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James19991 t1_je9rkgr wrote

Reply to comment by just_an_ordinary_guy in Train derailment in butler by thedudeabides412

Train derailments have dropped by 75% in the last 50 years.

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just_an_ordinary_guy t1_jeau0g6 wrote

Did you read literally anything I wrote? Yes, the raw number of derailments are down, but derailments per million miles is trending upwards nationally.

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MycologistQueasy22 t1_jebduwb wrote

What you said doesn't make mathematical sense. Fractions can't increase if the numerator goes down and the denominator goes up.

> Yes, the raw number of derailments is down. But that's not a very useful statistic. They're running more miles than ever as the economy continually grows

If they're running more miles than ever, and the number of derailments is down, then the derailments per mile has to be down too.

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just_an_ordinary_guy t1_jedbe90 wrote

Yeah, I messed up, but derailments per million miles is actually up. Where I goofed is I got the numbers flipped in my head for some reason. They're actually running fewer miles because precision scheduled railroading is consolidating shorter trains into much longer trains. So they need to run fewer miles to run the same amount, if not more, freight.

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