I've taken multiple Amtrak routes, all out of the Northeast Corridor but eventually crossing the country West or South.
You don't take Amtrak because you want to get there fast, and you don't really take it because it's cheaper than flying. You take it because you can, and because it's more important to you to be (comparatively) comfortable instead of rushing from A to B. You take it because of the sights, the people, the chance encounters, the proximity to city centers that airplanes can never hope to match. It's an experience in and of itself that's distinctly foreign to many Americans, and one I wholeheartedly recommend.
Sitting in a roomette, crossing from Boston to LA over a long weekend, sharing delicious meals with total strangers as the countryside whizzed by (or we sat on a siding waiting on a freight train).
For what it's worth, I love trains, and the romance of them, but I ALSO love taking it from Oakland or Richmond to Sacramento and sipping a beer while I look through the window at all the poor saps stuck on I-80. I've had that drive take 4+ hours before on a Friday, especially when people are headed to Tahoe.
This is not really true, at least for the northeast corridor. Amtrak is the fastest way to get from DC to NYC for example due to traffic in the city if driving or taking the bus, and the distance from the airport (LGA or JFK) to the final destination in the city if you're flying. I take Amtrak somewhat begrudgingly because it often can be way more expensive than flights which are subsidized generally speaking over passenger rail these days, because it's simply faster.
And I honestly don't know what adventures people are talking about, most people keep to themselves. I've had more stranger experiences on flights than I have on Amtrak but maybe it's different in the West Coast.
This only applies to sleeper car routes. You're on the traib for 2-3 days, mostly with no cell service. If you eat in the restaurant car, they will seat you with strangers. If you sit in the observation car, there's a bunch of other people sitting there too.
I did NY to Miami 18 months ago having spent a week in Washington/NY and was due for 3 days in Miami before flying home.
Saturday morning in NY looking at a few sights I hadn't seen (Trinity Church), then a relaxing train down to Miami. Beat flying and spending Sunday in a hotel room.
I didn't sit with anyone else in the restaurant car, but that does sound an interesting way to meet people from a whole different world. The Friday night in NY though I did sit at a bar next to other people, so I guess that was horrifying?
Had i been that against it though there was an option to eat in my room.
And creeping along for hours at 25mph because you're following a freight train is frustrating in its own way, even if you have a comfortable seat and food and drink.
I spent the entire trip on the Acela Express first class (work was paying) from NYC to Boston talking to an absolutely fascinating man headed to his 60th MIT reunion.
I spent the entire trip (including a 4 hour delay where we didn’t move) in the cheap seats from Atlanta to New Orleans smelling the farts of someone with serious GI issues while a college kid walked up and down the aisle spraying axe body spray to drown out the smell.
I usually take the Regional on my own dime though last trip I got a deal on the return leg on Acela. The downside of Amtrak for me is that the Boston south suburban station is an hour drive in basically the wrong direction. But I hate hate driving into Manhattan.
Do you ever consider driving to New Haven and taking Metro North the rest of the way? IIRC it's as fast as Amtrak if you're on the Super Express train.
I have considered it. I’ve never done it. Parking used to be an issue for some of the commuter rail stations but I understand it isn’t in New Haven at this point. Also about twice as long a drive but likely more efficient overall.
Many many years ago I took the train from San Luis Obispo to Sacramento and enjoyed a meal in the dining car, with set times and seating assignments. It was a really interesting conversation with my randomly chosen tablemates. Sadly I don't think they do that anymore.
it's very expensive though. i used to live in philly close to 30th and had a reason to go up to nyc regularly close to penn, essentially perfect for taking amtrak, but ended up taking boltbus just because the price difference was very significant and time wise it was only like 30-45min slower.
Pro tip for those who like risk and are traveling regularly for non timely purposes they have dynamic pricing that rewards literal last 5m. I do Amtrak for like $15-40 NYC-PHL. You have to be signed in to the app otherwise they won't give you the sweetheart deal. Refresh reguarly the price changes constantly in the last 3-4h though I'll typically rock up to Penn and buy one 10m before.
