This is disappointing. I used the Empire Builder to commute back and forth between Hood River and Portland before the pandemic. I've since stopped riding as my office has transitioned to full remote, and I can't justify the risk of spending almost 2 hours each way in a metal tube with strangers. In that sense, I guess I am part of the cause of its demise.
It was by far my favorite mode of travel for my commute. The scenery through the Gorge and relaxation it brought me relative to the drive were so valuable. I got to know the staff, and in the evenings, could kick back with a beer in the observation car while looking at Multnomah Falls.
I'd rather spend 2x the time on a train and have the full time be usable than driving, where I would always show up stressed out and feeling behind in my day before I even started.
I also took it eastbound one time to ski in Montana. That was wonderful. I boarded about 7pm, dinked around on my computer for a couple of hours, fell asleep, and woke up at a world-class ski area where I could walk to my motel, catch a bus to the slopes and back, and walk to a top notch concert downtown at night.
RealityVoid 1298 days ago [-]
That is a 4h commute each day! While I echo your feeling about trains and commuting, a 4h commute would absolutely crush me. Let's say you sleep 8h, you work 8h and you commute 4h, that does not leave a whole lot of time in the day.
ceejayoz 1298 days ago [-]
I'd happily take a four hour commute during which I can read, watch movies, browse Reddit, etc. over a two hour commute which requires me to be behind the wheel of a car. (I'll take remote work over either one, of course.)
monkeynotes 1298 days ago [-]
When I used to commute (also close to 2hrs each way) I just never got enough sleep. I'd have to get up around 6am to be on the train by 7am. I'd get to my desk worn out and dreading another slog back home for 7/8pm. It sucked so much I decided lifestyle is more important than work and moved to Canada where I have been able to walk to work or had an otherwise easy commute.
In my opinion anyone travelling 4 hrs between work is living in a poverty of sorts. Perhaps not financial poverty, but in my opinion a lack of freedom to enjoy your life outside of work is a considerable deficit in your short time here.
necrotic_comp 1298 days ago [-]
I could do this, if it was consistent, and if I knew I would have the same seat every day and the train was guaranteed to be on time.
The stress of the commute mainly comes from not knowing how long it's going to take and how different it is every day. If I was able to buy an assigned seat on a train and was able to work (either sending emails or coding) during the commuting time, it could allow me to shorten my time in the office and use that time only for necessary face-to-face meetings.
That'd be awesome, and would presumably let me transition into more full-time remote work.
bluGill 1298 days ago [-]
Not me. What I hated most going from driving my car to taking the bus is I could drive in 12 minutes, the bus took 25. I miss that extra 26 minutes per day with my family. Working from home is better, but I suppose it must end (when there is a vaccine)
monkeynotes 1298 days ago [-]
I think there will be a sizable number of people who will still work from home post-covid. Businesses can save a boatload of money by closing down office spaces. If their business is still productive with remote work why would they sign a new lease?
bluGill 1298 days ago [-]
There are real downsides to not working together. There is a reason my boss told me I can schedule a trip to India anytime I felt like it - seeing the people I work with there face to face was often important.
ghaff 1298 days ago [-]
When I commuted into Boston semi-regularly--often by train--it was something over a 90 minute commute. Yeah, you can doze and read on the train, but it's not really sustainable IMO. I only managed for 1 1/2 years because I didn't do it every day.
tspike 1295 days ago [-]
I used the commute as part of my work day. I spent about 5 hours in the office. I departed about 8am and got back around 6:30pm, and used some of the travel time for leisure.
rhino369 1298 days ago [-]
Depending how you sleep on a train, you might be able to sleep 5 at home and try to catch 3+ hours on the trains.
UncleOxidant 1298 days ago [-]
> In that sense, I guess I am part of the cause of its demise.
In a more ideal situation we'd be backstopping all forms of public transport right now at the federal level so that they don't suffer any diminution of service after covid is over. It's understandable - and necessary - that people don't want to travel in various types of metal tubes right now, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be an option again post-pandemic. Instead there are actual attempts in DC to bail out cruise lines.
Also love the train station in downtown Portland - it was restored to it's 1913 glory some years back. It's so much more pleasant catching a train than a plane as you show up 15 minutes prior to departure and not miss your train. Also so much more legroom. Going by train just feels so much more civilized.
seanmcdirmid 1299 days ago [-]
On a road trip my family and I stopped at Wishram once. What a strange little community in the Columbia with its own train stop. It was a Sunday, so it was pretty deserted (maybe everyone was at church?), but you could see signs of human habitation everywhere.
jdxcode 1299 days ago [-]
What a beautiful place to commute from. I proposed to my wife at Multnomah Falls.
pottertheotter 1299 days ago [-]
Reading this made me feel relaxed.
cstross 1298 days ago [-]
To European eyes, the delays on that journey (which the author dismisses with a shrug) are outrageous. Arriving an hour late at one stop, then 1h40m late to the next -- 93 miles away per google -- is ridiculous! You'd only get those sort of delays if there'd been a fatal accident on the line, or downed overhead power cables, or a similar major disruption, and the carrier would be issuing refunds and apologizing. Even here in the UK.
Also, a nominal hour to cover 93 miles by rail, and just three trains a week, is just laughable. That's a tourism charter service, not a transport network.
It's no wonder Americans don't think in terms of rail travel as mass transport. If you can't run trains like commuter planes, something's badly wrong.
pmjordan 1298 days ago [-]
This reminds me of the time we wanted to ride the Amtrak Coast Starlight from Seattle to San Jose on our trip to the US in 2014. It's supposed to be a scenic route, and takes about 24 hours for that leg. (The train carries on to LA IIRC.)
When we got to the station in Seattle and checked in our bags they told us the train was at least 5 hours delayed, so we should go do something else for 3 hours and then come back for a status update. We also left our mobile number and email address with them in case there was anything else. (Though in theory they should already have had these from the ticket booking.)
Anyway, we went off to a café round the corner (it was an apparently rare snowy day in Seattle - hence the delay, plus we didn't want to stray too far) and had some drinks and brunch.
After about 2 and a half hours later we wanted to stretch our legs and wandered back to the station. Whereupon we were told the train had already left without us… but with our bags, but we could have a refund or take the train on a later day. ️
We only had overnight bags, and an onward journey planned the other end, plus we were now super annoyed so we ended up scrambling to find a flight that would get us there by the next day. That was the closest to the flight time I've ever bought an airline ticket, less than 3 hours I think. It worked out OK in the end, we got our bags from San Jose station the next morning as we'd beaten the train there, though the contents of one of the bags was damaged from rough handling.
goodcanadian 1298 days ago [-]
On the other hand, in North America, massive amounts of freight are moved by rail, extremely efficiently, and railways are generally pretty profitable. A train might be a mile long (as a child, you count the cars as you go past on the highway, and 80 or so was pretty standard). The freight companies own the rails and their trains get priority over passenger trains. Via Rail has exactly the same problem in Canada.
In contrast, in Europe, while some cargo is moved by rail, the focus is on passengers. Freight trains (all trains) are short, and passengers have priority over freight.
A quick google brought this up, though I haven't read through it in full:
The US picked a different optimization. The combination of transportation modes from Rail, Truck, and Barge are amazingly important to the health of the country. Passenger rail had a brief time of importance but was passed by plane and car travel.
When the fully automated, electric car and buses arrive, I would imagine that passenger rail in the US will disappear entirely except for nostalgia operations and metro systems already in operation. It is much easier to be B2B or B2G than deal with individual customers for any of the railroads, and getting passengers off the rail will be a bonus for them. The nodal nature of rail will always be a handicap compared to roads.
sjsamson 1296 days ago [-]
>The US picked a different optimization. The combination of transportation modes from Rail, Truck, and Barge are amazingly important to the health of the country. Passenger rail had a brief time of importance but was passed by plane and car travel.
The US could have “chosen” to do both (there’s no single policy decision or document to point to), as it had done in its railroad heyday, and as other countries do (e.g. Switzerland, China, Russia, etc.). It was and continues to be a failure of public policy and political system that passenger rail is so bad, and even freight rail is as underinvested in. That’s not a knock on the other forms of transport, all of which form a vital part of a larger interconnected, intermodal transportation network, but rail should be an important trunk of that system given its capacity and efficiency. Yet rail has had the least amount of public financial and policy support. By comparison, the US has invested trillions of taxpayer dollars in building and maintaining millions of miles of publicly owned roads (almost all non-tolled), airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC) system, and seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS).
>When the fully automated, electric car and buses arrive, I would imagine that passenger rail in the US will disappear entirely except for nostalgia operations and metro systems already in operation. It is much easier to be B2B or B2G than deal with individual customers for any of the railroads, and getting passengers off the rail will be a bonus for them. The nodal nature of rail will always be a handicap compared to roads.
We do need autonomous, electric buses and trucks, but fully automated, electric railway technology exists now and has for many decades, and well over century in the case of electrification.[1][2] Standards-based electric trains and related technology are available for purchase off the shelf from multiple vendors, do not need to carry large battery packs in the vehicle, and no pie in sky hope for future automation of an insanely hard problem. Electric railways are the most optimized form of land-based transportation, and arguably the most overall.
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” - Bill Gates
The US could have “chosen” to do both (there’s no single policy decision or document to point to), as it had done in its railroad heyday, and as other countries do (e.g. Switzerland, China, Russia, etc.). It was and continues to be a failure of public policy and political system that passenger rail is so bad, and even freight rail is as underinvested in. That’s not a knock on the other forms of transport, all of which form a vital part of a larger interconnected, intermodal transportation network, but rail should be an important trunk of that system given its capacity and efficiency. Yet rail has had the least amount of public financial and policy support. By comparison, the US has invested trillions of taxpayer dollars in building and maintaining millions of miles of publicly owned roads (almost all non-tolled), airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC) system, and seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS).
I don't really think that was in the cards. The car was already prevalent before the interstate system was built, and the military was much more about a road solution than rail.
As to cost, look at California trying to add high speed rail, as they have failed badly for what was a very modest set of served areas.
Rail does cargo very well. It's very easy to setup the factories and elevators on the rail line. Rail has some serious problems with terminal delivery of people in the US. You still need another form of transportation to get people home. Without fundamentally changing where people live or work, it needs something else.
We do need autonomous, electric buses and trucks, but fully automated, electric railway technology exists now and has for many decades, and well over century in the case of electrification.[1][2] Standards-based electric trains and related technology are available for purchase off the shelf from multiple vendors, do not need to carry large battery packs in the vehicle, and no pie in sky hope for future automation of an insanely hard problem. Electric railways are the most optimized form of land-based transportation, and arguably the most overall.
Electric, Automated trains still don't reach people's homes. You are not going to change the fundamental idea of living in suburbs or the country. In fact, current events make living away from the cities a good option. The cost of rail in the USA is too high even for states that really want it. It will be much easier to alter how the USA builds roads to add cues for automation than try to add rail everywhere. Electric, automated buses will replace passenger rail and be much more flexible for changing trends in where people are going. Automated cars will make personal transport to individual destinations much more efficient and easy. Other than the metro systems that exist, there won't be much place for passenger rail.
sjsamson 1295 days ago [-]
>I don't really think that was in the cards. The car was already prevalent before the interstate system was built, and the military was much more about a road solution than rail.
These are policy decisions. Other countries chose to invest in rail. The US chose to invest in other forms of transportation and created adverse policy conditions in which rail largely withered and nearly died. I made another comment [1] where I talk about the political milieu that likely contributed to this.
I would also call out the fact since WW2, the US has lost more than half its railroad route-miles (300,000+ to ~147,000 today). Other countries had to rebuild their infrastructure after the destruction of the war. No bombs were dropped on American railroads. Aside from figurative bombs of bad policy by political leaders, competitors in automotive/airlines, and the deeply ignorant idea that railroads and trains are an obsolete 19th century technology.
>As to cost, look at California trying to add high speed rail, as they have failed badly for what was a very modest set of served areas.
I am well aware of the California HSR project and its many failings. It has nothing to do with anything inherent to rail technology. I view it as symptomatic of and the inevitable result of a broken political system, poor project management, a Transportation/Construction-Industrial Complex (similar to the Military-Industrial Complex), monied special interests like construction and engineering contractors run wild with no oversight, capturing the agencies they work for and transferring as many public dollars into their bank account.
Alon Levy’s blog Pedestrian Observations [2] covers transportation construction costs extensively, and generally calls out Anglo countries (UK, USA, CAN, AUS) as the most troubled. There’s also the Caltrain-HSR Compatibility Blog [3], Systemic Failure [4], and others in the technical transportation commentary space.
>Rail has some serious problems with terminal delivery of people in the US. You still need another form of transportation to get people home. Without fundamentally changing where people live or work, it needs something else.
>Electric, Automated trains still don't reach people's homes. You are not going to change the fundamental idea of living in suburbs or the country. In fact, current events make living away from the cities a good option. The cost of rail in the USA is too high even for states that really want it. It will be much easier to alter how the USA builds roads to add cues for automation than try to add rail everywhere.
There is an access problem or first/last mile problem, but rail does not exist in a vacuum. It can work in concert with buses, taxi/rideshare, friend/family pickup/dropoff, biking, walking, etc. as part of a larger comprehensive transportation network. Rail can act as the high capacity core of the network. A pair of optimized, electric, modern signaled rail tracks with has the transportation capacity equivalent of a 8-10 lane highway. This should be taken advantage of, then use lower capacity/higher flexibility transport for the first and last mile problem. Otherwise we continue have a congestion problem with transportation network centered around single occupant vehicles (SOVs), or even zero occupants with autonomy. Autonomous vehicles do not fix that, if anything it makes it worse.
Without getting into third rail politics unique to post-WW2 American suburbs/rural life and notions of “freedom,” historically trains were one of the primary form of mechanized land transport for about century, from the mid 1800s to well into 1900s. Suburbs were originally enabled by rail during this period (e.g. NYC, Boston, Chicago, LA metro areas), many of suburbs grew up around a local railroad or streetcar system, and their historic downtowns are often next to a rail station [5][6]. It was only later, we got auto oriented suburbs where you need a car to get anywhere. These were decisions, we could choose to create transit oriented communities, including suburbs.
That is at least for Germany not entirely correct. If some train from some logistics provider embedded in some just-in-time supply chain scheme is delayed for what ever reason, it is prioritised (Though this is new, since maybe about 5 years?). Which means you are standing still for maybe 15 to 20 minutes somewhere 'out there' between stations, and can enjoy 3 freight trains overtaking you, and maybe horses, cows, or just the noise protection walls.
Chaos!
Anyways, this chaos is self inflicted by building back switches, which would enable a more granular partition of the tracks, and more flexible passing of trains.
All in all, our railways are indeed "'ne Lachnummer"(laughing stock).
OTHO not so ridiculous at all, considering the massive build back of infrastructure.
bavcyc 1298 days ago [-]
The long trains you mention are called unit trains. They move from point A to point B as one unit. Typically the unit trains will be of all one type, e.g. tank, grain, container.
The trains with mixed types can be unit trains but they can also have intermediate stops where cars are added or dropped off.
The optimizations the rail companies perform to maximize the freight movement (and profit) is very interesting.
deepnotderp 1298 days ago [-]
Correct! American freight railroads are the most efficient in the world, Europe by contrast, chose to move passengers, but this has meant that more freight has been pushed off the rails onto the road.
From the point of view of a SimCity/Civilization/Railroad Tycoon player, they seem to do everything right.
While the rest of the world is engaging in useless Command&Conquer-like clashes, always on RED ALERT!
deepnotderp 1297 days ago [-]
By cost per ton mile, in which US freight rail is cheaper than almost any other country in the world, including China.
China's rail freight, as a percent of intercity freight has been steadily declining [0], in large part due to development on high speed rail, which has hurt freight rail networks.
Hm. Ok. Seems like almost everywhere, when road freight grows in relation to rail freight, even when rail freight grows by absolute tonnage transported.
I think it slowed a little bit because "change of management" due to imprisonment of
Imagine what would happen if Warren Buffet suddenly got jailed (for instance caused by Cancel Culture), along with about 40 to 50 others from higher management in connected companies, leading to break up of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc? Not exactly bye bye BNSF, but not good either (for a while).
Just handwaving here, but the timeframe fits IMO.
sjsamson 1296 days ago [-]
>By cost per ton mile, in which US freight rail is cheaper than almost any other country in the world, including China.
That likely won’t last assuming it is still true. China’s rail network is largely electrified, providing inherently lower operating costs over diesel-electric [1]. They also have more widely deploy advanced train control systems, safely enabling more capacity and future driverless operation.
