A strange description of about 20 cars concertina'd and the rest still on the rails.
I don't think I agree with that. Derailments are not a function of train-miles run, but of track condition and rolling stock maintenance standards. You see videos of their freight trains on minor lines or maybe long sidings rolling so badly that it's hard to see how they get (or afford the premiums for) any insurance cover. I hope none of my savings are "invested" in any US insurance companies.
Woodford Head to Head by ac6044cw, on Flickr
The Sweep of the Rails by ac6044cw, on FlickrProbably not. There will be a threshold of track and wagon maintenance above which derailments are highly improbable no matter how much traffic there is (we hope UK is in this league), and another below which they are almost certain - & this is where derailment frequency probably correlates with distance run. It certainly looks as though US track or wagon maintenance standards are way down if there is a derailment weekly.
They were building railways (particularly west of the Mississippi) to tie the country together, so yes, financial incentives and low first cost were important to attract the investment money to get them built. Europe had heavily populated/industrialised cities and towns before railways were invented, so there was good traffic potential from the beginning (making it much easier to get people to invest in them, and builders could justify more expensive engineering to reduce future operating costs) - that wasn't the case in large areas of the US. For example, traffic on the original Union Pacific/Central Pacific transcontinental route was quite low for years after it was completed, and building the Central Pacific part of it over the Sierra Nevada mountains (it's about 80 miles from Roseville to the summit at Donner Pass, at an average gradient of about 1.5%) cost a small fortune to build using an army of largely Chinese workers.
I expect they probably have have learnt to work long trains with remote-controlled locos along the length, or are you saying that they have set out on a path where they expect their traction policy to cause wrecks?
The trunk lines may well be fit for purpose but others obviously aren't. The point is that some of the infrastructure is so poor that almost no linespeed is safe (unless you can cope with a schedule that doesn't exceed walking pace.)Not saying they haven’t learned to run those trains, but 10’000tons of rolling railroad wagons are not really something you handle easily, even with the best experience and/or technology.
For how bad rail traffic in the US looks I can’t imagine them running freights at line speed over bad-maintained infrastructure. Not more than here at least.
If you have statistics at hand it’s time to bring them out.
But power distributed along the train, continuous braking etc mitigate the difficulties. If curvature is too sharp for the train length with locos just at the front then they split them up along the train. If they can't make it work then they are stuck running shorter trains.