Toll roads are profitable. They are basically money-printers in fact. More/all of our expressways should be toll roads IMO. Then the people who use them will pay for them, and there will be money to keep them in good repair without needing appropriations from the general fund.
Small thing - I generally haven't seen tolled motorways called Freeways - but I haven't lived in the US in a long time. I'm familiar with turnpikes of course, and a tolled motorway in Orange County, CA.
> An 18 hour highspeed NYC to LA train would be amazing.
Often I think of the cut intro scene for "Escape From New York" where Snake robs some sort of bank and then escape in the inter state subway[0]. That future is grim but at least they got high speed long distance underground subways.
High speed around the world rarely gets people taking more than about a 5 hour trip. I'm sure a few would take such a train, but not near enough to make it worth the cost of building an maintaining it. In the mean time everyone talking about that distracts from building transportation that people would use.
If you want trains in the US then you need to focus on the DC-NYC-Boston route - this should be an obvious route with affordable high speed trains every 10 minutes all day. You also need to get local trains to stop bloating the costs such that nothing but the most dense areas can afford to build them. Solve those and then start focusing on areas where trains are harder.
Well, you can take it because it's cheaper than flying. Prices are comparable to the dirtiest, cheapiest dirt cheap flights with no checked baggage, carry-ons etc., but with more space, free wifi + (often) functional mobile data, better amenities, no TSA, and all the luggage you can carry. It's amazing being able to bring a whole guitar in a gig bag without having to worry about it at all.
The romance of it is wonderful too, but even from a purely practical standpoint the only real downsides are the slow speed and inconsistent arrival times.
At $5000 vs $2000 to take my family someplace over Christmas break (when the kids are off school flight costs go up because everyone else is trying to take their kids on vacation at the same time) I'll pay the time. I seriously considered driving instead (which would have been cheaper, and perhaps faster).
Agree except for the meals. They are just OK. The experience of talking to other people on the train can be nice but the food itself is not “delicious”.
If you really like to have good food when you travel, the dining car wears thin quite quickly. I lament the lack of options for better food (I would happily pay more).
I was massively impressed by the food when I took it, certainly as good as any restaurant my expenses policy even attempts to allow me to eat in, and I'd say better than most first class on BA which I've flown a few times, other than the fixed meal times (in F on BA you can eat whenever you want)
> The train is still longer, and time is money, we are taught. But certainty has value, too, even if it means at 11:29 p.m. departure.
Unfortunately this is misleading. Outside of the Northeast Acela corridor, there is no certainty in train travel in the U.S..
Although legally passenger trains are now supposed to have right of way over freight trains, in practice that’s just not the case. So a 14.5 hr train journey can easily be delayed by several hours.
So I took a consulting job in a small town in Illinois called Quincy. I couldn't fly there without connecting in St. Louis, but I could take the train from Chicago. It was billed at 6 hours.
It absolutely left on time but had to wait for three freight trains on the way. 9 hours later we got to the "station". One of the other passengers said that their previous trip was cancelled and Amtrak bought everyone bus tickets.
In the Midwest, there are no guarantees with trains other than you'll get there. Eventually.
From talking to people there, it seems like Quincy itself was less destroyed by politics and more just sort of left to rot by families with "important names" in the area who are resistant to change.
No idea which is accurate, that's just a consistent theme from almost every conversation when I was consulting there.
Common pattern in small-ish towns, where there is a core of older wealthy people who are stereotypical NIMBYs running everything, and who want to keep their quaint little town as it is. Problem is that forces all the young people to move away to find opportunity, and then 50 years later the town is dying.
Yeah if I can add. The lack of anything for someone 18-24 years old there was kind of startling. There is zero incentive for youth to stay in that town other than family, I suppose. But the weird thing was, it was kind of a joke. Nobody took it seriously. They just kind of laughed and rolled their eyes.
>So I took a consulting job in a small town in Illinois called Quincy.
