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Blasting down bad track Doubleheader on the ND&W Railway (Maumee and Western)

Scott Taipale · 12.5M views · 2017-03-31 · 7:24

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Overview

Footage of a doubleheader of locomotives crawling over badly maintained track on a former Wabash Railroad line, now the ND&W Railway. The uploader explains the track had deferred maintenance for decades.

On Hacker News

Cited as a startling example of poor US freight track quality, usually in comparisons with Europe.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2023–2026

Topics

Transit, cities & urban planningCivil engineering & construction
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railroadfreight railtrack maintenanceus infrastructure

What people said

amiga386 · 2026-07 · Criticism

At least they're doing something. I couldn't believe the state of US railtrack: [VIDEO] Just go slower! We don't want to pay for maintenance. What's the worst that could happen? You derail and your toxic payload catches fire and poisons the neighbourhood? [LINK]

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cycomanic · 2025-07 · Criticism

Far worse in what sense? More tracks, sure the US rail network is about 1.5 times the size of the European network for the same landmass. But then, I don't think quality wise I don't think you'd encounter a track like this: [VIDEO] anywhere in Europe. Or the comparison of high speed tracks 9600km in Europe vs 70 km in the US. The reason for this is obviously the completely different priorities US is freight, Europe is passenger. So I don't think you can really compare the two networks and say one is clearly better.

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dylan604 · 2025-07 · Criticism

> track like this: [VIDEO] I can't believe that the train can actually travel down that track. If I had just come upon that track, there's no way I would have ever thought that it was still an operational track. I'm sure the engineers navigating that track have a lot of colorful opinions about it as well

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Sources

Video by Scott Taipale, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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