I once decided to take the train from Denver to Chicago rather than flying. Just to see the country.
One train per day.
Just fucking one train per day.
Amtrak, and the dots in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Illinois saw this and added just a second train between Msp And Chicago daily and ridership exploded, trains sold out. A frequent thing that they do to save money is cut trips, but it’s doing so much more harm than good. They’re now finally realizing that if you want ridership people want options, they want to be able to arrive close to when they want, and some may want to just show up day of and ask when the next train is.
Here in Seattle they just added a 5th or 6th roundtrip to Portland because each time they do, ridership goes up. Turns out there’s a lot of people who would rather not drive.
Don’t hate on Amtrak, they have been beaten to pulp by lack of interest and investment but still are making meaningful improvements every year.
One of the biggest issue is that rail was privatised way back when and the cargo rail got the ownership of the tracks. This just means that products, patient as they are get priority.
The North East corridor is getting tunnels rebuilt, added frequency. North Carolina has funded a major rail extension and so on. It’s very slow but it might be necessary for it be that way to not attract attention from the GOP. Slow incremental gains until it reaches escape velocity.
It shouldn’t be that way but Amtrak is doing well considering how little help they’ve gotten.
Driver here! I love my car, she is incredible and comfy and has an amazing sound system.
…if I have the option, 100% bus or train, I don’t want to drive. I’d much rather put on noise cancelling headphones and zone out and read or something then pilot a deathmobile (who, I will repeat, I love her very much because she’s best)
Apparently the situation with freight is the opposite, where the US networks are efficient compared to Europe (and even China), hence so much stuff is trucked across Europe instead.
As always, take YT videos with grains of salt, but it makes good points:
Meanwhile, other videos suggest that the US’s own passenger rail suppliers (like manufacturers/designers) are basically gone because the situation is so bad, hence companies like Amtrak end up importing EU stuff.
The way I understand it in the states is that all the rail lines are freight lines, and amtrack shares the rails. I’ve taken amtrak before and had to stop for like 15 minutes for a freight train because they have the right of way
AFAIK passenger trains have priority. But they have a lot of single rail infrastructre and freight games the system with trains that are too long for passing sidings, so the passenger trains have to wait.
bUt tHe US Is a yOunGEr coUnTrY! wE haVeN’t HaD mUCh TiMe tO caTcHuP.
I always find this one funny as perhaps more than any other nation railways massively shaped how the US grew into what it is today.
Looks at China over the last 10 years…
And as a Canadian, I’m even envious of the trains in the US. Pretty much the only thing but here we are.
Anecdote time: I was visiting Europe, sitting in Liège and arrived there from Aachen with a train ticket I bought the day before. My next step was Brussels or Ghent but I wasn’t decided yet and didn’t have a ticket, so I just bought one on the spot for the next train, in an hour. While eating fast food and waiting for that train, I was trying to book a train in Canada next week when I’d return, to go from Montréal to Drummondville. However I was already too late. There was still available tickets but there were over $100 CAD for a trip that would normally cost about $32 CAD if I would have booked it a month in advance. And the next departure was 3 hours later, still overpriced. So, no train in Canada for me, even a week in advance.
In short, in Canada, there’s only 5 trains a day between major cities, and you have to book weeks in advance otherwise the prices can triple if you’re last minute. And they don’t take bikes. And they weigh your bagage.
So I was in Europe, taking trains last minute here and there, while unable to book a train ticket at a reasonable price for the next week in Canada. VIA Rail sucks so much.
Germany used to have more 30 years ago. Scheiß Kohl und Schröder
France too :'( Putain de Chirac et Sarkozy.
For the unaware:
In the small town where I grew up, the train station got turned into a supermarket + gas station + mcdonalds (yes, really 🤮 ). To take a train to anywhere else in France, you first have to drive 25 minutes (not the longest, but really defeats the point of taking local / regional trains).
Goes to show how successful the oil and automobile lobbyists. The US passenger railway network is a fucking flop. When will they finally use electric locomotive instead of the pollution belching diesel electrics.
Wasn’t always this way
Why is no one concerned that europe has taken the place of mexico??? Where is mexico now??? How is this not international news?
It’s an exchange program so that the Scandinavians can learn to cook Mexican food for us
I find it interesting that there’s a noticeable difference in rail density between western Europe and former Warsaw pact countries, despite rail being important for Soviet union logistics. In top of that, Russian rail is severely lacking today.