Adams Internet/Telco/Fiber? Same. It always impressed me how early they were to fiber to the home down there in southwestern IL. ~15 years ago I made that same trip: Chicago down to Quincy then over to Steeleville and then to St Louis to drop off the rental car and fly back home. They really make the Coop system work out there.
Not them but I was legit impressed by the fiber coverage. They have towns of like 30 people with gig access, and all the roads between access points as well. It's kind of astonishing.
Seeing their setup is actually what spurred me to put together a coop at home to run fiber for the county.
Adams definitely knows what they're doing when it comes to managing resources in a rural area
The even more impressive thing is that they've had gig fiber for at least a decade, 15+ years. My town (nowhere near as rural) got us gig to the home municipal fiber 3-4 years ago, so 15 years was really impressive. I used to do sys admin consulting for them, they had really great people.
Freight is all you have in some places in the midwest. Ohio, for example, used to have some very cool passenger railway stations. Unfortunately now there is basically zero passenger rail in the entire state.
Haha hours. There is no upper bound. The average Amtrak delay on Norfolk Southern is 19 minutes per 100 miles. And the worst cases are all horror stories. A freight operator sidetracks Amtrak while a miles-long coal train rolls through at a jogging pace. The coal train breaks down. The Amtrak crew can't legally operate any more because of federal time limits. You are 1000 miles from a city in the middle of nowhere and by the time they dispatch another crew to your train you've been surviving on Fritos for days.
> Although legally passenger trains are now supposed to have right of way over freight trains, in practice that’s just not the case
Amtrak has right-of-way over freight trains if they are claiming their pre-allocated rail time slot. If a freight train is already on the track at its own scheduled time, it's going to take it, regardless of scheduling priority.
Unfortunately, Amtrak is independently dysfunctional (I'm sorry, it's true, it's led by people who don't know anything about trains) and is rarely on time even independent of rail congestion, so they show up at times they weren't scheduled, and the lateness compounds as they get further delayed by congestion.
I was looking at Tucson to Seattle trip on a relatively short notice - all sleeping tickets were sold out multiple weeks in advance. And due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat.
For fun, I just got prices for taking my family to Tucson from Portland, a trip we took last week by airplane. It was relatively expensive from what I'm used to for a trip between two cities on the same end of the country, about $2500 total. Nonstop, just under 3 hours flight time. Amtrak would be about half that for a coach ticket. But as you point out, a coach ticket for a 40-45 hour trip is impractical. So I picked a family room (when possible, which was not on every segment). $7000. HAHAHAHAHAHA. I could waste money on first class plane tickets and still pay less than half that.
My fever dream for the past two decades has been an interstate "road train" roll-on/roll-offstation network where cars are towed at moderate speed for comfort (45-55 mph) on extremely long flat bed trailers between cities so people don't have to pay attention to the road between cities and can sleep or relax.
due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat
I don't know what this anti-train propaganda is going on in this post, but this is laughable. All of the seats are sleepers on Amtrak at least. I went from Cincinnati to San Diego without a sleeper.
Different people have different standards. I've done many sleeper trips and several coach trips across the country over the years. Coach was fine when I was a teenager, now that I'm approaching 40, I'll pass.
Round-trip coach on Amtrak from Indianapolis to Las Vegas* in my early 20s is definitely a fun thing I'll never do again.
One of the friends I was with threw in the towel and bought a plane ticket home, though to be fair she was traveling with her 18-month-old daughter at the time and it's honestly a testament to youthful indiscretions that she even went along with the plan in the first place!
Personally, I find driving to be a much better way to see the US than trains, especially if you avoid interstate highways.
Living in Indiana with much of my family on the east and west coasts, I actually prefer driving
Like Amtrak, driving is rarely cheaper than flying, especially when traveling alone on a multi-day trip if you're not willing to sleep at rest areas and don't have friends to stay with at convenient points along the way.
