2mo ago

You vs the person they tell you not to worry about

101 comments

It really is crazy how bad the US rail system is. The last time I was taking a trip of about 1000 miles, I looked into taking amtrak. Not only was it more expensive than driving or flying, but it would take significantly longer as well, at 3 days. I know the train themselves are moving faster, and it's due to stops, but that's like 15mh average speed. What year is it?!?
- Actually, the trains aren't moving faster. I don't think there's a single significant span of passenger rail rated for more than 60mph in the US.
  
  Plus commuter trains get delayed frequently to make way for cargo trains.
  
  NY to DC is solid, it’s the one inter-metro train I’ve taken that’s faster than driving or flying (when accounting for security and travel to/from the airport).
  Using it really makes you realize how much better the train system could be. Not even bullet trains, and they’re so much better than cars.
  
  Brightline from Orlando to Miami. It's not fast by international standards but certainly more than 60mph
  It's also super expensive so....
  
  The NEC (Acela) is for most of its track, however it’s the same deal only at a higher level.
  In theory it’s high speed rail, but only about 50 miles is actually rated at 150 mph, the rest is various speeds lower. There’s some century+ old infrastructure taking it down to like 25 mph in spots. Average speeds end up more like 70 mph.
- I'm about to board a 12 hour Amtrak ride from Boston to Richmond. It's a miserable trip (I've done it once before) but for two people round trip it cost us $300 less than any flights we could find when we were looking for tickets a month ago.
  
  I was going from ind to den. The cheapest was $600 round trip. A flight is $150-300 and driving would have cost about $450 in gas. Flight and drive would have me arriving the same day.
  
  Northeast coordinator is where Amtrak is at its best. Their coverage of the rest of the country is only barely worthwhile on cost and time.
- It really is crazy how bad the US rail system is.
  It's also crazy to think that at some point in history, it used to be one of the best in the world. And then it got screwed by oil barons.
- As far as I know, Amtrak doesn't own any of its own rails. It leases access from freight hauling railroads. Because of this relationship, the freight lines always prioritize their own trains over Amtrak. So Amtrak will always suffer until this changes.
- As bad as it is, when it does work out, it's way, way better than flying.
  Took a trip to Minneapolis on Amtrak from Columbus, WI (closest station to my house in Madison). Everything is so much more low key than air travel. Seats are fairly comfy, and have legroom that might even beat first class air travel. Food is . . . no worse than airlines.
  Most of all, I didn't feel tired at the end of the trip. Air travel always makes me want to spend the rest of the day in bed.
  We'd probably go out of Wisconsin Dells next time. It takes the train an hour to go between the Dells and Columbus, and the extra drive time is less than that. But we also found this wonderful pizzeria not far from the station in Columbus, so idk.
  
  I just don't have the leave to spend 6 of my leave days simply riding a train or waiting at stations.
  
  That's only like a 4 hr drive though. I drive farther than that for quick overnight trips all the time.
  
  If you have the time, Amtrak is a pleasant way to go. You are right about the seats. They are very comfortable and it is nice to walk around on the train and stretch your legs.
  My most recent trip on Amtrak was from Effingham IL to Chicago. They only bad part about the trip was the last couple of miles in Chicago. The train stops just a mile or two away from Union Station and we had to wait quite a bit until it was our turn to move into the station.
  Edit: I have been corrected by another commenter below. Amtrak owns rails in the NE corridor. Which explains why it operates so much better there.
- That's not any better in Europe. This is just a random map of some rail tracks. Trying getting from Porto to Rome by train. On this map it would appear as there should be multiple routes. In reality you'll be lucky to get it done in 3 days.

It's funny how you see American movies about the old times and there's always a train around, but in fact it was the people being around the train.
- Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a documentary. Not the toon town stuff. The part about the judge buying the trolley so he could shut it down to build a highway. We used to have a better rail system than anywhere else. Then the car and oil companies bought the tracks and paved over them in the 1920s to 1950s
  
  "Who needs a car in LA? We got the best public transportation system in the world!"
  