>China's rail freight, as a percent of intercity freight has been steadily declining [0], in large part due to development on high speed rail, which has hurt freight rail networks.
That’s a very flawed interpretation. Excluding Covid-19, China freight volumes have been growing dramatically for many years and is expected to continue; while US growth is smaller, and generally mature/steady-state. China’s growth in land-based freight volumes has been largely captured trucks on roads, hence the falling relative mode share of rail freight, even though absolute ton-miles/TEUs/railcars/etc. by freight rail have grown significantly year-over-year. This trend will continue and relative mode shares will likely turnaround eventually.
China is investing hundreds of billions of dollar equivalent in their railway systems, both high speed passenger (300-400+ km/h) and “standard speed” passenger (up to 200-250 km/h) and freight (up to 100-130 km/h). There is also large investments in “dry ports” inland intermodal rail facilities. While high speed passenger lines capture a lot of attention and dollars/yuan, there are still large direct investments in the “regular” rail network improving freight capacity. And where high speed lines parallel standard mainlines, standard speed passenger services are reduced or eliminated, freeing up capacity for more freight in an indirect manner by separating them.
China has made a strategic decision, at the highest levels of government, to invest in railways and to mode shift as much possible to rail, passenger and freight. Tens of thousands of miles of railway have been built in just the last decade. It is likely the largest rail expansion in a century. More trackage of high speed lines than the rest of the world combined twice over, and it only started in 2008 (0 to 22,000+ miles; 0% to ~67%). They continue to plan and build major expansions in the decades to come, there does not appear to be a slow down. [2][3]
The US has one of the best and most comprehensive railways on earth. The problem is that its a freight railway that passenger trains have to work around. In southern california the metrolink regional railways link the entire region, but take second fiddle to freight rail which kneecaps their utility unless you are working 9-5 in downtown LA. The entire network is tailored for that commute because thats the best they could do with the freight rail schedule. We need grade separation between freight and passenger trains before any regional or national network will ever improve, and amtrak and other agencies like metrolink have no money allocated for this.
marcinzm 1298 days ago [-]
The US is a massive country and in most of it rail is a niche. It's cheaper and faster to go by plane even counting security, getting there, getting from there and so on. Worst of all you need a car as local public transit is lacking so arriving in the middle of downtown via train is actually a negative as you can't easily rent a car.
Amtrak has proper service in the areas where it's economically viable like the northeast. The rest of it loses money and is basically there because it's legally required.
edit: San Francisco to LA, a relatively short trip as far as the US goes, is the same as going from London to Scotland. Seattle to LA is the same as London to Rome. That's not counting cross-country which makes those distances look small. Rail just isn't competitive at those distances.
1298 days ago [-]
fredoralive 1298 days ago [-]
AIUI it’s partly due to priority rules. In most countries, passenger trains have priority over freight. Amtrak doesn’t own much rail itself, and mostly runs on 3rd party tracks. On these Amtrak only has priority if it’s running on time. So as soon as a train gets one delay, the various railway operators stop giving the train priority, and it just gets more delayed.
protomyth 1298 days ago [-]
The penalties on cargo timing are pretty severe. If that cargo train is supposed to be somewhere to load / unload, it really is a problem if it doesn't arrive on time and costs the railroads money they do not want to pay. Cargo, as many SV startups have discovered, is much more profitable than passenger.
klyrs 1298 days ago [-]
This boondoggle brought to you by the oil, gas, and auto lobbies; who paid our politicians to kneecap Amtrak and more generally, our rail industry. Bonus: libs are placated by nice bike trails on the bones of dead infrastructure, happy to "do their part" to reduce oil use and blissfully ignorant of the difference that electric trains would make in displacing diesel trucks.
rhino369 1298 days ago [-]
Amtrak is clinging to an unprofitable business model (outside the Boston-DC route).
85% of adults in America have a car. The 15% (plus children) who don't can use Greyhound/Megabus buses, which are fine. Flights are generally more convenient for trips over 300 miles anyway.
There is no significant use case for Amtrak. It doesn't take a conspiracy to make it unprofitable.
klyrs 1298 days ago [-]
There was a significant use case when Amtrak was gutted to make way for "modernization" of transit, which resulted in the urban sprawl and high rate of car ownership that you see today.
And also, Amtrak is a quasi-public corporation like USPS. Its existence is meant to be a public good, not to be profitable.
freeopinion 1298 days ago [-]
I wonder how things might change if 1% of highway funding were diverted to rail funding. And if 1% of USPS funding went into funding mailcars on Amtrak trains. And if 1% of federal unemployment stimulus went into hiring new employees for rail.
Maybe current funding dwarfs all those accumulated 1%s. I don't know. But maybe a dozen 1%s could help out a dozen other challenges and give a huge boost to passenger rail in the U.S.
montjoy 1298 days ago [-]
> libs are placated by...
Sorry but you don’t know WTF are you talking about. Any proposal to expand train service and especially electric trains in MN is vehemently attacked by conservatives, often with the loss of federal money to support light rail expansion.
klyrs 1298 days ago [-]
Actually, I'm a cyclist who has participated in "rails to trails" advocacy. That was actually a statement of self-awareness and I know precisely WTF I'm talking about because I've talked to perhaps hundreds of other cyclists about this issue.
It's easy to blame conservatives. But a huge portion of democrats take the same money and vote for the same bills, only they dig in their heels a little to score green points with trifling shit like rails to trails.
rsynnott 1298 days ago [-]
> That's a tourism charter service, not a transport network.
My impression is that most US intercity passenger lines _are_ basically tourism services, and not used for normal intercity travel.
fatnoah 1298 days ago [-]
A related point is that of Amtrak's 21,000 or so route miles, only 623 are actually owned by Amtrak. In nearly every case, freight operators only tolerate Amtrak because they're required to. The money they get paid is a drop in the bucket of their revenue, so they do the minimum required.
It's also worth remembering that the US is huge. For the routes many of these trains cover, especially west of the Mississippi River, you have a choice between plane, bus or train. Getting to an airport could be a 6+ hour drive, and 18 hours on a train is often a much more comfortable experience than 10 hours on a bus.
Despite the not-so-great timekeeping, there are many rural areas where the train is still the best of options. Keep in mind how large the US is.
nsgi 1298 days ago [-]
> Also, a nominal hour to cover 93 miles by rail, and just three trains a week, is just laughable.
The service frequency is laughable but an hour to cover 93 miles doesn't sound too bad. Plenty of intercity train services in the UK are slower than that. e.g. London Waterloo to Brockenhurst is 92 miles and takes about 1hr30 making three stops
Rapzid 1298 days ago [-]
The one time I took Empire Builder, from Leavenworth to Seattle, it was 4.5 hours late. Luckily I had decided to spend the day in Seattle before catching my flight..
okprod 1298 days ago [-]
Yea the US is far behind other countries with regard to passenger rail service. A friend who thought Amtrak was fast got blown away when she rode the Shinkansen for the first time.
freeopinion 1298 days ago [-]
Osaka to Tokyo on Shinkansen is ~500km and takes over 3 hours.
Los Angeles to Las Vegas on Amtrak is ~500km and takes over 7 hours.
Oh, except that you don't finish in Las Vegas. You finish in Kingman, AZ (more that 160km from Las Vegas) because that's as close as you can get with Amtrak.
The Shinkansen is travelling through significantly populated areas on the trip. Amtrak is travelling through a barren desert.
fomine3 1298 days ago [-]
Osaka to Tokyo is about 2.5 hours if you use fastest Shinkansen.
kevindong 1299 days ago [-]
> the Twin Cities-Chicago market is definitely a route that deserves better service
For reference, the distance between Minneapolis and Chicago is about 400 miles.
If the Amtrak schedule [0] is strictly adhered to, the travel time is ~7.75 hours. Current prices are ~$116 roundtrip.
Google Maps says the estimated time by car (assuming no traffic) is ~6.25 hours. At ~30 miles/gallon at $2/gallon, the cost of a roundtrip for just gas would be ~$53.
A roundtrip, non-stop flight lasting ~1.5 hours each way can be had for ~$80~$175 with the passenger's choice of at least 10 distinct flights/3 separate airlines.
I like rail. But it's clear that there's not a market fit for rail between Minneapolis and Chicago without massive subsidies. A car is faster and cheaper. A plane is much faster and about the same price. Both car and planes are strictly more convenient.
It's fun that nobody ever includes the cost of the Interstate Highway System into these throwaway calculations, as if the roads just magically appeared and are maintained by faeries. As if the roads, car companies, and the airlines aren't "massively subsidized" with energy (fuel and corn->ethanol) subsidies.
We spent half a trillion dollars building the IHS over five decades, and have historically thrown at least a few billion a year at US oil producers - is it really surprising to anyone that driving is cheap? We keep bailing out the airline industry repeatedly - we already gave them $25 billion in grants this year because of the coronavirus, and they're still asking for more.
But, dare we build an alternative to those systems, one that could be more ecologically and financially sound? Nope, too busy feeding our sunk cost industries. Keep blaming Amtrak for being terrible while refusing to give them their own run of rails so they don't constantly get stuck behind freighter traffic. Keep shuting down High Speed Rail projects around the country because the billionaires don't want it in their back yards.
supportlocal4h 1298 days ago [-]
I am often guilty of ignoring real costs of car travel. You didn't even mention the purchase price of the car which is included in the rail ticket. Or the rest of the $0.55/mile in tire maintenance, insurance, oil changes, battery replacement, etc.
jandrese 1298 days ago [-]
For a personal calculation it is a moot point. You're paying the taxes to maintain those roads even if you take the train or a plane.
A true market based solution would be to make all major roads toll roads and use the funds collected to maintain said roads. With EZ-Pass/SmartTag/etc... this could be practical. The problem with toll roads is that local governments tend to use them as a piggybank so you end up with poorly maintained expensive road.
LargoLasskhyfv 1297 days ago [-]
While this looks good at first sight, it reminds me of robbery, wegelagerei/highwayman when thinking longer about it. I mean you need roads anyways, always, if only for emergency- and utility services. Are they exempt, priced in?
What about bicyclists? Will there even be roads accessible to bicyclists between cities in such a system? Or can they simply fuck off, because no market for it? What about freedom of movement?
pg_bot 1299 days ago [-]
We raise ~36 Billion dollars in fuel taxes per annum. That's why no one complains about the Interstate Highway System, it pays for itself.
From the American Road and Transportation Builders Association, hardly a negative source about highways: https://www.artba.org/about/faq/
> Highways: The FAST Act provides $45.3 billion for highway and bridge improvements in FY 2019 (the fiscal year from Oct. 1, 2018 through Sept. 30, 2019) and grows this amount to $46.4 billion by FY 2020. Most federal highway investment is used to upgrade and maintain the nation’s core highways, including the Interstate Highway System, and to repair and replace deficient bridges.
> An additional $3.4 billion was provided for highway and bridge investments as part of the final FY 2019 spending bills signed into law Feb. 15, 2019.
> Since 2008, revenues to the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) have been insufficient to fully support the level of federal highway and transit investment authorized by Congress. Prior to enactment of the FAST Act, the annual investment gap was nearly $15 billion. Congress has not increased the federal motor fuels tax since 1993, but federal highway and public transportation spending has grown substantially over the last 26 years. It should surprise no one that holding the trust fund’s inflow of revenues constant while attempting to address the nation’s growing transportation needs would lead to an unsustainable situation.
It is quite clear that even just the Interstates do not "pay for themselves." There's also the issues with the fuel taxes, namely that motorists are not necessarily the only ones paying those taxes, and in addition to the depreciating value from a flat fee not tracking inflation, the value of the tax is continuing to diminish as some motorists switch to alternative fuels and others are driving ever more efficient vehicles.
awalton 1299 days ago [-]
Hm, using your own link, I see "Federal aid to highways" totaled at $43,421,077,419, and I see "Total excise taxes" at $42,329,411,402. I do a subtraction and I see a $1,091,666,017 deficit. Seems to suggest that, in fact, the Highway System does not pay for itself, but rather we pay for it, no? (It get worse if I just use gasoline taxes and ignore the rest.)
I also see no mention to climate impact anywhere. $36 billion dollars of gas taxes at 18.3 cents per gallon suggests sales of nearly 200 billion gallons of gasoline were burned. That's a hell of a lot of climate damage that everyone's being forced to pay for.
So, you were saying about us not subsidizing the IHS?
pg_bot 1298 days ago [-]
The budget for the highway system is managed by the Highway Trust Fund. The trust fund had been solvent until 2008, but has since needed additional funding to meet outlays. Prior to that the system had been working as outlined in the Federal Aid Highway Act of 1956. So yes the taxpayer has been subsidizing the highways for the last 12 years.
So the system is broken, but it has a simple fix, just raise the gas tax. We haven't done that since 1993 and it isn't indexed to inflation. This is something that should have been fixed years ago, but alas I don't control congress.
If you want to go even further and discuss the environmental impact, again the solution is more taxes.
skolsuper 1298 days ago [-]
Your simple fix would change the calculus when comparing road & rail travel, which I think is the point of the person you were disagreeing with.
pc86 1298 days ago [-]
Which is a fair argument, but using the current math it's about half the cost of rail. So even if you need to increase the gas tax in order to "make it pay for itself," you're absolutely not going to do that so much so that you double the cost.
It's hard to make an argument that rail is cheaper than driving without getting into a lot of mental gymnastics, and I really like taking the train when able.
skolsuper 1298 days ago [-]
I don't think "cars cost more than just the price of gas" is mental gymnastics, but an exact $ figure we can all agree on will be tough.
Once they become a thing, the price of an autonomous taxi between the cities should approach the real amortized cost of road travel.
bobthepanda 1298 days ago [-]
Inflation-indexing might help for a bit but there are longer term issues on the horizon.
Namely, as fuel efficiency increases and some drivers switch to alternative fuels, people will need less gas for the same amount of driving.
ceejayoz 1298 days ago [-]
> So the system is broken, but it has a simple fix, just raise the gas tax.
Given the latency on legislatively fixing things in the USA these days, any work at fixing stuff now should probably include the likelihood of a major shift to non-gas vehicles in the next couple decades.
riffic 1299 days ago [-]
conveniently ignoring the external costs of driving.
pc86 1298 days ago [-]
And the external costs of rail.
topkai22 1299 days ago [-]
Gas cost isn’t a great stand in for car trip prices, as there are a plenty of other costs to drivers.
The IRS per mileage reimbursement rate is 57.5 cents per mile, putting the “real” cost to an 800 mile roundtrip around $400.
A different stand in might be the per mile rate I can get from a rental company, which is often around 20 cents a mile. That would be $160 in other costs + the $53 in gas $213.
Now, people chronically underestimate the cost of driving (and many of them are fixed costs) so the “competitiveness” of rail doesn’t really change, but IMO we shouldn’t just look at gas costs for automobile transport.
DiogenesKynikos 1299 days ago [-]
In Germany, the state rail company (Deutsche Bahn) tries to address this problem by selling rail discount cards.
The idea is that people only take into account fuel costs when considering driving. They don't typically take into account capital costs like depreciation. So the DB sells a 250 Euro card that gives you a 50% discount on tickets for a year. The card creates an artificial sunk cost, and lowers the marginal cost of taking the train, making it more comparable with driving.
NanoCoaster 1298 days ago [-]
> So the DB sells a 250 Euro card that gives you a 50% discount on tickets for a year.
A nitpick that's so small as to almost be irrelevant: For people up to (and including) the age of 26, it's actually 60€/year. This makes going by train a financially pretty attractive travel method.
kuschku 1298 days ago [-]
Or even the 100, which retails at 3878€ (2nd class)/6560€ (1st class) a year and allows pretty much unlimited travel, forever, everywhere.
vinay427 1298 days ago [-]
The SBB equivalent is Switzerland is even cheaper! 165-185 CHF/year (a bit lower in EUR) and now it's cheaper for younger passengers, which means many people get it without really thinking about it because it almost inevitably pays back even with many local transport tickets or certainly intercity travel. A few trips from Zurich to Geneva would mostly or completely offset the cost depending on your ticket.
pdonis 1298 days ago [-]
> people chronically underestimate the cost of driving (and many of them are fixed costs)
Once someone has paid the fixed cost of owning a car, that cost is sunk and shouldn't be factored into calculations for individual trips. The only thing that matters at that point is marginal cost.
For public transportation to be competitive, the overall public transportation system has to provide a level of service that makes it feasible for many people to not own a car at all. For example, having great inter-city train service doesn't help if I need a car to get to the train station. If I have to own the car anyway, and the marginal cost of driving is lower than the marginal cost of taking the train, I'm going to drive.