For reference, from Indy, on the interstate, NYC is an easy one-day trip (~12 hours), and LA is a long but viable two-day trip with a stop in Denver (~15 hours/day), but SF and the Pacific Northwest are pushing it even in two days. Taking non-interstate routes can take much longer, especially when traveling through the mountains or major metro areas.
* Actually from Chicago to Needles, CA, with a bus between Indy and Chicago and a van between Needles and Vegas, because Amtrak didn't even offer service to Indy or Vegas at the time.
We should nationalize the rail lines, ensure Positive Train Control is mandatory, invest in the rails and sidetracks to allow for faster trains and less traffic jams.
It could be structured so the current owners don't lose money on the deal but America gets a faster, better utilized train system. So much winning!
America has the best fright system in the world. The other countries you are looking at have a great humans on train system, but freight is much worse because of it. Humans and freight generally want very difference things from transportation and so they should not be mixed at all.
I am in no way suggesting that the freight traffic be diminished, in fact it should be increased. We can have both but the rail owners only care about their immediate profits and have shown to be reckless with their management via deferring maintenance, improper staffing, and not investing in improving it.
It does not, but it has a sane scheduling agreement with the railroad which the railroad actually respects.
This is a common misconception because Brightline’s parent company Florida East Coast Industries shares heritage with Florida East Coast Railway, but the companies were split in 2007.
This also includes some images that aren't part of the netscape.com version... which is probably part of the point of it: "A view of America from the tracks" has some pictures of Amtrak stations and Virginia countryside.
Imagine if we had passenger rail like Asia does, it would be amazing. But sadly it's all a matter of political will, the US simply does not want to create such a rail system where we can take bullet trains from NYC to LA.
There is no world where bullet trains between NYC and LA would make any financial sense at all. The trains can't possibly go fast enough for passengers to be satisfied with the speed (even maglev isn't fast enough), and the cost of track construction and maintenance would never be paid for by ridership.
I live in Japan; bullet trains are great here, but the distances they cover are quite short by American standards. Extremely high ridership, with trains covering relatively short distances between extremely populated population centers (the Tokyo metro area has 38 million people for reference) means the trains operate at a profit. That could be done in America, maybe, but only between select cities that aren't too far apart, such as DC and NYC and Boston. Even here in Japan, no one is taking the shinkansen between far-apart cities in the north and south; they use inexpensive and faster domestic flights instead.
In China it's a matter of politics rather than financial sense, of unifying the country hence why they have them in ethnic minority areas too. The trains would be like roads, sure, most people wouldn't take them from one end to the other, A to Z, but there are enough people to take them from A to D, J to N, Q to T, so to speak. If one could commute in one hour from Boston to DC for example each way, daily without flying, it opens up more economic opportunities in total. But like PG said, the competition to an airline isn't a car or a plane, it's Zoom.
Yes, I can see how some people might think the same system would work in the US too, with a HSR network going from Boston to LA, with stops along the way in NYC, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, Denver, and maybe some smaller cities too.
But China has a much larger population than the US, by far, and an authoritarian government that has no problem using the "build it and they will come" business model for large infrastructure projects that may or may not work out as planned and no worry about opposition from local politicians, NIMBYs, etc. Don't forget, most of their population is concentrated on the east coast; the inland areas are relatively unpopulated. And they don't have a population that's been conditioned from birth, ever since the 1940s, to think that automobiles are the mode of transit that society should be based around.
So even if they did build an HSR network across the US, I don't think it would work out. How much travel is there between Denver and St Louis, really? A lot of the intra-US travel is really between places on opposite coasts, or on the same coast, because that's where the population is.
Denver is too far away from any other large city to make HSR work. At the distances involved everyone will fly. Maybe you can make it work within Denver, but not to get to any other state as there is no city of any size anywhere close.
Zoom isn’t a replacement for in-person meetings all of the time but it’s pretty good for a lot of purposes. I’m on a non-profit board and we do have a couple meetings a year when we ask people to try to make it in person but the rest is planned to be virtual.