Could it be a rail gauge issue where eastern rail standard caused development to be prohibitively more expensive?
Its not too different. Your perception is thrown off by that very dense tangle around Germany, but then Germany was a very early adopter of railways having passed proto-railway technology to Britain in the first place, then via the personal union of the British and Hanoverian thrones got modern railways in return from the mid-18th century.
And still here in Europe they are not a meaningful alternative to the plane. Taking for example an Amsterdam to Barcelona is an exhausting 12-14h deal (almost 10x as long) and 5x more expensive.
What we need is express trains that go from A to B without stopping anywhere, avoiding city centres and constantly running max speed. If I’m going to Barcelona I don’t want to stop in Schiphol, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Brussels, and various cities in France. There should just be a dedicated departure just for that (and judging by how many planes go back & forth daily these trains could certainly be filled). This would cut down on that exhausting travel time a lot. But we lack the high-speed network capacity for that. And won’t have it for at least 15 years even if they decided to build them now :( So planes it is.
The will never be enough capacity to connect capitals with no intermediate stops. And let me tell you, it’s in general a stupid idea.
12h is not a big deal if travelled overnight. Which is currently not possible. So this what we really miss, not constant 300 km/h direct connections.
And of course, we need to stop taxing passenger rail companies. And maybe re-nationalise them, while we are at it. Forcing free market in the railway has been one of the biggest mistakes of the European Union.
There was a concept I thought was neat. Imagine around stops you had a parallel set of tracks with cars that would connect to the train and passengers would have X number of minutes to transfer between the parallel trains before they decouple.
So a ‘fast lane’ train wouldn’t actually stop, it would just couple to another train that does pretty much nothing but transfer passengers to and from the stop.
Though the reality is that would require a lot of work when the counter argument can be “fly a plane direct instead”
The Nightjet trains from La Spezia (Italy) goes both to Wien and München, as it splits in Villach.
On the opposite direction, the train from München is coupled with the one from Wien.Why is it not done more often? Because coupling trains is a security operation, and it takes time (1h+).
On top of that, modern trains are a fixed composition that you cannot couple and decouple as you like.Note this concept was about a hypothetical design and infrastructure. That coupling would be horizontal and occurring while moving and using train designs that didn’t yet exist.
I said interesting, not necessarily practical. It’s something we might have tried to do if we didn’t have direct flights as a viable option.
honestly I wouldn’t mind it taking 12 hours, but it also being more expensive just doesn’t make any sense at all. Europe needs to stop subsidizing air travel and needs to up its rail subsidies
It also doesn’t acknowledge that a lot of that is just empty space. The US is ranked 180 of 242 nations in population density.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
The US rail system has been bastardized since its inception, but this map is basically useless. The UK has 7x the population density as the US.
Ok… so why isnt the east coast covered in rails? The western states pulls the average way down.
The East coast is covered in rails. There’s an Amtrak station within walking distance of my house. We have a high speed rail line in the Northeast Corridor and have for decades.
Are we looking at the same image?
Actually, I realize we’re not looking at the same map. Those are the passenger routes. I’m thinking of railways. We’ve got more rail than that, we just don’t run passenger trains on them.
All roads lead to… Chicago?
As someone who grew up in Chicago, it has a wonderful rail system. The “US not having public rail” argument always confused me when I was young because I figured everywhere was like Chicago
Yeah but what about the size difference between the two countries?
… Oh wait…
But Europe actually has a slightly larger land area than the united states? aproximately 3.9 million square miles as opposed to aproximately 3.5 million square miles.
I mean yes this does show passenger trains but it doesn’t actually show all of the passenger trains such as the lines that run in Utah nor south well over a hundred miles carrying passengers for commuter purposes. So there’s quite a few lines that are missing on here there’s also lines that run up and down the East Coast I know as well and there’s other passenger trains and other cities such as salt lake as well.
The european map does not show all minor railsystems, I am not 100% sure but it looks more like interregional rails.
In Holland it seems to show them all but it probably differs by country.
One thing we are really really bad at in Europe is homogenising rail systems. Every country does its own thing, like voltage, signalling systems, sometimes even with their own gauge (e.g. spain). Only the high speed lines are fairly commonised.
There’s some projects going on like the ETCS safety system but they go at a snail’s pace because there’s so much installed base and design by a 25-country committee that are all trying to rope in their own industry ties is a slow process.