In most European countries, the overall public transportation system does provide this level of service. In most places in the US, it doesn't. A significant part of the reason for that is simply that people in Europe and people in the US have a different mix of preferences. Many more people in the US do not want to live in population dense areas that can support a public transportation system that makes it feasible to not own a car. (I'm one of them: I have lived in population dense areas and I know from experience that I prefer not to.)
lotsofpulp 1298 days ago [-]
These too are just the financial costs of driving, they don’t account for the long term environmental costs.
leoedin 1298 days ago [-]
This is a chicken and egg problem.
Of course there's hardly any demand for a slow, expensive and often late service which only runs once a day. It's not useful.
A journey I do often in the UK is London to Edinburgh by train. The distance is almost the same (400 miles). London is a bit bigger than Chicago (12 million metro vs ~8 million metro) but then the Twin Cities are quite a lot larger than Edinburgh (1 million metro vs ~4 million metro).
However, the track has been improved, is at least doubled the whole way and has significant portions at 125 mph. As a result the journey takes just over 4 hours. If the trains are more than 1 hour late you get all your money back.
On an average weekday there's 41 trains travelling each way between those cities. And many of them are full. They're constantly doing improvements to try and increase the number of trains travelling.
I understand it's a different situation - the result of decades of political apathy towards railways. But I think it's important to understand that the Amtrak situation doesn't have to be the way it is. There's not an inherent lack of demand for fast, regular train services between major cities.
biztos 1298 days ago [-]
Berlin to Frankfurt is also 4 (ICE) to 7 (IC) hours, and has a bunch of trains every day, and in my experience (pre-Covid) was usually pretty full when I took it.
Lots of countries have good rail service that people actively choose over cars or planes between major cities. I find it maddening that my own country can't bring itself to really want that.
BrianHenryIE 1299 days ago [-]
> A car is faster and cheaper.
I don't own a car and never learned to drive. What's my upfront cost before the $53 incremental cost?
Car ownership begets car ownership.
AAA says car ownership costs $8,558 per year. I'd have a hard time spending that much on public transport.
The linked article clearly states that number only applies to new car ownership. For reference, I have a 20 year old vehicle which I own outright, runs great, and drive maybe 6k miles a year. I usually bike and/or walk to work (or did, before COVID.)
Buy a used car and do your due diligence before purchasing.
Not sure what state they're using for license, tax, and registration. I pay less than $100 a year for that.
Maintenance is about right and can be lower, especially if you don't buy junk.
My insurance is lower than that, but that's a perk of my state.
I fill up maybe once every three weeks, so my fuel usage is way lower than that.
It'll probably go to the scrap yard once I'm done, and this thing was worth around maybe $3k when I bought it some years ago.
All in all, I'm sitting somewhere around $2000 a year for my car. Totally worth having.
Just be smart about it. Cars are very useful to have.
emiliobumachar 1298 days ago [-]
You listed a lot of ways to pay in time and energy instead of cash.
(Disclaimer: I own a car)
pc86 1298 days ago [-]
The only thing I see in the list that takes time is doing due diligence when buying a used car, which isn't really a reason not to buy a car. You should be doing a little research for any $10k+ purchase, I would think.
aww_dang 1299 days ago [-]
Also consider the health benefits and reduced medical costs if your lifestyle includes bicycling or walking.
sushshshsh 1299 days ago [-]
until someone hits you with their car or you catch pneumonia from cycling in february
lmm 1299 days ago [-]
All-cause mortality is significantly lower for cyclists. Yes, motorists do kill a lot of people, but in the big picture they're still less dangerous than a sedentary lifestyle.
evgen 1298 days ago [-]
Motorists kill more motorists than they do cyclists. Did your car calculation include the odds of getting hit by some other moron in a car while you were driving to your destination?
aww_dang 1299 days ago [-]
As a former bike messenger, I can't relate to this kind of fear mongering.
Winter biking is enjoyable when you dress properly for the weather and use spiked tires.
Then you are doing it wrong. Where does one catch pneumonia from driving in the cold?
sushshshsh 1299 days ago [-]
I agree with you but there's no way the number is that high. My used car cost $3,000 and for three years the total cost of service has been less than $600. Add in $300 per year of insurance and you're looking at a yearly cost of $1,500 tops
throwaway0a5e 1298 days ago [-]
> What's my upfront cost before the $53 incremental cost?
$400ish (get lucky on a $250 "ran when parked" car, pay by month for insurance and live in a low tax state) on up.
>AAA says car ownership costs $8,558 per year
They say it costs that on average. That's very different from the floor or baseline cost which seems to be what you're implying.
mlavin 1298 days ago [-]
>$250 "ran when parked" car
How to get an absolute hooptie sitting in your driveway waiting for replacement parts.
throwaway0a5e 1298 days ago [-]
I said "lucky" for a reason.
If you can't source parts in this day and age it's not the car's fault. Anything made in the last 30yr you can readily get service parts for. What you can't get at the parts store are interior trim and non-wearing suspension items that are specific to a narrow range of vehicles (also true for new cars) but if you expect to keep the interior of a bottom dollar car in tip top shape you're out of your mind. The internet makes finding everything that isn't a normal wear item super quick and easy but you're gonna have to wait 24-96hr to get it.
qiqitori 1299 days ago [-]
Hrm. If the average car lasts 200,000 miles, then 800 miles is 0.4% of that, and if the car cost $30000, that alone is $120.
Just some food for thought -- of course, if you have passengers it'll quickly be worth it even if you decide to factor in this kind of calculation.
throwaway0a5e 1298 days ago [-]
That analysis is incomplete because any car that gets used at all ages by time as well as by mileage. The car is going to depreciate and degrade on a similar timeline regardless of how much you use it. Keeping miles off just changes the shape of the depreciation function.
pc86 1298 days ago [-]
At the end of a car's expected life, absolutely. But compare a two otherwise-identical 2016 or 2017 models, one with 30k miles and one with 120k miles.
throwaway0a5e 1298 days ago [-]
And ~8yr from now the depreciation functions for both those will intersect.
The only difference is depreciation now vs later.
ghaff 1298 days ago [-]
That's true especially in regions where there's salt on the road in the winter. But depreciation is usually a lot more mileage-based than time based.
WhompingWindows 1298 days ago [-]
There are a ton of subsidies at play behind these numbers. Cars and planes get the massive subsidies of non-taxed externalities due to carbon emissions and air pollution, for instance.
There's a lack of long-term policy here: do we want to be in a society in 20-30 years that's still using personal cars to do that journey, when a high speed rail would be much more efficient and pleasant? If a true high speed rail were enabled, that 400 mile trip might take 3 hours instead of 6-8 for other modes of transit, and it would incur less negative externalities to boot.
I'm all for individuals making informed decisions in the short term, while government and society should be taking long-term steps to promote the health of the commons as well.
codingdave 1298 days ago [-]
The core use cases that the long-haul Amtrak solves are not day trips between large cities. You are right, there are other solutions for those.
But Amtrak is the best fit for multi-day trips across the entire country for people who cannot fly. Amtrak also solves transportation for travelling directly from small rural towns to the large cities, and sometimes even from one rural town to another. It is the safest way to get across mountain ranges in the depth of winter (although not the fastest).
It doesn't solve every problem, and it does need subsidies, and it always runs late... nevertheless, it connects rural Americans to the large cities in ways that city folk don't even realize.
paul_f 1298 days ago [-]
With a car, you can go point to point. With a train, you have to arrange transportation to the station on both ends. Also, you can leave when you want, you don't have to time your travel with the train or plane schedule or worry about delays and cancellations. To me, up to 6 hours, a car almost always makes sense. Above 6, usually a plane. Rarely does a train beat out both alternatives.
pc86 1298 days ago [-]
The only time I've found the train beneficial for me is rural/suburban -> urban travel, where the train ride itself is about 3 hours. I live in the middle of nowhere and have gone to NYC via train many times. The train is about 20 minutes longer than driving, I don't have to drive in NYC, and I can park at the rural train station for $5/day. Now granted that could very easily go out the window if there are strict time constraints around when I can travel, and I end up driving because I can leave when I need to, and it's actually faster.
Agreed though that car or plane beats train 99% of the time.
pantalaimon 1298 days ago [-]
It doesn’t have to be this slow or expensive.
A sprinter train from Berlin to Munich, which is a similar distance, takes a bit less than 4h, non Sprinter is 1h more with Tickets starting at 17.50€
w-m 1298 days ago [-]
But this starting price can be had only if you book way in advance. If you hop on the train from Berlin to Munich today, it will set you back between 93€ and 135€.
Helps to find cheap tickets, so when you are somewhat flexible you can still travel for cheap.
Phobophobia 1299 days ago [-]
There are a lot of great counter arguments to what you said, but as someone who is from the Twin Cities and studied in Chicago, I'd recheck each trip and always go car or plane. Often I could car pool, and splitting with one person made zero interest with going train. Train should be easy and way more competitive than it is.
smabie 1299 days ago [-]
The cost of tolls, gas, depreciation per mile, depreciation time, monetary risk of accident, and etc could definitely make driving less economical than taking the train.
adrianN 1299 days ago [-]
Unfortunately car owners tend to ignore depreciation and risks of accidents in their cost estimates, but include comforts like the ability to carry more luggage.
sushshshsh 1299 days ago [-]
What happens when you get to your destination? Do you suddenly just stop needing a car?
WaxProlix 1299 days ago [-]
Alternatively, you pay up to $60/night for the privilege of keeping your car underneath your hotel while you walk or ferry or scooter or even uber your way around your destination.
I'm a car owner but it's stupid expensive and if there were a reasonable alternative I'd stop in a heartbeat.
adrianN 1299 days ago [-]
Flying is pretty popular and cars don't generally fit into the cargo hold of airplanes.
From the 1950s to the 1970s there was a regular service transporting cars by air between the UK and various airports in France, Belgium and the Netherlands. It cost about twice as much as the boat from Dover to Calais.
They initially used Bristol Superfreighters, which were replaced by Aviation Traders Carvairs (converted for the purpose from second-hand Douglas DC-4s). The Carvair could carry 5 cars and 22 passengers- the cars were loaded through a door in the nose.
The "air ferry" service was killed by competition from the new RO-RO car ferries (when it started flying, cars still had to be loaded onto cross-Channel ferries by crane) and especially by the hovercraft service which began in 1968- a crossing by hovercraft with a car didn't cost much more than the conventional ferry while being as fast as the plane. The hovercraft, in turn, stopped being viable because of competition from the car-carrying trains through the Channel Tunnel- it stopped running in 2000.
LargoLasskhyfv 1297 days ago [-]
Rumors have it that there are cities which are actually walkable AND have acceptable public transportation!
Imagine!
ghaff 1298 days ago [-]
The other difference with a car is that, unless you're going downtown to downtown, you may need a car on the other end anyway.
One of the reasons I always take a train to Manhattan is that I not only don't need a car but I hate driving into the city and parking is expensive.
dredmorbius 1298 days ago [-]
That applies equally to air travel.
I've heard Uber and Lyft are popular.
Cities and regions built with density, walkability, bikability, and transit in mind avoid or greatly reduce this problem.
ghaff 1298 days ago [-]
You can take limos/taxis for multi-hour drives but I expect that's relatively rare.
I'm about 200 miles from NY and actually backtrack to take the train. But I'm still guessing that an Uber (if I could get one) would be a a good 2x the train and a private car even more.
Some areas make it easier to get around other than in an auto than others. Of course, I'm often going somewhere out in the suburbs of a city anyway.
dredmorbius 1298 days ago [-]
Uber or Lyft would provide local point-to-point transport once at the long-haul destination.
If you're making extended or multi-stop day or multi-day trips at a destination, you no longer have a simple long-haul transport need. A local car hire, group tour bus, bicycle rental, transporting your own bike, or similar arrangement could satisfy this.
Boeing 737s and Airbus A330s would be equally or more handicapped under such circumstances, though a Cesna or comparable bush plane might be appropriate in some regions.
hvs 1298 days ago [-]
A lot of people are pointing out that you are only including gas costs, but they are also ignoring the fact that cars get you precisely where you want to go. Trains only get you into the city you are going.
scatters 1298 days ago [-]
Cars get you to the nearest parking lot to where you want to go. Depending on the city, that could be further away than the nearest metro or rail station to your destination.
yourapostasy 1298 days ago [-]
Once I got above a threshold compensation package where my time became far more valuable than occupying it with attention-grabbing activities around driving and flying, I came to appreciate trains. I can see how this calculus can change yet again back to valuing money more than freed-up time when one has a family though, if one were strictly evaluating as homo economicus: non-working spouses and children can add significantly to travel costs. However, I've frequently seen families prefer train travel for the time spent together it engenders, with one challenge being coordinating travel logistics once at the destination while wrangling children (ride sharing has alleviated that, I'm sure).
On the super-long transcontinental trips, apparently the cell reception with the right gear on trains is much better than when I rode half the country westward many years ago. That makes the train travel mode even more valuable to me if I'm not on a tight schedule and the seating arrangement enables me to look forward to getting work done.
What prevents me from using trains more than I do is the demands of many clients upon my time. Not quite lucrative enough for me to justify a satellite data link, but if my financial picture improves by many orders of magnitude, a digital nomadic life with a private railcar set towing shipping container footprint custom structures as a "home base" that I operate vehicles from would be an enjoyable way to my mind to get deeply into locales, while staying in touch with the Net and maintaining full fabrication capabilities with me.
briffle 1298 days ago [-]
The Obama Administration tried to build high speed rail from Chicago to Madison, WI. It was supposed to be the first segment that would eventually extend to the twin cities. They have $700M dedicated to it. Then WI had an election for governor, and the incoming Republican (Scott Walker) managed to somehow conflate high speed inter-city rail with 'light rail' and scrapped it. He claimed it was too expensive, since the state would have to spend $7Million or so each year for their part of the maintenance (even though the feds were going to fully fund construction). After Scrapping it, the State then had to pay $90Million to upgrade the tracks between Chicago and Milwaukee (that was going to be paid for) and then had to pay $40M for the high speed Talgo Trains. Plus, Talgo moved their US headquarters from Milwaukee to Chicago.
yellowbkpk 1298 days ago [-]
Interestingly, it wasn't the Obama administration that tried to build the high speed rail. It was the Republican governor of Wisconsin (Tommy Thompson) that pushed for it. Scott Walker used it as a wedge to split the electorate and win the election. Wisconsin Public Radio did a great podcast about it here: https://www.wpr.org/derailed/wisconsins-high-speed-rail-saga...
jackschultz 1298 days ago [-]
We could really need the Milwaukee to Chicago train up to speed. I'm in Milwaukee and would go to a Chicago office twice a week on that train and it just got tough with 1:30 each way. The train is packed too, where on the way back in the evening, people can be standing because not enough seats. Higher speed, like cutting it down to :45 or :50, would mean a ton. The problem is the value of that isn't able to be calculated and in pretty much all infrastructure cases, it gets purely political.
gbronner 1298 days ago [-]
The route is seriously dumb -- goes straight to Milwaukee and then south, versus going directly through Madison. Badger bus already does MSN-MKE cheaply and quickly, and there's almost no chance that this routing could ever be time-efficient versus the direct route.
The route in Madison was supposed to go to Monona Terrace, which is singularly inconvenient for most people, limiting the catchment basin. Getting out of Madison requires huge numbers of grade crossings, limiting speed, and disrupting traffic.
So this route was never going to be anything other than a slow drain on the treasury, and SW wisely killed it.
beisner 1299 days ago [-]
FWIW when driving, tolls along that route are roughly $10 each way... and that's low for the midwest.
waterheater 1299 days ago [-]
Tolls are actually around $5.50 one way, and they're only in Chicago. You can bypass tolls by taking 41 through Chicagoland and add maybe 15 minutes to the total drive time. No tolls once you're in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
vxNsr 1299 days ago [-]
so that's worth about $10 more for a grand total of ~$63 for the trip
PaulDavisThe1st 1299 days ago [-]
Depending on whether you fly into O'Hare or Midway, you've got a significant or a somewhat significant journey into Chicago after you land. This doesn't negate your point, but needs to be taken into account for city-to-city service.
bluGill 1298 days ago [-]
Depends on where you go. The arrival is written by someone who lives near the airport in Minneapolis and had to drive (or?) a considerable distance to the train station.
stickfigure 1299 days ago [-]
I don't know if the the schedules are better out east, but here in CA the Amtrak schedules are wildly optimistic. Like, double the listed travel time. And they run infrequently, at odd hours.