  A perfect example of this is the Boston T. It's half the size it was 100 years ago and is still considered the 3rd best transportation network in the country, with a full 50% of all daily commutes to Boston happening on the T.
  
  Although honestly the feuding between the various tram/rail/bus companies contributed to their demise.
- Actually, every American town founded before 1950 had a train line going through it. Aside from people living on homesteads, and maybe some small antebellum towns, everybody lived in close distance to a train station before they were shut down and torn up.
  Worth noting that this map is for passenger rail only. The cargo rail network is much bigger. Basically, this map shows whereever Amtrak runs, where as before the introduction of massively subsidized interstates in the US in 1956, every cargo rail company also ran profitable passenger rail traffic on a massive network that became today's cargo lines.
  The cargo companies dumped their traffic onto the federal government in the 70s and have also ran massive cost cutting programs since, tearing up hundreds of thousands of miles of rail.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_rail_transportation_in_the_United_States
  
  What the US has that Europe doesn't is protected former trackbeds - European governments go around salting the earth after closing a railway so when they want to reopen it in 30 years they either can't or have to spend billions. The US can just reopen it.
  
  Another major event in the decline of passenger rail was the elimination of railway post office contracts in 1968 which heavily subsidized passenger transport by also transporting mail
  Then the failed merger of the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad(second largest bankruptcy in the country to date, only eclipsed by Enron who simply moved numbers in spreadsheets so do they even count?) created a true crisis as suddenly a significant portion of the eastern US could cease to have rail service
  On a related but unrelated note, watching Miles in Transit videos where they take intercity buses, its clear that intercity buses are in danger of ceasing to exist, and he advocates for nationalization. Its hard to imagine such a national bus network as anything but an incredible expansion for Amtrak, greatly improving throughway services and likely improving the quality of bus service. Links here and here(timestamp to the retrospective where he advocates for nationalization)

Veiny ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Iberia needs to keep up, damn it!
- Spain has the second largest high speed rail network in the world. They're doing alright.
  
  High speed rail is worthless if you don't have the local rail to support it. That's where the most traffic occurs by far, with millions of passengers per day. Compare that with the capacity of a few dozen high speed trains and they're a mere drop in the bucket when it comes to mass transit.
  
  So, then explain to me how long would it take by train from Bilbao to Vigo.
  On that map above we can clearly see a train route. Can I take a train on it?
- They make up for what they don't have in volume by having crazy cheap and fast trains instead.
  They also build them remarkably cheap as well. We should all be envious of Spain.
  Portugal not included on account of being an Eastern European country
- Seriously what are they even doing, Siesta?

thats what you get when you put car and oil billionaires in charge
- that’s part of it, but also the continental US is massive and divided by two pretty impactful mountain ranges. Not defending our lack of train infrastructure but we came of age pretty much in line with the rise of the Jet era along with our culture of individualism and the massive expansion of public interstate hiways due to one specific president’s expierence as them being useful tools for self powered land based military vehicles so obviously that was prioritized over investing in new rail infrastructure in the interceding years.
  Point being, there’s a lot of spinning plates involved with why we are where we are in regards our national rail network—would be nice to hop on an hourly train and zoop from Boston to LA in 6 hrs for like $50 but we also just elected Trump again for incomprehensible reasons so in all likelihood there will be a nuclear wasteland in between those two cities, which will need additional plates to be spun up to deal with.
  
  The USA is a lot older than 70 years, so no the USA did not come of age in the jet era. It would be a lot more accurate to say that the modern USA came together in the age of trains, because it was trains that connected east + west together (+the bits in the middle). There used to be passenger trains between all major cities + many towns literally grew around the railways. That train infrastructure is still there, but now there are just very few passenger lines running on them.
  
  Isn't the USA about the same size as Europe? I think Europe might actually be bigger. We also have a bunch of mountain range dividing up our continent too.
  (Not denying the rest of your comment, just pointing out)

God damnit I hate cars bro
- I feel you bro. Especially the endless stroads and parking lots. We lost a lot to make a suburbia we can't even take ownership of.

