The train tracks in Brahmanbaria have not quite melted, but they have buckled in the heat. Still, the correct question is not, in fact, to ask how do we stop the tracks in Brahmanbaria from buckling -- it's whether we allow the train tracks in Brahmanbaria to buckle enough?
Yes, I know, this sounds absurd. But it is still true as we are in a universe of scarce resources. Therefore there is an optimal amount of train track failure, and that optimum is not zero.
I grew up in Bath, in England, a place where a lot of Jane Austen movies are filmed (she did live there for a time) and also that latest hit, Bridgerton (if you look at that very closely you can see my apartment in fact). It's a slightly odd place, for a few decades it was the most fashionable -- and possibly richest -- place in the English speaking world then near overnight it became unfashionable. At which point it went to sleep and no one really changed anything. That's why it's all so preserved right now. It can be odd having so much history around, teaching the kids swimming lessons -- my own included -- used to take place in an 18th century pool that used Roman plumbing from the 1st century AD to deliver the warm spring water.
This period of great wealth also coincided with the building of the first railways across Britain, so of course Bath is on that network. My father, himself an engineer, used to point out that we know that Brunel was a bad engineer and he'd use that railway going through town as the example. Because the bridges he built to carry 200 tonne trains still stand today and carry 2,000 tonne ones with very little modification. He over-specified, he wasted resources on building bridges that were too strong for the needs of the time.
Which is where we get back to Brahmanbaria. It is possible to build a railway where the tracks never do buckle. But that's expensive. So, what actually happens is that railways in different climates are built to slightly different standards. You can stress the steel before installation so that it will work just fine in a certain range of temperatures -- which range you pick depends upon where you are. Clearly a line in Bangladesh has a likely different range to deal with than one in Siberia. Trying to make all rails able to deal with all temperature ranges is both expensive and wasteful.
But then we get to ask the really important question. Should we spend to ensure that rails never buckle? The answer being no. Because this treatment is expensive. If we treated and prepared to make sure that none ever buckled we'd be wasting precious resources -- things used to do this cannot then be used to do something else after all. On the other hand if they buckled for 3 months every summer then we'd be willing to pay a bit more for the rails so we could have more railway transport. So, we should spend to the point where we have very little buckling, but perhaps still some.
Another way to put this is that we should design and build to cope with a normal summer but not for a once in a century heatwave. Losing a few days every hundred years would be worth the savings.
The background to this is just that old truism that we're in a universe of scarce resources. What we use once, for one purpose, cannot then be used again for another. So a great deal of life is making sure that something is good enough instead of perfect. What we've saved by not wasting effort on the last 1% of reliability is something that we can then use to provide us with something else. We're richer that is.
This is true of everything, it's just what is “good enough” that wanders a bit. We want airplanes to work rather more than just 99% of the time while failure rates in bicycles worry us a great deal less.
It is possible to stress (really, stretch before installing) tracks so that they'll only buckle at higher and higher temperatures. But that same process also makes them liable to crack in low temperatures. Or we can use a “slab” system of laying the rails, but that costs four times more than the usual method. There are more “ors” available to us as well. We might even use some of them if climate change does lead to significant problems in the future. But the correct answer is still that we should sometimes put up with having no railway because of the cost of ensuring that rails never buckle instead of just sometimes.
I do like one solution though -- apparently, according to Network Rail that now runs the system through my home town of Bath, painting the rails white keeps them 10°C cooler than not painting them. So there's a job for someone out at Brahmanbaria then with a brush and a pot of standard white house paint.
Tim Worstall is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London.
https://www.dhakatribune.com/nation/2023/04/29/train-movement-halted-again-as-heatwave-bends-tracks-in-brahmanbaria