CalRobert 1298 days ago [-]
Surely this calculation is incomplete without considering depreciation. Also, it makes sense to consider a portion of the cost of the insurance, maintenance, etc. towards the vehicle cost.
halfmatthalfcat 1298 days ago [-]
Chicago - Indianapolis is also another route that would benefit both cities immensely.
wpm 1298 days ago [-]
And Chicago - Milwaukee. We used to have a train that ran as often as the CTA that you could hop on on the Union Loop downtown that would take you to Milwaukee. Now? You still see some people commuting on the Hiawatha but there's still only 9 of those a day.
PaulHoule 1298 days ago [-]
People born in the last 50 years have no idea of the anger and resentment that Americans had towards railroad companies, immortalized by the use of the word "railroaded" in slang.
Back in the day the railroad would go right past your town, refuse to build a stop, buy the land along the tracks a few miles away, build a stop, and then start a new town there.
Cher had a monologue in the 1990 movie "Mermaids" where she talked about the feeling of freedom she had from getting in her car and that feeling can be best appreciated by understanding the way that pre-WWII Americans felt about taking the train. Today a car payment, insurance and all that feel like a millstone at your neck, but back then you could get in a new car and smell the freedom. That generation knew what it was like for somebody who could care less what you think to decide when and where you go.
dredmorbius 1298 days ago [-]
That resentment has less to do with anything inherent to rail than it does to a ruthlessly-run monopoly. In which light there are numerous analogous examples present in other examples.
Some decades back I spent some time listening to a denizen of flyover country speak with still-simmering anger of how the Interstate, already a couple of decades old, had bypassed his town, drying up local highway traffic and decimating local business.
Today, airlines are recalibrating expense-revenue models and determining what routes remain profitable. Telecoms monopolies try to provide the minimum viablequantum of service --- theoretical and net bandwidth, latency, and reliability --- for a given subscriber rate. Disruptions in live-work patterns tend to bugger this.
Any connections or network-based sector is subject to this, especially in private hands; transport, communications, trade (bulk cargo, wholesale, retail), energy distribution, utility services, information, broadcast, etc.
PaulHoule 1298 days ago [-]
You are so right about private networks.
What's interesting about highways is that they produce a politically durable coalition around a combination of public ownership of the roads and private ownership of the cars.
Psychologically there is a double dose of the "feeling of ownership" because "we all" perceive the roads belong to us (e.g. a socialist feeling of camaraderie) but we also have a sunk cost in a vehicle we own that is tied to feelings of "I've somebody special because I drive a special car and such".
In contrast, investments in public transit are seeing as benefiting "special interests" in most places, except in California where normally skinflint taxpayers are notorious for ballot initiatives to fund public transit that they don't actually use.
dredmorbius 1298 days ago [-]
"Politically durable coalition" is an excellent point. Morever it's got additional aspects, including commodity excise tax (fuel) which clearly benefits the taxed sector (petroleum companies) by funding a key element of demand creation (highways), and is largely passed on to purchasers (inelastic demand).
I'd noted a few years back that a chief problem in governance, or management, isn't simply creating necessary and effective regulatory institutions, but resiliant ones, most especially to subversion attempts from within the organisation or government itself.
Politically durable coalitions are certainly one such mechanism.
sjsamson 1296 days ago [-]
Great points about public vs private owned networks, private competition at “higher layers in the stack” of a publicly owned network, and building a durable political coalition around that. I’ve been on this train as it were for many years, but building that durable political coalition is a really difficult thing.
In the US, rail is the only form of transportation that mostly privately owned. Whereas the other forms of transportation infrastructure are publicly owned and maintained as a common good: roads, airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC), and maritime infrastructure (seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS)). Ideally the US should do the same for its rail infrastructure. This is what Europe is pursuing, publicly owning and investing the infrastructure, and allowing multiple competitors to operate on top.
Much the American political hostility to rail stems the monopolistic practices of privately owned railroads. Central Pacific, which built the Western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad, was founded by the Big 4, which included Leland Stanford, Governor and US Senator in the early days of California statehood, and of course founder of the University. They merged with another railroad they owned in Southern Pacific, later referred to as The Octopus, with tentacles that reached to every corner of the state and dominated California transportation and politics.
The solution to this problem is to bring the railroads under public ownership, not destroy the railroad with subsidized competition from public roads. The consequences of this have been enormous. The US once had over 300,000 route miles of railroad at its peak. Today it has ~147,000 route miles, less than half of its peak. The US National Highway System is ~160,000 route miles by comparison. Many communities lost rail service entirely. Even a rural agricultural state like Iowa, almost 90% farmland, was completely criss-crossed by railroads to an extent that no location in the state was more than 12 miles from a rail line. Today only a fraction of that rail network survives.
It is hard imagine something like this happening to other forms of publicly owned transportation infrastructure, because of that durable political coalition. People would not accept half of all roads or airports being abandoned because they are not nominally profitable. It is considered a common good provided for by the state.
pdonis 1298 days ago [-]
> investments in public transit are seeing as benefiting "special interests" in most places
Perhaps that's because they do?
In the subject article there is a link to another article on the author's site about intercity rail in Minnesota, in which I find the following interesting fact:
"Like most states, Minnesota had a large intercity rail network operated by private freight railroads. With the formation of Amtrak in 1971 this large system was reduced to a skeletal system of just a few routes, and then just one after 1985."
It never seems to occur to the author that perhaps Amtrak is the cause of the problems he sees, rather than the solution to them.
lucideer 1298 days ago [-]
Is it possible the forces that are causing the demise of trains today are the same forces that caused the derision toward trains 50 years ago?
nahuel0x 1298 days ago [-]
Imagine a zero emissions electrical vehicle with no batteries at all, much more easily automatable than cars, infinitely safer and can be used for medium and long distances. Looks like a Tesla pipe dream, right? Now imagine a complete transportation grid using these and add public individual vehicles for last mile transportation.
Trains are the rational future, they were before, but irrational market forces are against them.
analyte123 1298 days ago [-]
Trains can also be used to mandate development patterns. If you build roads through an area, then people can build houses (or slash-and-burn forest) anywhere and they know they'll have transport. But with rail, significant development will only occur near stations. This is a big problem in the Amazon; imagine if Brazil built trains instead of roads.
AlgorithmicTime 1298 days ago [-]
So your argument for trains is that they centralize power and control? Seems more like an argument AGAINST trains.
nsgi 1298 days ago [-]
Except they don't usually take you where you want to go, and they're not zero emissions because very few lines in the US are electrified
wpm 1298 days ago [-]
They're lower emissions than cars, per capita.
pc86 1298 days ago [-]
Unless you care at all about how long it takes you to get somewhere.
I've taken the train from central Pennsylvania to NYC several times. It's great, but it's also a hike and not something you want to do for anything shorter than a long weekend (4 days is perfect, especially if you can do Fri-Mon as the Sunday train is usually very full). I did it once for a Sat/Sun trip and you just spend too much time on the train watching a movie or staring out the window.
calaphos 1298 days ago [-]
But that's not inherent to the mode of transportation. In germany (and generally in Europe) taking the train is often a bit faster (~20%) than by car - assuming no traffic. Of course this doesn't apply to rural regions, but between most cities trains run every 1h.
And the train network in germany isn't even very good.
LargoLasskhyfv 1297 days ago [-]
Around the year 2000+/-2 that was my daily experience on the track from Hagen in Westfalen(near Dortmund) to Cologne or Düsseldorf. When it went over the Autobahn there was always gridlock. I noticed that mostly out of the corners of my eyes, while reading Tipler's Physics, Stryer's Biochemistry, Albert's Molecular Biology of the Cell, or other sciency stuff like that, comfortably munching something and sipping coffee. Hopping into some bus, tram, subway for another 10 to 20 minutes, arriving relaxed and fit.
rsynnott 1298 days ago [-]
> And the train network in germany isn't even very good.
It's all relative :) Coming from Ireland (where intercity is still diesel with max speeds around 160km/h, and average speeds far worse), ICE kind of seems like magic.
pc86 1298 days ago [-]
It's inherent to the current state of US rail, though.
kevstev 1298 days ago [-]
A lot of this seems like a policy issue though- Why do trains only top out around 60mph? There is no technical limitation that I know of that would prevent them from going faster in most places. Giving them a leg up on cars would induce demand dramatically IMHO.
Its such a better ride as well- I mean I love getting a nice stretch of open road where you can go 60-80mph and such, but the reality of most travel in the northeast is just traffic and congestion and a lot of paying attention to that dude in the SUV who seems like he wants to jump in your lane without so much as a blinker of warning.
We have massively funded our highways, claim that Amtrak is a suck of taxpayer funds and do the bare minimum for it, and then complain about traffic, it's quite irrational.
untog 1298 days ago [-]
That's because trains in the US are incredibly slow. There is nothing inherent in train travel the requires it to be that way.
If you visit a country that actually invests in train travel you'll see it's a fast, convenient way to get around. The most underrated aspect, IMO, is that it's not a hike: the train stations are slap bang in the middle of every city. That's even true in the US, it's just the rails between the cities that let the whole thing down.
jdminhbg 1298 days ago [-]
> I've taken the train from central Pennsylvania to NYC several times. It's great, but it's also a hike and not something you want to do for anything shorter than a long weekend
From where in Central PA? It's definitely the fastest way to get into downtown NYC from anywhere between Philly and Harrisburg.
pc86 1298 days ago [-]
I checked Lancaster->NYC on Google Maps and Amtrak and it looks like Amtrak is about 30 minutes longer on a ~3 hour trip, depending on the exact train. Traffic on Maps may be playing with those numbers though.
jdminhbg 1298 days ago [-]
I see 12:41 pm -> 3:20 pm from Lancaster to Penn Station, which is 2:39, and Apple Maps is giving me 2:40 for the same drive, so nearly exactly the same. Of course, this is under Covid, when Amtrak is reducing service and there's far less traffic into NYC than usual.
There are lots of places in the US where the train is a huge time sink, it's just that in my experience, getting into NYC is one of the few where it's much faster and more convenient.
rsynnott 1298 days ago [-]
In most developed countries, this sort of route would be covered by high-speed rail.
gbronner 1299 days ago [-]
Comment section will bring out the foamers, but consider:
There's demand for service from mpls to Chicago, but it would have to be much faster- at 3 hours it would be competitive. That would require massive rail investment, and would basically create a new railroad next to the existing one, as fast passenger and slow freight don't mix. This is probably not cost effective. A nice bus gets you better service with lower capital expenditures.
West of mpls, the train drags 200k lb sleeping cars along with lounge and diner cars for only a handful of passengers. Swedish and Russian railways pack 6 to a compartment; Amtrak struggles with 2. No way this is cost effective or a good use of capital.
Deregulate the fra rules, allow electric buses on the rails (and eliminate the crazily overbuilt rail standards), and you might get real innovation and a competitive product...
DominikPeters 1298 days ago [-]
> Swedish and Russian railways pack 6 to a compartment; Amtrak struggles with 2.
But there are two roommettes side by side. Both European and Amtrak cars have a length of ~26m. An Amtrak Superliner sleeping car can sleep up to 44 people. A sleeper as used by Austria’s ÖBB can sleep 12*3=36 people. A 3rd class Russian sleeping car holds 54 [https://www.vagonweb.cz/razeni/vlak.php?zeme=%D0%91%D0%A7&ka...]. Comparable.
herbstein 1298 days ago [-]
I used an older generation of that third class Russian carriage design last year. Biggest problem is the length of the benches and the noise. It's not like it was _great_ but for a dirt-cheap cross-country train ticket in Ukraine I expected a whole lot worse.
gbronner 1298 days ago [-]
54 sleeper car actually can be full. Basically no way to fill the Amtrak car, as people don't like to share the bedrooms.
Russian trains used to have 3 bunks, which improved the economics.
mschuster91 1298 days ago [-]
> and would basically create a new railroad next to the existing one, as fast passenger and slow freight don't mix
Why not make freight fast, too?
> A nice bus gets you better service with lower capital expenditures
A bus can accomodate 80 people per driver, a train (German ICE) 750 seats+750 people standing. Sure, a bus is cheaper in upfront investment, but has higher operation expenses, is way slower and is worse for the environment. Additionally, buses get caught in traffic jams while railways are generally separate.
> allow electric buses on the rails
What? Why? And how should this be secured?!
> and eliminate the crazily overbuilt rail standards
These standards were written in the blood of thousands of people who died or were severely maimed in accidents.
ceejayoz 1298 days ago [-]
> These standards were written in the blood of thousands of people who died or were severely maimed in accidents.
So were the European standards. They just tackled accident prevention more than accident survivability as the engineering goal.
> But FRA rules had required significant design changes. Most important, American train cars had to be built to withstand 800,000 pounds of frontal impact. Former Amtrak CEO David Gunn complained U.S. trains had to be designed like “high-velocity bank vaults.” Rather than just bulk up, European and Asian trains instead are designed to absorb impacts and avoid collisions in the first place. And they have better safety records.
mschuster91 1298 days ago [-]
> Rather than just bulk up, European and Asian trains instead are designed to absorb impacts and avoid collisions in the first place. And they have better safety records.
There is a total lack of information why that route was taken in the 1920s, so I'm going to take a wild guess... in Europe, the train routes, especially for fast trains, are completely separated, often outright walled off, and level crossings with streets totally eliminated. In the US, you have a country that is many, many times bigger and widely un- or sparsely populated, which means that there is a lot more danger to trains from stuff that ends up on the tracks as it's infeasible to build a wall that long.
Herds of animals, heavy trucks/tractors ending up on the tracks of a crossing - that is something that I expect to be pretty much routine in the US, and it makes sense to build trains that can simply plow through such impediments.
LargoLasskhyfv 1297 days ago [-]
While that may be true, I think there is another cultural and/or regulatory issue at play here, though I can't put my finger at it exactly.
In the USA everything on rails is Danger! Danger! and has to be signaled as such, even if it's only a tram servicing downtown. It has to Ring! Ding! Ding! all the times.
I'd go crazy if having to live near anything like that.
throwaway0a5e 1298 days ago [-]
>Why not make freight fast, too?
Money. Most goods need to be on schedule, not fast. More speed costs more money.
>These standards were written in the blood of thousands of people who died or were severely maimed in accidents.
The standards were also written for a world who's conditions were very different from those of today.
I know that you can score easy virtue points by pretending like any rollback of regulation that is intended to protect something is a bad thing but let's be real here. With modern signaling infrastructure there's no reason that dedicated passenger rail can't be equally safe or safer than legacy passenger rail that has to be interoperable with legacy signaling systems and freight rail.
dredmorbius 1298 days ago [-]
Fast freight --- say, a unit train of coal or clinker at 110 * 200 tonne cars --- has kinetic energy at the square of speed, posing increased risks to the freight service itself, any shared-road or adjacent-road traffic, level crossings, and structures, property, or natural features boardering tracks, as well as wear and tear on track and rolling stock. These are part of those safety standards you note, among other factors.
High-speed rail demands fully separated rights of way for reasons of route and destination, safety, predictable scheduling, minimum turning radius, and more. Unfortunately in a world of strong land-property rights and interests, this makes it extraordinarily politically vulnerable.
A few years ago I realised that virtually every successful large-scale rail system (both high-speed and earlier "conventional" services) emerged in a largely uncontested land-rights regime. For the 19th century US and British systems, a pre-industrial or pioneer domain in which land owners were few, poor, or both. On completion, the US transcontinental railroad was seen as a boondoggle "road to nowhere", though various "wheres" began springing up along its route nearly immediately.
(Famously, Denver, Colorado, saw a 10x population growth in the decade after a spur line was built to the transcontinental route.)
For Japan and Europe, planning for high-speed fail began following the physical and economic devastation of WWII. Landholders couldn't put up much of a fight.
China's HSR growth resembles that of frontier America and early-industrial Britain, benefitting by a different land-ownership regime.
The most pernicious obstacle to California high-speed rail is Atherton.
gbronner 1298 days ago [-]
>Why not make freight fast, too?
Physics.
Running a freight train at 150 mph requires serious engineering to make sure it can go around the curves well, and wear and tear is immense.
yuliyp 1299 days ago [-]
The Empire Builder is one of those vacation trains. That it actually does something useful between Minnesota and Chicago is basically accidental. Because it's government-run it has to run these completely unprofitable trains.