I’m curious about this map because I definitely live near passenger rail and it’s not showing here.
- Non-Amtrak line? I think this is Amtrak specific. There are a few bits of passenger service in the US outside Amtrak, but it wouldn't add much to this map.
- The US map are all Amtrak services and the European map all mainline railways.

I'm more worried about all the lightning bolts Chicago can shoot out to the rest of the country.
- He pulls out a knife, you pull out lightning powers. That's the Chicago way.

all rails lead to chicago.

And it's crazy to think that Europe would fit into North America many times. I would like to see the NA city subways/trains added then compare them to Asia
- ???
  
  North America is more than the continental USA.
  Canadian passenger service isn't much better than the US. Mexico isn't too bad.
- Most of the euro side of that map, fits into texas alone. The USA has shit rails but acting like Europe has even half the distance that's needed to cover the usa like it looks in this map is dishonest.
  
  What the fuck are you on about
  
  Just France covers most of Texas.
  
  Texas is about the size of France, with The Netherlands tacked on. Europe would fit east of the Mississippi, not in the second largest state.
  Alaska, however, is bigger than Europe

Where we're going, we won't need roads!

https://www.arcgis.com/apps/mapviewer/index.html?webmap=96ec03e4fc8546bd8a864e39a2c3fc41
- This needs to be higher. The US has the most rail in the world, at over ~~224,000 miles~~ 257,000 km according to Wikipedia or 149,000 according to Statistica. ~~Europe, by comparison, has 94,000 miles.~~ the European Union, by comparison, has around 200,000 km recently according to Statistica. ~~That's one country having more rail than the total of a whole continent.~~ The original numbers came from Florida, which automatically makes them suspicious, but these ones are still pretty impressive.
  The map down in the meme appears to only be Amtrak.
  
  Amtrak service.
  Amtrak owns the Northeast Corridor (Boston to DC) track and not much else
  
  The map on the meme is fake both ways
  https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:World_railway_network.svg#mw-jump-to-license
  Anyway, where did you get the numbers? I’m interested

There's an Amtrak station served by two trains a day within walking distance of my house. I've never once taken that train because according to Amtrak it can't be done. I've tried several times. I'm planning a trip across country, maybe to go visit someone. Hey let's try taking the train. Raleigh NC to Altoona PA...can't be done. Those stations aren't on the same route, and the trip planner on their website can't say "Take the Silver Star to Grand Central in New York then wait around 7 hours then take the Pennsylvanian to Altoona." Neither of these trains will spend much time at 70 miles per hour, both will end up sitting on sidings waiting for freight trains to go by, you've got to catch the train when it goes by at 6 AM or 10 PM, you're going to spend two days on a journey you can do by highway in 8 hours, and it actually costs a little more.
- I've seen an Amtrak passenger train on the rails where I live once. It was like seeing a unicorn. Can see freight trains pretty much every day (most of the rails here are through granaries and other farm shit where they load the cars).

Can you drive 120km/h in those areas if you don’t take the train?
I don’t take the train here even though I have one because it takes too long. A 3-4 hr car trip takes all day with the train having to makes its stops.
The closest large city is 50 miles (80km) away. I can be there in 45min to an hour depending on traffic. The train takes almost three hours.
Also, there is no public transportation to get to the train stop which is on the bad side of town and there’s no station to wait inside.
- You know the difference? I don't have to actually drive when I take the train. I can do literally anything else, especially if wireless is available.
  It's like people who say, "I don't need a dishwasher, I can wash them in half the time!". Yeah, sure, but I don't have to fucking wash them. Not to mention the environmental and health benefits which, incidentally, works for trains too.
  
  Do what? Listen to music, a podcast or watch a show? Things I already do driving. I hate travelling. I just want to be there. Anything more than 500 miles it’s better to fly anyway. The price difference is negligible.
  Not to mention trains are subsidised by the government yet still cost more than gas even driving a huge SUV.
  Ironically I have a dishwasher but don’t use it. I stick to takeout and paper plates/ platicware. Because it’s faster and easier than doing dishes. You’re right, not only do I not have to do dishes, I don’t have to cook or clean up either.
- I can go to Paris (500 km) by train in about three hours. That train is musch faster thatn you'd be allowed to drive.

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