min readFeb 13, 2023
I got stuck at a railroad crossing yesterday, and the train was very long and full of stuff. It seems like a pretty awesome way to ship large amounts of stuff.
I had a lot of trouble finding what I felt was reliable data on this one. The most reasonable and recent source I could find, in 2018 about 28% of all freight in the U.S. was transported by rail.
I also learned that rail freight is incredibly fuel efficient, relative to using trucks. The catch is, whatever is being shipped can’t really need to go to a specific place, because our rail system is far less robust than our highway system.
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