PaulDavisThe1st 1299 days ago [-]
there are very few trains anywhere in the world that are profitable if "profit" is determined by the balance of cost vs income.
most countries with extensive, speedy and reliable train service measure the "profit" of their systems by considering other measures in addition to these two very simplistic measurements.
presentation 1299 days ago [-]
Here in Japan, JR and the other train operators are extremely profitable, since they also act as developers in the land over their stations, so obviously they build and profit from shopping, apartment and office towers on every station. Which makes sense - you didn’t ride the train just to ride a train, you rode it to go somewhere.
seanmcdirmid 1299 days ago [-]
Many train systems (eg japan) make profit on renting station space, they are actually profitable overall without subsidy, but this is very much like the land grant system used to fund America’s first railroads. Perhaps something like that would work in the USA again
rsynnott 1298 days ago [-]
That's true of intercity trains; metro train systems are sometimes reasonably profitable.
MH15 1299 days ago [-]
There is a thing called a "positive externality". The capitalist class in the United States would do good to remember this when debating the "cost" of public goods.
presentation 1299 days ago [-]
Capitalists can easily justify building trains, if you just let train operators commercialize the land around stations. When you have a literal conveyor belt of customers getting dumped directly into your shopping centers, office complexes and apartment buildings, you can easily make a pretty penny, like how it works in places like HK and Japan where the train systems are very profitable. I always found it bizarre that subway stations in American cities like NYC usually have literally nothing inside or around them.
nickff 1299 days ago [-]
The vast majority of the train system in the USA was built with private money, so it's a poor example of capitalist failure. The fact that passenger trains are unviable in the USA is a product of the distances and the airplane.
adrianN 1299 days ago [-]
Distances in the US are mentioned a lot, but few people actually propose going from NY to SF by train. Moving more people for example in the Northeast Corridor, or in the Bay Area by train is a realistic goal.
evgen 1298 days ago [-]
The vast majority of the train system was built on public land that was provided to those private builders for free. If they had to pay for the land they never would have built in the first place.
bluGill 1298 days ago [-]
That public land was worthless at the time. Without the train nobody wanted it, the train made it valuable to the public.
Things have changed since 1880 of course. However it isn't fair to evaluate it against modern values.
mauvehaus 1298 days ago [-]
> That public land was worthless at the time. Without the train nobody wanted it, the train made it valuable to the public.
To the white people, perhaps. The indigenous population probably would have rather it stayed that way.
bluGill 1298 days ago [-]
Once again we are looking at history with a modern eye. What you say is true, but irrelevant.
trainsawayy 1299 days ago [-]
Aww. I liked it, even though it was clear before the pandemic that it was on the downswing.
Rail travel is just much more relaxing and interesting than air travel. People in an airport act like zombies, but people on a train act like people.
One time, I was on a Empire Builder that got stuck in a freight yard around midnight. The freight company had donated an engine to replace one that had broken on the Amtrak train, but apparently the crew didn't have a key to unlock it.
So we sat in a freight yard for about an hour, with snow gently falling around us. It had been several hours since our last stop, and the passengers started to get restless. 4 hours without a smoke break is considered a mortal sin in Montana.
Eventually, the crew relented and let people out in the freezing snow to smoke on the train tracks, under a litany of disclaimers about trespassing and liability and whatnot.
It was hilarious and surreal. Amtrak felt like a system run by human beings, so it was chronically late and haphazard, but I'll still miss it compared the the sterile almost-competence of modern airports.
uxp100 1298 days ago [-]
I don’t think that’s true that all of empire builder was on a downswing. Before Covid, (and maybe still), empire builder was going to get a second train in each direction daily on the stretch from St Paul to Chicago.
Right now 90% of the route from St. Paul is forbidden from traveling to Chicago.
And dining service was being removed from many routes before Covid, I’m sure that has been accelerated.
PaulDavisThe1st 1299 days ago [-]
Amtrak wants to remove the entire central portion of the Southwest Chief, turning the entire route between Kansas City and Albuquerque into bus service only. This was even before COVID19 happened. God knows what they will plan on doing post-COVID.
reaperducer 1299 days ago [-]
Empire Builder isn't what it should be. I don't know how many times I've taken it between Chicago and Seattle.
Sunset Limited is worse, though. No activities. Fewer showers. And you can't even get your meals brought to your room.
bane 1298 days ago [-]
When I was a teen I was part of a group that did a Washington D.C. to Miami (and back) Amtrak trip. We knew it was going to take longer, but it was about $100 cheaper than flying -- and thought it might be fun to take a long haul train.
It's maybe a 16-20 hour car trip. Less than a 3 hour flight. Amtrak turns it into a 23-24 hour train ride without delays.
We were more than 8 hours delayed getting there, which caused all kinds of havoc with our local transport and accommodations.
This is not in a sparsely populated part of the U.S. It's not the North-East corridor, but it's still pretty heavily populated for most of the run. I swore off trains ever again until many years later my wife thought it would be better to start taking trains around Europe and I finally understood how good they can be. More recently we were in Japan and took the Shinkansen (and a bunch of local trains) all over the country and experienced truly the dream that trains can be. As much of an improvement as the average Eurorail is over Amtrak, Japanese trains are the much of an improvement over Europe. Absolutely incredible.
kalessin 1299 days ago [-]
Too bad, I really enjoy those long distance Amtrak trips, and I can't wait to take the California Zephyr or the Southwest Chief again, but not sure I wanna ride multiple days on Amtrak in the current situation.
I hope service is resumed after the pandemic, I haven't had the chance to take this route yet!
thisisauserid 1298 days ago [-]
I just completed a cross-country Amtrak sleeper-car journey from New York City to Spokane and flew back from there. (I would have continued to Seattle or Portland but everything seemed to be kind of on fire).
I got off in Chicago for few days, then rented a can in Montana and drove around for a few days before getting back on.
The Lake Sore Limited line had much better sleepers with windows on the top bunk. The Empire Builder has that amazing viewing car though with panoramic views.
Until I got to Glacier National Park the first leg between NYC and Buffalo was much more beautiful. Glacier is not worth trying to describe, just go see it.
lacker 1299 days ago [-]
It's frustrating to me that this train only goes 79 miles an hour. It seems really hard for it to be a competitive option with driving when the maximum speed is approximately the same as the maximum speed in a car.
reaperducer 1299 days ago [-]
The problem isn't so much the speed, it's that it has to slow down frequently, gets blocked by freight trains too often, and stops in far too many towns. There should be an express option.
yourapostasy 1298 days ago [-]
> There should be an express option.
We have the technology now to sling the last car (could be a sub-standard-size car) to a shunt track at a station to offload passengers at the station, which redirects much of the kinetic energy braking it to speed up an already-moving outgoing car off the shunt track to connect to the train to onboard passengers from the station, without the train slowing down at all. Some folks were working on it in France and separate group was working on it in China if I recall correctly from a handful of years ago, but it never got traction. I figure the amount of space the shunt track requires (more length the faster the train travels through the station) and the costs killed it, but it would be skookum tech.
The sheer scale of physically moving around humanity might be a problem uniquely facing our civilization that previous civilizations didn't have to contend with. Maybe on an available watts/person measure we have more than previous civilizations, but it is a fascinating megascale engineering problem to me to wonder about the efficiency optimization possibilities. Not just moving people around the planet, but how to get people off the planet.
adventured 1299 days ago [-]
Biden rode Amtrak to work for 36 years [1], from Delaware to DC. As someone who appreciates the benefits of available rail transportation more than perhaps any other recent national politician, I'm hoping he'll take a shot at either doing some regional high-speed rail, or at least making substantial improvements to Amtrak.
Those blog posts are from 10 years ago Is that plan still current? What have they actually built in that time?
adventured 1299 days ago [-]
The only high-speed rail effort I'm aware of that has any reasonable shot at becoming actual and is currently being pursued, is the Dallas-Houston line.
From September 21:
"High-speed train between Dallas and Houston gets federal approval"
"Texas Central expects to start construction in the first half of 2021."
Well, California high speed rail is being built.[1] And there is Brightline which doesn't really qualify as high speed, but it is newly operating, and it fills a useful niche.[2] Ideally, I would like to see many more such projects.
I’m not aware of any of that being built in the past ten years, some of the plans were canceled, and I think the momentum has been lost to accomplish most of it. Even just increasing speed on the Hiawatha didn’t happen because it traveled through a town that was able to limit the trains speed due to noise and safety concerns.
volkl48 1298 days ago [-]
Most improvements in Wisconsin didn't happen because Wisconsin's newly elected governor in 2010 decided to quit most projects and was rather hostile towards pursuing any substantial improvements in rail.
Michigan has been making steady enough progress on their parts of those plans.
The Wolverine (Chicago-Detroit/Pontiac) now runs at 110mph for significant sections of the route. While still not "fast", it does mean the total trip time for Detroit-Chicago is now time-competitive with driving, even if there's no traffic on the drive.
jdhn 1298 days ago [-]
I just looked at taking the train from Ann Arbor to Chicago, and the times that it leaves are all super early in the morning. It's very much tailored to business travelers instead of people who just want to go to Chicago for pleasure. While going fast is nice, I'm not getting up to take a train at 7:20 AM.
Applejinx 1298 days ago [-]
He's got Amtrak in his twitter bio. I figure that's a hopeful sign, at least. Coronavirus changes all the calculations, but I've taken Amtrak to cons many times (I take the Vermonter, which still has a station literally in my town, which is great!) and the experience is SO MUCH nicer than driving even when it's not faster or cheaper. I get business class and since I'm starting in Vermont, I typically can claim a seat in the one-seat wide side of the car. And there's legroom in business class, and power for devices: I really miss taking Amtrak down to do things in other states.
drdeadringer 1298 days ago [-]
I'm turning 39 this year.
In the 1990s my immediate family would travel from MA to MI via Amtrak to visit grandparents. Travel time in each direction was measured in days. Later on we "upgraded" to planes which reduced travel time to hours within one day.
I miss the trains.
Nostalgia aside, diner car and all, I crave the rumble-tumble and the scenery and the idea of "cross country".
Tunnels.
Every day I commute into and out of work, I witness a random toddler jumping up and down or waving or waddle-running along the train because train.
I have an anniversary coming up in a few months. I and my partner are interested in celebrating by train.
1298 days ago [-]
news_to_me 1299 days ago [-]
Sad to hear this. I rode the Empire Builder from Chicago to Seattle in 2013 with all my things after college — it was a big moment for me and that line will always be special to me.
Theodores 1298 days ago [-]
> Along the Mississippi River we wait in a siding for an approaching freight train
Good grief. With all of that big country and having had more than a century to make rail routes 'broad way' with four tracks, it beggars belief that so many U.S. rail routes are this third-world, poverty spec. single track arrangement.
Plus the options for delays are comical. You could understand a train being hours late if it was on its first outing as a prototype but really? Hot air balloons have a more predictable and reliable service.
Plus the heritage of U.S. railroads and the fantastic loading gauge mean that U.S. trains should be the best and the most stylish in the world. Those double deck carriages with observation domes and the potential for cool end carriages and comfy sleeping arrangements are just not so easy in other countries. Plus the scenery is spectacular in much of the U.S. Why the reality is people driving for hours with attention focused on the road the whole way - is this not a waste of human potential? You could be reading or doing your knitting on the train rather than holding that wheel.
I think that the rail network in the U.S. is not to be given up on. There could even be a whole new approach to it. I often wonder if you could build vastly lighter trains that used active suspension and other gizmos that you might find in a deluxe German road car to put some magic back into rails. Plus speed is a problem on U.S. rail. Even in the UK there are trains that slightly terrify you with a genuine perception of 120+ mph speed. In the U.S. you can be crawling along at 12 mph and that is if you are not stuck in a siding waiting for a mile long freight train to crawl past at 12 mph.
Recently I learned the PRR T1 trains in the days of steam would be doing an estimated 140 mph if behind schedule. Those streamliner trains from almost a century ago were just so cool. For the 21st century America needs trains that suit post Covid, post-boomer lifestyles that hark back to the majesty of times past.
Applejinx 1298 days ago [-]
This. America is huge. We could be doing so much cooler things with trains, and the experience can be SO nice. It's a beautiful country to watch going by from the window of a train.
Even if we didn't end up with trains that went way FASTER than other methods of transport, we could be doing so much better. I saw someone advocating for a line along the Northeast corridor departing every hour in both directions.
Where I live we've got the Vermonter, stopping at a (admittedly charming) antique station in my town. It comes through once a day, in each direction. That requires that any trip has to include an overnight stay. If that train ran like a metro train and came through hourly, I'd be constantly travelling to places like NYC and Philly or even Baltimore, to do stuff, because I would be able to come home again once I was done, even if it was late.
gbronner 1298 days ago [-]
That's nice... Might as well let private companies operate land cruises the way they do in other countries, and to own and operate their own rolling stock in cooperation with the host railroads.
NOrtheast Corridor, and some of the west coast trains as well as some routes around chicago serve a real transportation need, but long-distance cross-country travel is best handled by the private sector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Railroad_class_T1 says "there was a drawback of the metallurgy used; the poppet valve could not withstand the stress of sustained high-speed operation (meaning over 100 mph (160 km/h) on production T1s)."
Theodores 1298 days ago [-]
The Mallard record was a bit of a stretch. One way, down a hill, not in service but testing new brakes. It needed repairs after that. The previous record was 1.5 mph slower.
At least it didn't have the wheel slip that the 4-4-4-4 PRR train had or that poppet valve problem.
Size was also very different, like comparing a 737 to a 747.
Beautiful that the Mallard was, the U.S. trains had something to them and the expanse of the U.S. gave opportunities that were not possible in the UK for some truly fast trains. The mountain ranges of the US are vast compared to the mere hills of the UK, if you wanted a downhill run for top speed then the U.S. should have had options. But planes came along.
edit: Btw. taken from the german wikipedia, and put into DeepL because I'm lazy:
After several test runs with trains with a mass of about 250 t and speeds of up to 195.7 km/h, the 05 002 reached a world speed record for steam locomotives on May 11, 1936, in front of a train made up of four cars (train mass about 200 t) on a level stretch between Hamburg and Berlin. The fact that only four cars were used in this test run instead of the five cars normally attached to the train happened by chance due to a hot-box on a car the day before. The record run thus took place without any special preparation and almost by chance.
(Diz iz verry good tränntzläyshn! Äm DeepL(y)impressed with DeepL!)
eesmith 1298 days ago [-]
Sure, but where does "an estimated 140 mph if behind schedule" come from?
>You could be reading or doing your knitting on the train rather than holding that wheel.
You can also brush shoulders with a diverse cross section of America and see and meet all sorts of interesting people. You can get pretty lucky in the dining car if you're traveling alone being sat with cool people with interesting stories to tell, or passing a covert bottle of whiskey back and forth with a stranger. There's a camaraderie you get on the train you never get in a car or on a plane, something more and more important the more fractured and divisive we get. People of all classes and backgrounds, mixed in a comfy tube with nothing better to do than to talk to each other.
gbronner 1298 days ago [-]
US rail network doesn't need 4-track mains. We run gigantic freights (3+km) on huge loading gauges, so we have many fewer trains. There's also nearly no passenger traffic because it takes 2 full days to go from Chicago to Seattle.
Adding 3 more tracks would be a gigantic capital investment in never-used capacity.
jt2190 1298 days ago [-]
Some context: Amtrak was created as part of a federal bail-out that re-organized the railroads. (Other parts were: Allowing railroads to merge operations; abandon unneeded trackage; and an ongoing dose of de-regulation.) For Amtrak to get federal political support it needs to operate in many states, even though it makes no financial sense to do so. Hence trains that seem run in the middle of nowhere, and are often slower to get anywhere.
bluGill 1298 days ago [-]
Amtrak needs to kill all operation outside of New England until they can get that system working. DC to Boston should leave a evey half hour or better 24x7, with average speeds of 150 mph. Note average includes all stops (new York city obviously is a stop, we can debate others). This is perfectly possible and would make money. Until they get that working they shouldn't try anything with harder to make work routes.
jcranmer 1298 days ago [-]
Why would killing all of those routes help Amtrak? The sentiment of "we should prevent you from expanding until you fix all of your problems" tends to lead into death spirals instead of solutions.
bluGill 1298 days ago [-]
Because money is limited and those routes lose money. Taking whatever is lost running those routes adds some more pocket change to fixing the routes that Amtrak should improve the most. Sorry to the handful of people who live in the middle of nowhere, but for every one of you Amtrak serves there are 10,000 people on the east coast that would use improved service.
The death spiral can sometimes be real, but lack of focus also is a death spiral. Amtrak has been around since the 1970s and most of the improvements to the east coast have been obviously needed and yet haven't happened. While we can (many do) debate what route to run new rails, what is the most important step to take first, and many other details, the big picture is the same to all observers.
Of course the reality is Amtrak exists for political reasons. Probably more realistic is to split Amtrak into two parts (with completely different leadership), one with the goal of making the east cost work well, and one with the goal of political appeasing people on in the middle of nowhere. The way you run the two systems needs to be very different and so there is no reason to keep them together as the concerns of each is a distraction from the other.
jcranmer 1298 days ago [-]
> Because money is limited and those routes lose money.
The money problem is in large part lack of money for capital expenditures, which Amtrak wouldn't have with a pure-NEC system anyways. The capital expenditure is going to have to come from Congress, and it's a lot easier to beg money from Congress if it isn't seen as purely benefiting rich coastal leftist elites.
> While we can (many do) debate what route to run new rails, what is the most important step to take first, and many other details, the big picture is the same to all observers.
Having read several transit enthusiast blogs, I will assure you that the big picture is not the same to all observers. The viewpoint of most enthusiasts tends to boil down to "just build something and people will get excited about it," whereas people like Alon Levy have instead argued that the real issue is that the US is relying on a century-old mindset of how to run trains and somewhere between ignorant and irrationally dismissive of how foreign countries run their superior modern rail systems.
bluGill 1297 days ago [-]
It may well be that I only read things from the Alon Levy bubble, and so I discount the rare times I come across something else as a crackpot and don't look for others in that bubble... This wouldn't be surprising, Alon Levy has good arguments as to why he is right (and has changed my mind a few times), while the others are obviously not living in reality.
treis 1298 days ago [-]
Shedding marginal products and focusing on profitable ones is a classic turn around strategy.
Rail in the US could definitely use a model system to prove out it's viability. The biggest ongoing project is California's and that's shaping up to be a disaster.
hackbinary 1298 days ago [-]
I read somewhere previously that the USA (and Canada) largely prioritise (bulk) freight over passenger travel when considering rail transport. Freight trains are given priority over passenger trains, when passenger trains having to wait for, yield to, and let freight ahead of then.
Further the tracks in NA are designed to carry weight rather than for speed. The design considerations are quite different.
jrs235 1299 days ago [-]
I took the Empire Builder from La Crosse, WI to Everett, WA and back with my wife and two young children many years ago. It was an experience and we generally enjoyed it. I also took it from La Crosse, WI to downtown Chicago and back for a business trip. Sure beat driving!
neom 1299 days ago [-]
Dylan's Travel Reports youtube channel does awesome reviews of long haul train journeys, here is the Empire Builder review if anyone is curious: https://youtu.be/wa_D27yvl5U
pradeepnr 1299 days ago [-]
Trains should carry vehicles as well similar to ferry.
Not really "some Amtrak Lines". One, and only one line, between the lower-mid-Atlantic and southern Florida.
vonmoltke 1298 days ago [-]
Also, it's a point-to-point express. Lorton, VA to Sanford, FL (and nothing in between).
Ichthypresbyter 1298 days ago [-]
That's a common feature of car-carrying trains because of the infrastructure required, not to mention that loading and unloading cars takes so long that you really don't want to do it at an intermediate stop.
For instance, the Austrian Federal Railway operates a pair of overnight trains from Innsbruck and Vienna to Dusseldorf and Hamburg, which also transport cars. The only possible routes you can take your car on are Innsbruck-Dusseldorf and Vienna-Hamburg.
Meanwhile, as a foot passenger you can also get on or off at an intermediate stop like Cologne or Munich.
Foot passengers can also travel Innsbruck-Hamburg or Vienna-Dusseldorf (as sleeping cars are switched between the two trains in Nuremberg, but car carrying wagons aren't).
urda 1295 days ago [-]
TIL thanks for the info. I could have sworn it was on at least more than one ha.
Rendered at 20:27:28 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
It was by far my favorite mode of travel for my commute. The scenery through the Gorge and relaxation it brought me relative to the drive were so valuable. I got to know the staff, and in the evenings, could kick back with a beer in the observation car while looking at Multnomah Falls.
I'd rather spend 2x the time on a train and have the full time be usable than driving, where I would always show up stressed out and feeling behind in my day before I even started.
I also took it eastbound one time to ski in Montana. That was wonderful. I boarded about 7pm, dinked around on my computer for a couple of hours, fell asleep, and woke up at a world-class ski area where I could walk to my motel, catch a bus to the slopes and back, and walk to a top notch concert downtown at night.
In my opinion anyone travelling 4 hrs between work is living in a poverty of sorts. Perhaps not financial poverty, but in my opinion a lack of freedom to enjoy your life outside of work is a considerable deficit in your short time here.
The stress of the commute mainly comes from not knowing how long it's going to take and how different it is every day. If I was able to buy an assigned seat on a train and was able to work (either sending emails or coding) during the commuting time, it could allow me to shorten my time in the office and use that time only for necessary face-to-face meetings.
That'd be awesome, and would presumably let me transition into more full-time remote work.
In a more ideal situation we'd be backstopping all forms of public transport right now at the federal level so that they don't suffer any diminution of service after covid is over. It's understandable - and necessary - that people don't want to travel in various types of metal tubes right now, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be an option again post-pandemic. Instead there are actual attempts in DC to bail out cruise lines.
Also love the train station in downtown Portland - it was restored to it's 1913 glory some years back. It's so much more pleasant catching a train than a plane as you show up 15 minutes prior to departure and not miss your train. Also so much more legroom. Going by train just feels so much more civilized.
Also, a nominal hour to cover 93 miles by rail, and just three trains a week, is just laughable. That's a tourism charter service, not a transport network.
It's no wonder Americans don't think in terms of rail travel as mass transport. If you can't run trains like commuter planes, something's badly wrong.
When we got to the station in Seattle and checked in our bags they told us the train was at least 5 hours delayed, so we should go do something else for 3 hours and then come back for a status update. We also left our mobile number and email address with them in case there was anything else. (Though in theory they should already have had these from the ticket booking.)
Anyway, we went off to a café round the corner (it was an apparently rare snowy day in Seattle - hence the delay, plus we didn't want to stray too far) and had some drinks and brunch.
After about 2 and a half hours later we wanted to stretch our legs and wandered back to the station. Whereupon we were told the train had already left without us… but with our bags, but we could have a refund or take the train on a later day. ️
We only had overnight bags, and an onward journey planned the other end, plus we were now super annoyed so we ended up scrambling to find a flight that would get us there by the next day. That was the closest to the flight time I've ever bought an airline ticket, less than 3 hours I think. It worked out OK in the end, we got our bags from San Jose station the next morning as we'd beaten the train there, though the contents of one of the bags was damaged from rough handling.
In contrast, in Europe, while some cargo is moved by rail, the focus is on passengers. Freight trains (all trains) are short, and passengers have priority over freight.
A quick google brought this up, though I haven't read through it in full:
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/railroad/us-and-european-f...
When the fully automated, electric car and buses arrive, I would imagine that passenger rail in the US will disappear entirely except for nostalgia operations and metro systems already in operation. It is much easier to be B2B or B2G than deal with individual customers for any of the railroads, and getting passengers off the rail will be a bonus for them. The nodal nature of rail will always be a handicap compared to roads.
The US could have “chosen” to do both (there’s no single policy decision or document to point to), as it had done in its railroad heyday, and as other countries do (e.g. Switzerland, China, Russia, etc.). It was and continues to be a failure of public policy and political system that passenger rail is so bad, and even freight rail is as underinvested in. That’s not a knock on the other forms of transport, all of which form a vital part of a larger interconnected, intermodal transportation network, but rail should be an important trunk of that system given its capacity and efficiency. Yet rail has had the least amount of public financial and policy support. By comparison, the US has invested trillions of taxpayer dollars in building and maintaining millions of miles of publicly owned roads (almost all non-tolled), airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC) system, and seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS).
>When the fully automated, electric car and buses arrive, I would imagine that passenger rail in the US will disappear entirely except for nostalgia operations and metro systems already in operation. It is much easier to be B2B or B2G than deal with individual customers for any of the railroads, and getting passengers off the rail will be a bonus for them. The nodal nature of rail will always be a handicap compared to roads.
We do need autonomous, electric buses and trucks, but fully automated, electric railway technology exists now and has for many decades, and well over century in the case of electrification.[1][2] Standards-based electric trains and related technology are available for purchase off the shelf from multiple vendors, do not need to carry large battery packs in the vehicle, and no pie in sky hope for future automation of an insanely hard problem. Electric railways are the most optimized form of land-based transportation, and arguably the most overall.
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” - Bill Gates
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...
I don't really think that was in the cards. The car was already prevalent before the interstate system was built, and the military was much more about a road solution than rail.
As to cost, look at California trying to add high speed rail, as they have failed badly for what was a very modest set of served areas.
Rail does cargo very well. It's very easy to setup the factories and elevators on the rail line. Rail has some serious problems with terminal delivery of people in the US. You still need another form of transportation to get people home. Without fundamentally changing where people live or work, it needs something else.
We do need autonomous, electric buses and trucks, but fully automated, electric railway technology exists now and has for many decades, and well over century in the case of electrification.[1][2] Standards-based electric trains and related technology are available for purchase off the shelf from multiple vendors, do not need to carry large battery packs in the vehicle, and no pie in sky hope for future automation of an insanely hard problem. Electric railways are the most optimized form of land-based transportation, and arguably the most overall.
Electric, Automated trains still don't reach people's homes. You are not going to change the fundamental idea of living in suburbs or the country. In fact, current events make living away from the cities a good option. The cost of rail in the USA is too high even for states that really want it. It will be much easier to alter how the USA builds roads to add cues for automation than try to add rail everywhere. Electric, automated buses will replace passenger rail and be much more flexible for changing trends in where people are going. Automated cars will make personal transport to individual destinations much more efficient and easy. Other than the metro systems that exist, there won't be much place for passenger rail.
These are policy decisions. Other countries chose to invest in rail. The US chose to invest in other forms of transportation and created adverse policy conditions in which rail largely withered and nearly died. I made another comment [1] where I talk about the political milieu that likely contributed to this.
I would also call out the fact since WW2, the US has lost more than half its railroad route-miles (300,000+ to ~147,000 today). Other countries had to rebuild their infrastructure after the destruction of the war. No bombs were dropped on American railroads. Aside from figurative bombs of bad policy by political leaders, competitors in automotive/airlines, and the deeply ignorant idea that railroads and trains are an obsolete 19th century technology.
>As to cost, look at California trying to add high speed rail, as they have failed badly for what was a very modest set of served areas.
I am well aware of the California HSR project and its many failings. It has nothing to do with anything inherent to rail technology. I view it as symptomatic of and the inevitable result of a broken political system, poor project management, a Transportation/Construction-Industrial Complex (similar to the Military-Industrial Complex), monied special interests like construction and engineering contractors run wild with no oversight, capturing the agencies they work for and transferring as many public dollars into their bank account.
Alon Levy’s blog Pedestrian Observations [2] covers transportation construction costs extensively, and generally calls out Anglo countries (UK, USA, CAN, AUS) as the most troubled. There’s also the Caltrain-HSR Compatibility Blog [3], Systemic Failure [4], and others in the technical transportation commentary space.
>Rail has some serious problems with terminal delivery of people in the US. You still need another form of transportation to get people home. Without fundamentally changing where people live or work, it needs something else. >Electric, Automated trains still don't reach people's homes. You are not going to change the fundamental idea of living in suburbs or the country. In fact, current events make living away from the cities a good option. The cost of rail in the USA is too high even for states that really want it. It will be much easier to alter how the USA builds roads to add cues for automation than try to add rail everywhere.
There is an access problem or first/last mile problem, but rail does not exist in a vacuum. It can work in concert with buses, taxi/rideshare, friend/family pickup/dropoff, biking, walking, etc. as part of a larger comprehensive transportation network. Rail can act as the high capacity core of the network. A pair of optimized, electric, modern signaled rail tracks with has the transportation capacity equivalent of a 8-10 lane highway. This should be taken advantage of, then use lower capacity/higher flexibility transport for the first and last mile problem. Otherwise we continue have a congestion problem with transportation network centered around single occupant vehicles (SOVs), or even zero occupants with autonomy. Autonomous vehicles do not fix that, if anything it makes it worse.
Without getting into third rail politics unique to post-WW2 American suburbs/rural life and notions of “freedom,” historically trains were one of the primary form of mechanized land transport for about century, from the mid 1800s to well into 1900s. Suburbs were originally enabled by rail during this period (e.g. NYC, Boston, Chicago, LA metro areas), many of suburbs grew up around a local railroad or streetcar system, and their historic downtowns are often next to a rail station [5][6]. It was only later, we got auto oriented suburbs where you need a car to get anywhere. These were decisions, we could choose to create transit oriented communities, including suburbs.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24651127 [2] https://pedestrianobservations.com/ [3] http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/ [4] https://systemicfailure.wordpress.com/ [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_town
Chaos!
Anyways, this chaos is self inflicted by building back switches, which would enable a more granular partition of the tracks, and more flexible passing of trains.
All in all, our railways are indeed "'ne Lachnummer"(laughing stock).
OTHO not so ridiculous at all, considering the massive build back of infrastructure.
The trains with mixed types can be unit trains but they can also have intermediate stops where cars are added or dropped off.
The optimizations the rail companies perform to maximize the freight movement (and profit) is very interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...
edit: Furthermore https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3098444/chi...
From the point of view of a SimCity/Civilization/Railroad Tycoon player, they seem to do everything right.
While the rest of the world is engaging in useless Command&Conquer-like clashes, always on RED ALERT!
China's rail freight, as a percent of intercity freight has been steadily declining [0], in large part due to development on high speed rail, which has hurt freight rail networks.
[0] https://www.mdpi.com/sustainability/sustainability-12-00583/...
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/2/583/htm
I think it slowed a little bit because "change of management" due to imprisonment of
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Zhijun
and consecutive dissolvement of
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Railways_(China)
transforming that into
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Railway
under supervision of the
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Railway_Administratio...
Imagine what would happen if Warren Buffet suddenly got jailed (for instance caused by Cancel Culture), along with about 40 to 50 others from higher management in connected companies, leading to break up of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc? Not exactly bye bye BNSF, but not good either (for a while).
Just handwaving here, but the timeframe fits IMO.
That likely won’t last assuming it is still true. China’s rail network is largely electrified, providing inherently lower operating costs over diesel-electric [1]. They also have more widely deploy advanced train control systems, safely enabling more capacity and future driverless operation.
>China's rail freight, as a percent of intercity freight has been steadily declining [0], in large part due to development on high speed rail, which has hurt freight rail networks.
That’s a very flawed interpretation. Excluding Covid-19, China freight volumes have been growing dramatically for many years and is expected to continue; while US growth is smaller, and generally mature/steady-state. China’s growth in land-based freight volumes has been largely captured trucks on roads, hence the falling relative mode share of rail freight, even though absolute ton-miles/TEUs/railcars/etc. by freight rail have grown significantly year-over-year. This trend will continue and relative mode shares will likely turnaround eventually.
China is investing hundreds of billions of dollar equivalent in their railway systems, both high speed passenger (300-400+ km/h) and “standard speed” passenger (up to 200-250 km/h) and freight (up to 100-130 km/h). There is also large investments in “dry ports” inland intermodal rail facilities. While high speed passenger lines capture a lot of attention and dollars/yuan, there are still large direct investments in the “regular” rail network improving freight capacity. And where high speed lines parallel standard mainlines, standard speed passenger services are reduced or eliminated, freeing up capacity for more freight in an indirect manner by separating them.
China has made a strategic decision, at the highest levels of government, to invest in railways and to mode shift as much possible to rail, passenger and freight. Tens of thousands of miles of railway have been built in just the last decade. It is likely the largest rail expansion in a century. More trackage of high speed lines than the rest of the world combined twice over, and it only started in 2008 (0 to 22,000+ miles; 0% to ~67%). They continue to plan and build major expansions in the decades to come, there does not appear to be a slow down. [2][3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_China
Amtrak has proper service in the areas where it's economically viable like the northeast. The rest of it loses money and is basically there because it's legally required.
edit: San Francisco to LA, a relatively short trip as far as the US goes, is the same as going from London to Scotland. Seattle to LA is the same as London to Rome. That's not counting cross-country which makes those distances look small. Rail just isn't competitive at those distances.
85% of adults in America have a car. The 15% (plus children) who don't can use Greyhound/Megabus buses, which are fine. Flights are generally more convenient for trips over 300 miles anyway.
There is no significant use case for Amtrak. It doesn't take a conspiracy to make it unprofitable.
And also, Amtrak is a quasi-public corporation like USPS. Its existence is meant to be a public good, not to be profitable.
Maybe current funding dwarfs all those accumulated 1%s. I don't know. But maybe a dozen 1%s could help out a dozen other challenges and give a huge boost to passenger rail in the U.S.
It's easy to blame conservatives. But a huge portion of democrats take the same money and vote for the same bills, only they dig in their heels a little to score green points with trifling shit like rails to trails.
My impression is that most US intercity passenger lines _are_ basically tourism services, and not used for normal intercity travel.
It's also worth remembering that the US is huge. For the routes many of these trains cover, especially west of the Mississippi River, you have a choice between plane, bus or train. Getting to an airport could be a 6+ hour drive, and 18 hours on a train is often a much more comfortable experience than 10 hours on a bus.
Despite the not-so-great timekeeping, there are many rural areas where the train is still the best of options. Keep in mind how large the US is.
The service frequency is laughable but an hour to cover 93 miles doesn't sound too bad. Plenty of intercity train services in the UK are slower than that. e.g. London Waterloo to Brockenhurst is 92 miles and takes about 1hr30 making three stops
Los Angeles to Las Vegas on Amtrak is ~500km and takes over 7 hours.
Oh, except that you don't finish in Las Vegas. You finish in Kingman, AZ (more that 160km from Las Vegas) because that's as close as you can get with Amtrak.
The Shinkansen is travelling through significantly populated areas on the trip. Amtrak is travelling through a barren desert.
For reference, the distance between Minneapolis and Chicago is about 400 miles.
If the Amtrak schedule [0] is strictly adhered to, the travel time is ~7.75 hours. Current prices are ~$116 roundtrip.
Google Maps says the estimated time by car (assuming no traffic) is ~6.25 hours. At ~30 miles/gallon at $2/gallon, the cost of a roundtrip for just gas would be ~$53.
A roundtrip, non-stop flight lasting ~1.5 hours each way can be had for ~$80~$175 with the passenger's choice of at least 10 distinct flights/3 separate airlines.
I like rail. But it's clear that there's not a market fit for rail between Minneapolis and Chicago without massive subsidies. A car is faster and cheaper. A plane is much faster and about the same price. Both car and planes are strictly more convenient.
[0]: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
We spent half a trillion dollars building the IHS over five decades, and have historically thrown at least a few billion a year at US oil producers - is it really surprising to anyone that driving is cheap? We keep bailing out the airline industry repeatedly - we already gave them $25 billion in grants this year because of the coronavirus, and they're still asking for more.
But, dare we build an alternative to those systems, one that could be more ecologically and financially sound? Nope, too busy feeding our sunk cost industries. Keep blaming Amtrak for being terrible while refusing to give them their own run of rails so they don't constantly get stuck behind freighter traffic. Keep shuting down High Speed Rail projects around the country because the billionaires don't want it in their back yards.
A true market based solution would be to make all major roads toll roads and use the funds collected to maintain said roads. With EZ-Pass/SmartTag/etc... this could be practical. The problem with toll roads is that local governments tend to use them as a piggybank so you end up with poorly maintained expensive road.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2016/f...
> Highways: The FAST Act provides $45.3 billion for highway and bridge improvements in FY 2019 (the fiscal year from Oct. 1, 2018 through Sept. 30, 2019) and grows this amount to $46.4 billion by FY 2020. Most federal highway investment is used to upgrade and maintain the nation’s core highways, including the Interstate Highway System, and to repair and replace deficient bridges.
> An additional $3.4 billion was provided for highway and bridge investments as part of the final FY 2019 spending bills signed into law Feb. 15, 2019.
> Since 2008, revenues to the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) have been insufficient to fully support the level of federal highway and transit investment authorized by Congress. Prior to enactment of the FAST Act, the annual investment gap was nearly $15 billion. Congress has not increased the federal motor fuels tax since 1993, but federal highway and public transportation spending has grown substantially over the last 26 years. It should surprise no one that holding the trust fund’s inflow of revenues constant while attempting to address the nation’s growing transportation needs would lead to an unsustainable situation.
It is quite clear that even just the Interstates do not "pay for themselves." There's also the issues with the fuel taxes, namely that motorists are not necessarily the only ones paying those taxes, and in addition to the depreciating value from a flat fee not tracking inflation, the value of the tax is continuing to diminish as some motorists switch to alternative fuels and others are driving ever more efficient vehicles.
I do see their balances coming up positive though, thanks to a very massive balance transfer from the General Fund per the FAST act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/22), straight from US taxpayers' wallets.
I also see no mention to climate impact anywhere. $36 billion dollars of gas taxes at 18.3 cents per gallon suggests sales of nearly 200 billion gallons of gasoline were burned. That's a hell of a lot of climate damage that everyone's being forced to pay for.
So, you were saying about us not subsidizing the IHS?
So the system is broken, but it has a simple fix, just raise the gas tax. We haven't done that since 1993 and it isn't indexed to inflation. This is something that should have been fixed years ago, but alas I don't control congress.
If you want to go even further and discuss the environmental impact, again the solution is more taxes.
It's hard to make an argument that rail is cheaper than driving without getting into a lot of mental gymnastics, and I really like taking the train when able.
Once they become a thing, the price of an autonomous taxi between the cities should approach the real amortized cost of road travel.
Namely, as fuel efficiency increases and some drivers switch to alternative fuels, people will need less gas for the same amount of driving.
Given the latency on legislatively fixing things in the USA these days, any work at fixing stuff now should probably include the likelihood of a major shift to non-gas vehicles in the next couple decades.
The IRS per mileage reimbursement rate is 57.5 cents per mile, putting the “real” cost to an 800 mile roundtrip around $400.
A different stand in might be the per mile rate I can get from a rental company, which is often around 20 cents a mile. That would be $160 in other costs + the $53 in gas $213.
Now, people chronically underestimate the cost of driving (and many of them are fixed costs) so the “competitiveness” of rail doesn’t really change, but IMO we shouldn’t just look at gas costs for automobile transport.
The idea is that people only take into account fuel costs when considering driving. They don't typically take into account capital costs like depreciation. So the DB sells a 250 Euro card that gives you a 50% discount on tickets for a year. The card creates an artificial sunk cost, and lowers the marginal cost of taking the train, making it more comparable with driving.
A nitpick that's so small as to almost be irrelevant: For people up to (and including) the age of 26, it's actually 60€/year. This makes going by train a financially pretty attractive travel method.
Once someone has paid the fixed cost of owning a car, that cost is sunk and shouldn't be factored into calculations for individual trips. The only thing that matters at that point is marginal cost.
For public transportation to be competitive, the overall public transportation system has to provide a level of service that makes it feasible for many people to not own a car at all. For example, having great inter-city train service doesn't help if I need a car to get to the train station. If I have to own the car anyway, and the marginal cost of driving is lower than the marginal cost of taking the train, I'm going to drive.
In most European countries, the overall public transportation system does provide this level of service. In most places in the US, it doesn't. A significant part of the reason for that is simply that people in Europe and people in the US have a different mix of preferences. Many more people in the US do not want to live in population dense areas that can support a public transportation system that makes it feasible to not own a car. (I'm one of them: I have lived in population dense areas and I know from experience that I prefer not to.)
Of course there's hardly any demand for a slow, expensive and often late service which only runs once a day. It's not useful.
A journey I do often in the UK is London to Edinburgh by train. The distance is almost the same (400 miles). London is a bit bigger than Chicago (12 million metro vs ~8 million metro) but then the Twin Cities are quite a lot larger than Edinburgh (1 million metro vs ~4 million metro).
However, the track has been improved, is at least doubled the whole way and has significant portions at 125 mph. As a result the journey takes just over 4 hours. If the trains are more than 1 hour late you get all your money back.
On an average weekday there's 41 trains travelling each way between those cities. And many of them are full. They're constantly doing improvements to try and increase the number of trains travelling.
I understand it's a different situation - the result of decades of political apathy towards railways. But I think it's important to understand that the Amtrak situation doesn't have to be the way it is. There's not an inherent lack of demand for fast, regular train services between major cities.
Lots of countries have good rail service that people actively choose over cars or planes between major cities. I find it maddening that my own country can't bring itself to really want that.
I don't own a car and never learned to drive. What's my upfront cost before the $53 incremental cost?
Car ownership begets car ownership.
AAA says car ownership costs $8,558 per year. I'd have a hard time spending that much on public transport.
https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/what-does-it-cost-to...
Buy a used car and do your due diligence before purchasing.
Not sure what state they're using for license, tax, and registration. I pay less than $100 a year for that.
Maintenance is about right and can be lower, especially if you don't buy junk.
My insurance is lower than that, but that's a perk of my state.
I fill up maybe once every three weeks, so my fuel usage is way lower than that.
It'll probably go to the scrap yard once I'm done, and this thing was worth around maybe $3k when I bought it some years ago.
All in all, I'm sitting somewhere around $2000 a year for my car. Totally worth having.
Just be smart about it. Cars are very useful to have.
(Disclaimer: I own a car)
Winter biking is enjoyable when you dress properly for the weather and use spiked tires.
https://valientemott.com/blog/chances-of-dying-in-a-car-cras...
$400ish (get lucky on a $250 "ran when parked" car, pay by month for insurance and live in a low tax state) on up.
>AAA says car ownership costs $8,558 per year
They say it costs that on average. That's very different from the floor or baseline cost which seems to be what you're implying.
How to get an absolute hooptie sitting in your driveway waiting for replacement parts.
If you can't source parts in this day and age it's not the car's fault. Anything made in the last 30yr you can readily get service parts for. What you can't get at the parts store are interior trim and non-wearing suspension items that are specific to a narrow range of vehicles (also true for new cars) but if you expect to keep the interior of a bottom dollar car in tip top shape you're out of your mind. The internet makes finding everything that isn't a normal wear item super quick and easy but you're gonna have to wait 24-96hr to get it.
Just some food for thought -- of course, if you have passengers it'll quickly be worth it even if you decide to factor in this kind of calculation.
The only difference is depreciation now vs later.
There's a lack of long-term policy here: do we want to be in a society in 20-30 years that's still using personal cars to do that journey, when a high speed rail would be much more efficient and pleasant? If a true high speed rail were enabled, that 400 mile trip might take 3 hours instead of 6-8 for other modes of transit, and it would incur less negative externalities to boot.
I'm all for individuals making informed decisions in the short term, while government and society should be taking long-term steps to promote the health of the commons as well.
But Amtrak is the best fit for multi-day trips across the entire country for people who cannot fly. Amtrak also solves transportation for travelling directly from small rural towns to the large cities, and sometimes even from one rural town to another. It is the safest way to get across mountain ranges in the depth of winter (although not the fastest).
It doesn't solve every problem, and it does need subsidies, and it always runs late... nevertheless, it connects rural Americans to the large cities in ways that city folk don't even realize.
Agreed though that car or plane beats train 99% of the time.
https://bahn.guru/
Helps to find cheap tickets, so when you are somewhat flexible you can still travel for cheap.
I'm a car owner but it's stupid expensive and if there were a reasonable alternative I'd stop in a heartbeat.
They initially used Bristol Superfreighters, which were replaced by Aviation Traders Carvairs (converted for the purpose from second-hand Douglas DC-4s). The Carvair could carry 5 cars and 22 passengers- the cars were loaded through a door in the nose.
The "air ferry" service was killed by competition from the new RO-RO car ferries (when it started flying, cars still had to be loaded onto cross-Channel ferries by crane) and especially by the hovercraft service which began in 1968- a crossing by hovercraft with a car didn't cost much more than the conventional ferry while being as fast as the plane. The hovercraft, in turn, stopped being viable because of competition from the car-carrying trains through the Channel Tunnel- it stopped running in 2000.
Imagine!
One of the reasons I always take a train to Manhattan is that I not only don't need a car but I hate driving into the city and parking is expensive.
I've heard Uber and Lyft are popular.
Cities and regions built with density, walkability, bikability, and transit in mind avoid or greatly reduce this problem.
I'm about 200 miles from NY and actually backtrack to take the train. But I'm still guessing that an Uber (if I could get one) would be a a good 2x the train and a private car even more.
Some areas make it easier to get around other than in an auto than others. Of course, I'm often going somewhere out in the suburbs of a city anyway.
If you're making extended or multi-stop day or multi-day trips at a destination, you no longer have a simple long-haul transport need. A local car hire, group tour bus, bicycle rental, transporting your own bike, or similar arrangement could satisfy this.
Boeing 737s and Airbus A330s would be equally or more handicapped under such circumstances, though a Cesna or comparable bush plane might be appropriate in some regions.
On the super-long transcontinental trips, apparently the cell reception with the right gear on trains is much better than when I rode half the country westward many years ago. That makes the train travel mode even more valuable to me if I'm not on a tight schedule and the seating arrangement enables me to look forward to getting work done.
What prevents me from using trains more than I do is the demands of many clients upon my time. Not quite lucrative enough for me to justify a satellite data link, but if my financial picture improves by many orders of magnitude, a digital nomadic life with a private railcar set towing shipping container footprint custom structures as a "home base" that I operate vehicles from would be an enjoyable way to my mind to get deeply into locales, while staying in touch with the Net and maintaining full fabrication capabilities with me.
The route in Madison was supposed to go to Monona Terrace, which is singularly inconvenient for most people, limiting the catchment basin. Getting out of Madison requires huge numbers of grade crossings, limiting speed, and disrupting traffic.
So this route was never going to be anything other than a slow drain on the treasury, and SW wisely killed it.
Back in the day the railroad would go right past your town, refuse to build a stop, buy the land along the tracks a few miles away, build a stop, and then start a new town there.
Cher had a monologue in the 1990 movie "Mermaids" where she talked about the feeling of freedom she had from getting in her car and that feeling can be best appreciated by understanding the way that pre-WWII Americans felt about taking the train. Today a car payment, insurance and all that feel like a millstone at your neck, but back then you could get in a new car and smell the freedom. That generation knew what it was like for somebody who could care less what you think to decide when and where you go.
Some decades back I spent some time listening to a denizen of flyover country speak with still-simmering anger of how the Interstate, already a couple of decades old, had bypassed his town, drying up local highway traffic and decimating local business.
Today, airlines are recalibrating expense-revenue models and determining what routes remain profitable. Telecoms monopolies try to provide the minimum viablequantum of service --- theoretical and net bandwidth, latency, and reliability --- for a given subscriber rate. Disruptions in live-work patterns tend to bugger this.
Any connections or network-based sector is subject to this, especially in private hands; transport, communications, trade (bulk cargo, wholesale, retail), energy distribution, utility services, information, broadcast, etc.
What's interesting about highways is that they produce a politically durable coalition around a combination of public ownership of the roads and private ownership of the cars.
Psychologically there is a double dose of the "feeling of ownership" because "we all" perceive the roads belong to us (e.g. a socialist feeling of camaraderie) but we also have a sunk cost in a vehicle we own that is tied to feelings of "I've somebody special because I drive a special car and such".
In contrast, investments in public transit are seeing as benefiting "special interests" in most places, except in California where normally skinflint taxpayers are notorious for ballot initiatives to fund public transit that they don't actually use.
I'd noted a few years back that a chief problem in governance, or management, isn't simply creating necessary and effective regulatory institutions, but resiliant ones, most especially to subversion attempts from within the organisation or government itself.
Politically durable coalitions are certainly one such mechanism.
In the US, rail is the only form of transportation that mostly privately owned. Whereas the other forms of transportation infrastructure are publicly owned and maintained as a common good: roads, airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC), and maritime infrastructure (seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS)). Ideally the US should do the same for its rail infrastructure. This is what Europe is pursuing, publicly owning and investing the infrastructure, and allowing multiple competitors to operate on top.
Much the American political hostility to rail stems the monopolistic practices of privately owned railroads. Central Pacific, which built the Western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad, was founded by the Big 4, which included Leland Stanford, Governor and US Senator in the early days of California statehood, and of course founder of the University. They merged with another railroad they owned in Southern Pacific, later referred to as The Octopus, with tentacles that reached to every corner of the state and dominated California transportation and politics.
The solution to this problem is to bring the railroads under public ownership, not destroy the railroad with subsidized competition from public roads. The consequences of this have been enormous. The US once had over 300,000 route miles of railroad at its peak. Today it has ~147,000 route miles, less than half of its peak. The US National Highway System is ~160,000 route miles by comparison. Many communities lost rail service entirely. Even a rural agricultural state like Iowa, almost 90% farmland, was completely criss-crossed by railroads to an extent that no location in the state was more than 12 miles from a rail line. Today only a fraction of that rail network survives.
It is hard imagine something like this happening to other forms of publicly owned transportation infrastructure, because of that durable political coalition. People would not accept half of all roads or airports being abandoned because they are not nominally profitable. It is considered a common good provided for by the state.
Perhaps that's because they do?
In the subject article there is a link to another article on the author's site about intercity rail in Minnesota, in which I find the following interesting fact:
"Like most states, Minnesota had a large intercity rail network operated by private freight railroads. With the formation of Amtrak in 1971 this large system was reduced to a skeletal system of just a few routes, and then just one after 1985."
It never seems to occur to the author that perhaps Amtrak is the cause of the problems he sees, rather than the solution to them.
Trains are the rational future, they were before, but irrational market forces are against them.
I've taken the train from central Pennsylvania to NYC several times. It's great, but it's also a hike and not something you want to do for anything shorter than a long weekend (4 days is perfect, especially if you can do Fri-Mon as the Sunday train is usually very full). I did it once for a Sat/Sun trip and you just spend too much time on the train watching a movie or staring out the window.
And the train network in germany isn't even very good.
It's all relative :) Coming from Ireland (where intercity is still diesel with max speeds around 160km/h, and average speeds far worse), ICE kind of seems like magic.
Its such a better ride as well- I mean I love getting a nice stretch of open road where you can go 60-80mph and such, but the reality of most travel in the northeast is just traffic and congestion and a lot of paying attention to that dude in the SUV who seems like he wants to jump in your lane without so much as a blinker of warning.
We have massively funded our highways, claim that Amtrak is a suck of taxpayer funds and do the bare minimum for it, and then complain about traffic, it's quite irrational.
If you visit a country that actually invests in train travel you'll see it's a fast, convenient way to get around. The most underrated aspect, IMO, is that it's not a hike: the train stations are slap bang in the middle of every city. That's even true in the US, it's just the rails between the cities that let the whole thing down.
From where in Central PA? It's definitely the fastest way to get into downtown NYC from anywhere between Philly and Harrisburg.
There are lots of places in the US where the train is a huge time sink, it's just that in my experience, getting into NYC is one of the few where it's much faster and more convenient.
West of mpls, the train drags 200k lb sleeping cars along with lounge and diner cars for only a handful of passengers. Swedish and Russian railways pack 6 to a compartment; Amtrak struggles with 2. No way this is cost effective or a good use of capital.
Deregulate the fra rules, allow electric buses on the rails (and eliminate the crazily overbuilt rail standards), and you might get real innovation and a competitive product...
But there are two roommettes side by side. Both European and Amtrak cars have a length of ~26m. An Amtrak Superliner sleeping car can sleep up to 44 people. A sleeper as used by Austria’s ÖBB can sleep 12*3=36 people. A 3rd class Russian sleeping car holds 54 [https://www.vagonweb.cz/razeni/vlak.php?zeme=%D0%91%D0%A7&ka...]. Comparable.
Why not make freight fast, too?
> A nice bus gets you better service with lower capital expenditures
A bus can accomodate 80 people per driver, a train (German ICE) 750 seats+750 people standing. Sure, a bus is cheaper in upfront investment, but has higher operation expenses, is way slower and is worse for the environment. Additionally, buses get caught in traffic jams while railways are generally separate.
> allow electric buses on the rails
What? Why? And how should this be secured?!
> and eliminate the crazily overbuilt rail standards
These standards were written in the blood of thousands of people who died or were severely maimed in accidents.
So were the European standards. They just tackled accident prevention more than accident survivability as the engineering goal.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/11/23/u-s-finally-legalizes...
> But FRA rules had required significant design changes. Most important, American train cars had to be built to withstand 800,000 pounds of frontal impact. Former Amtrak CEO David Gunn complained U.S. trains had to be designed like “high-velocity bank vaults.” Rather than just bulk up, European and Asian trains instead are designed to absorb impacts and avoid collisions in the first place. And they have better safety records.
There is a total lack of information why that route was taken in the 1920s, so I'm going to take a wild guess... in Europe, the train routes, especially for fast trains, are completely separated, often outright walled off, and level crossings with streets totally eliminated. In the US, you have a country that is many, many times bigger and widely un- or sparsely populated, which means that there is a lot more danger to trains from stuff that ends up on the tracks as it's infeasible to build a wall that long.
Herds of animals, heavy trucks/tractors ending up on the tracks of a crossing - that is something that I expect to be pretty much routine in the US, and it makes sense to build trains that can simply plow through such impediments.
In the USA everything on rails is Danger! Danger! and has to be signaled as such, even if it's only a tram servicing downtown. It has to Ring! Ding! Ding! all the times.
I'd go crazy if having to live near anything like that.
Money. Most goods need to be on schedule, not fast. More speed costs more money.
>These standards were written in the blood of thousands of people who died or were severely maimed in accidents.
The standards were also written for a world who's conditions were very different from those of today.
I know that you can score easy virtue points by pretending like any rollback of regulation that is intended to protect something is a bad thing but let's be real here. With modern signaling infrastructure there's no reason that dedicated passenger rail can't be equally safe or safer than legacy passenger rail that has to be interoperable with legacy signaling systems and freight rail.
High-speed rail demands fully separated rights of way for reasons of route and destination, safety, predictable scheduling, minimum turning radius, and more. Unfortunately in a world of strong land-property rights and interests, this makes it extraordinarily politically vulnerable.
A few years ago I realised that virtually every successful large-scale rail system (both high-speed and earlier "conventional" services) emerged in a largely uncontested land-rights regime. For the 19th century US and British systems, a pre-industrial or pioneer domain in which land owners were few, poor, or both. On completion, the US transcontinental railroad was seen as a boondoggle "road to nowhere", though various "wheres" began springing up along its route nearly immediately.
(Famously, Denver, Colorado, saw a 10x population growth in the decade after a spur line was built to the transcontinental route.)
For Japan and Europe, planning for high-speed fail began following the physical and economic devastation of WWII. Landholders couldn't put up much of a fight.
China's HSR growth resembles that of frontier America and early-industrial Britain, benefitting by a different land-ownership regime.
The most pernicious obstacle to California high-speed rail is Atherton.
most countries with extensive, speedy and reliable train service measure the "profit" of their systems by considering other measures in addition to these two very simplistic measurements.
Things have changed since 1880 of course. However it isn't fair to evaluate it against modern values.
To the white people, perhaps. The indigenous population probably would have rather it stayed that way.
Rail travel is just much more relaxing and interesting than air travel. People in an airport act like zombies, but people on a train act like people.
One time, I was on a Empire Builder that got stuck in a freight yard around midnight. The freight company had donated an engine to replace one that had broken on the Amtrak train, but apparently the crew didn't have a key to unlock it.
So we sat in a freight yard for about an hour, with snow gently falling around us. It had been several hours since our last stop, and the passengers started to get restless. 4 hours without a smoke break is considered a mortal sin in Montana.
Eventually, the crew relented and let people out in the freezing snow to smoke on the train tracks, under a litany of disclaimers about trespassing and liability and whatnot.
It was hilarious and surreal. Amtrak felt like a system run by human beings, so it was chronically late and haphazard, but I'll still miss it compared the the sterile almost-competence of modern airports.
Right now 90% of the route from St. Paul is forbidden from traveling to Chicago.
And dining service was being removed from many routes before Covid, I’m sure that has been accelerated.
Sunset Limited is worse, though. No activities. Fewer showers. And you can't even get your meals brought to your room.
It's maybe a 16-20 hour car trip. Less than a 3 hour flight. Amtrak turns it into a 23-24 hour train ride without delays.
We were more than 8 hours delayed getting there, which caused all kinds of havoc with our local transport and accommodations.
This is not in a sparsely populated part of the U.S. It's not the North-East corridor, but it's still pretty heavily populated for most of the run. I swore off trains ever again until many years later my wife thought it would be better to start taking trains around Europe and I finally understood how good they can be. More recently we were in Japan and took the Shinkansen (and a bunch of local trains) all over the country and experienced truly the dream that trains can be. As much of an improvement as the average Eurorail is over Amtrak, Japanese trains are the much of an improvement over Europe. Absolutely incredible.
I hope service is resumed after the pandemic, I haven't had the chance to take this route yet!
I got off in Chicago for few days, then rented a can in Montana and drove around for a few days before getting back on.
The Lake Sore Limited line had much better sleepers with windows on the top bunk. The Empire Builder has that amazing viewing car though with panoramic views.
Until I got to Glacier National Park the first leg between NYC and Buffalo was much more beautiful. Glacier is not worth trying to describe, just go see it.
We have the technology now to sling the last car (could be a sub-standard-size car) to a shunt track at a station to offload passengers at the station, which redirects much of the kinetic energy braking it to speed up an already-moving outgoing car off the shunt track to connect to the train to onboard passengers from the station, without the train slowing down at all. Some folks were working on it in France and separate group was working on it in China if I recall correctly from a handful of years ago, but it never got traction. I figure the amount of space the shunt track requires (more length the faster the train travels through the station) and the costs killed it, but it would be skookum tech.
The sheer scale of physically moving around humanity might be a problem uniquely facing our civilization that previous civilizations didn't have to contend with. Maybe on an available watts/person measure we have more than previous civilizations, but it is a fascinating megascale engineering problem to me to wonder about the efficiency optimization possibilities. Not just moving people around the planet, but how to get people off the planet.
[1] https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a32363173/joe-biden-amt...
Those blog posts are from 10 years ago Is that plan still current? What have they actually built in that time?
From September 21:
"High-speed train between Dallas and Houston gets federal approval"
"Texas Central expects to start construction in the first half of 2021."
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/21/dallas-houston-high-...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brightline
Michigan has been making steady enough progress on their parts of those plans.
The Wolverine (Chicago-Detroit/Pontiac) now runs at 110mph for significant sections of the route. While still not "fast", it does mean the total trip time for Detroit-Chicago is now time-competitive with driving, even if there's no traffic on the drive.
In the 1990s my immediate family would travel from MA to MI via Amtrak to visit grandparents. Travel time in each direction was measured in days. Later on we "upgraded" to planes which reduced travel time to hours within one day.
I miss the trains.
Nostalgia aside, diner car and all, I crave the rumble-tumble and the scenery and the idea of "cross country".
Tunnels.
Every day I commute into and out of work, I witness a random toddler jumping up and down or waving or waddle-running along the train because train.
I have an anniversary coming up in a few months. I and my partner are interested in celebrating by train.
Good grief. With all of that big country and having had more than a century to make rail routes 'broad way' with four tracks, it beggars belief that so many U.S. rail routes are this third-world, poverty spec. single track arrangement.
Plus the options for delays are comical. You could understand a train being hours late if it was on its first outing as a prototype but really? Hot air balloons have a more predictable and reliable service.
Plus the heritage of U.S. railroads and the fantastic loading gauge mean that U.S. trains should be the best and the most stylish in the world. Those double deck carriages with observation domes and the potential for cool end carriages and comfy sleeping arrangements are just not so easy in other countries. Plus the scenery is spectacular in much of the U.S. Why the reality is people driving for hours with attention focused on the road the whole way - is this not a waste of human potential? You could be reading or doing your knitting on the train rather than holding that wheel.
I think that the rail network in the U.S. is not to be given up on. There could even be a whole new approach to it. I often wonder if you could build vastly lighter trains that used active suspension and other gizmos that you might find in a deluxe German road car to put some magic back into rails. Plus speed is a problem on U.S. rail. Even in the UK there are trains that slightly terrify you with a genuine perception of 120+ mph speed. In the U.S. you can be crawling along at 12 mph and that is if you are not stuck in a siding waiting for a mile long freight train to crawl past at 12 mph.
Recently I learned the PRR T1 trains in the days of steam would be doing an estimated 140 mph if behind schedule. Those streamliner trains from almost a century ago were just so cool. For the 21st century America needs trains that suit post Covid, post-boomer lifestyles that hark back to the majesty of times past.
Even if we didn't end up with trains that went way FASTER than other methods of transport, we could be doing so much better. I saw someone advocating for a line along the Northeast corridor departing every hour in both directions.
Where I live we've got the Vermonter, stopping at a (admittedly charming) antique station in my town. It comes through once a day, in each direction. That requires that any trip has to include an overnight stay. If that train ran like a metro train and came through hourly, I'd be constantly travelling to places like NYC and Philly or even Baltimore, to do stuff, because I would be able to come home again once I was done, even if it was late.
NOrtheast Corridor, and some of the west coast trains as well as some routes around chicago serve a real transportation need, but long-distance cross-country travel is best handled by the private sector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Railroad_class_T1 says "there was a drawback of the metallurgy used; the poppet valve could not withstand the stress of sustained high-speed operation (meaning over 100 mph (160 km/h) on production T1s)."
At least it didn't have the wheel slip that the 4-4-4-4 PRR train had or that poppet valve problem.
Size was also very different, like comparing a 737 to a 747.
Beautiful that the Mallard was, the U.S. trains had something to them and the expanse of the U.S. gave opportunities that were not possible in the UK for some truly fast trains. The mountain ranges of the US are vast compared to the mere hills of the UK, if you wanted a downhill run for top speed then the U.S. should have had options. But planes came along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRG_Class_05
Streamlined, even.
After several test runs with trains with a mass of about 250 t and speeds of up to 195.7 km/h, the 05 002 reached a world speed record for steam locomotives on May 11, 1936, in front of a train made up of four cars (train mass about 200 t) on a level stretch between Hamburg and Berlin. The fact that only four cars were used in this test run instead of the five cars normally attached to the train happened by chance due to a hot-box on a car the day before. The record run thus took place without any special preparation and almost by chance.
(Diz iz verry good tränntzläyshn! Äm DeepL(y)impressed with DeepL!)
You can also brush shoulders with a diverse cross section of America and see and meet all sorts of interesting people. You can get pretty lucky in the dining car if you're traveling alone being sat with cool people with interesting stories to tell, or passing a covert bottle of whiskey back and forth with a stranger. There's a camaraderie you get on the train you never get in a car or on a plane, something more and more important the more fractured and divisive we get. People of all classes and backgrounds, mixed in a comfy tube with nothing better to do than to talk to each other.
Adding 3 more tracks would be a gigantic capital investment in never-used capacity.
The death spiral can sometimes be real, but lack of focus also is a death spiral. Amtrak has been around since the 1970s and most of the improvements to the east coast have been obviously needed and yet haven't happened. While we can (many do) debate what route to run new rails, what is the most important step to take first, and many other details, the big picture is the same to all observers.
Of course the reality is Amtrak exists for political reasons. Probably more realistic is to split Amtrak into two parts (with completely different leadership), one with the goal of making the east cost work well, and one with the goal of political appeasing people on in the middle of nowhere. The way you run the two systems needs to be very different and so there is no reason to keep them together as the concerns of each is a distraction from the other.
The money problem is in large part lack of money for capital expenditures, which Amtrak wouldn't have with a pure-NEC system anyways. The capital expenditure is going to have to come from Congress, and it's a lot easier to beg money from Congress if it isn't seen as purely benefiting rich coastal leftist elites.
> While we can (many do) debate what route to run new rails, what is the most important step to take first, and many other details, the big picture is the same to all observers.
Having read several transit enthusiast blogs, I will assure you that the big picture is not the same to all observers. The viewpoint of most enthusiasts tends to boil down to "just build something and people will get excited about it," whereas people like Alon Levy have instead argued that the real issue is that the US is relying on a century-old mindset of how to run trains and somewhere between ignorant and irrationally dismissive of how foreign countries run their superior modern rail systems.
Rail in the US could definitely use a model system to prove out it's viability. The biggest ongoing project is California's and that's shaping up to be a disaster.
Further the tracks in NA are designed to carry weight rather than for speed. The design considerations are quite different.
For instance, the Austrian Federal Railway operates a pair of overnight trains from Innsbruck and Vienna to Dusseldorf and Hamburg, which also transport cars. The only possible routes you can take your car on are Innsbruck-Dusseldorf and Vienna-Hamburg.
Meanwhile, as a foot passenger you can also get on or off at an intermediate stop like Cologne or Munich.
Foot passengers can also travel Innsbruck-Hamburg or Vienna-Dusseldorf (as sleeping cars are switched between the two trains in Nuremberg, but car carrying wagons aren't).