I heard something like that about the Concorde at the Air and Space Museum. What killed it was not fuel costs, but cheaper long-distance phone calls and fax machines.
But if a country takes the Chinese approach and pushed inexpensive rail as a way to open new economic opportunities, the idea of flying as your daily commute moves from ridiculous to feasible (if you replace the airplane with a train).
No, it was definitely the cost to operate it and the sonic boom associated with flying at that speed. The company operating the Concorde never made a profit.
The thing that killed the Concorde was a fatal crash that killed everyone on board.
The thing was already losing money because it guzzled fuel and was horribly loud and uncomfortable inside, while still costing a fortune for tickets. Not many people really wanted to pay 1st-class fares for worse-than-economy comfort just to shave a couple hours off the flight. Also, the plane could only operate at supersonic speeds over the ocean, so when it flew to/from Texas, it had to operate at subsonic speeds (and guzzle even more fuel because it was inefficient at those speeds), and the average trip time wasn't that much faster than a regular jumbo jet. It had been going downhill for a while, but that fatal crash was the end; they stopped all operations after that.
Sure, better communications might have contributed to its downfall, but that would have affected all air travel; just comparing like-for-like, the Concorde really wasn't a great alternative to the subsonic jumbo jets which became more and more prevalent for transcontinental routes.
> the distances they cover are quite short by American standards
Typical distances are about the same as SanFrancisco-LA, LA-Phoenix, Phoenix-LasVegas, Dallas-Houston, Houston-New Orleans, Portland-Vancouver. The longest service is 650 miles -- around the Atlanta to New York, Chicago to Washington DC, San Francisco to Portland, Austin to Kansas City
I’ve taken this line - as many have and do all the time. Ride it once and you’ll realize why it’s the better way to travel in every way but cost and time - and both of those are a result of the United State unwillingness to fully fund something like Amtrak.
As the author states traveling by train just a more pleasant experience.
I should note that even though there is technically wifi on every Amtrak train, it’s cellular based. You’ll find that at least from atlanta to NY, the train somehow threads the needle between cellular ranges. Both your phone and of course the train will often be either out of range of fast cellular service or out of range altogether. Supposedly Amtrak is getting starlink but we’ll see. So, don’t expect to be getting on any video calls.
Years ago I tried to book a train from San Francisco to Chicago as part of a trip I had planned but found it to be more expensive and, more significantly, a multi-day journey instead of a few hours. If you happen to be an American living near one of the useful passenger rail lines, and desire to go to one of the few destinations it can take you to quickly and affordably, more power to you. But most Americans live nowhere near a useful rail system.
I guess so. We took the girls when they were young to Omaha a few times from the Bay Area. I wasn't even sure passenger trains would be around when they were adults so wanted to give them that experience. I took a train between Kansas City and Chicago as a kid and found it magical.
So, yeah, the train ride was actually a significant part of the experience for those particular vacations.
> and both of those are a result of the United State unwillingness to fully fund something like Amtrak.
What kind of funding are we looking at? Is the issue that this is cost-prohibitive for reasons of scale that make this non-competitive for businesses themselves to fund as compared to elsewhere?
Amtrak was created to preserve the last vestiges of passenger rail when private businesses pulled out. It has conflicting missions so it's never going to be competitive in service.
Amtrak does not own its own rail network. It has priority over cargo trains de jure but in practice cargo takes priority. Many areas only have one set of tracks and trains can only pull over onto sidings when they exist. Class 1 railroads are capital intensive so to be more profitable they don't spend any money they don't have to. Such as more sidings, more train yards, not maximizing the length of trains so they fit onto those sidings, or more than one operator per train. Class 1 railroads are focused on cargo and making money, not helping Amtrak trains go first. The government doesn't care to enforce the law either. https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/tracking-productivity...
Amtrak operates routes that suffer from low demand instead of focusing on the New York Washington DC route. It's about counting US Senate votes as much as customer satisfaction or breaking even.
The Federal government heavily subsidized cars starting in the 1950s through the Interstate Highway System. Cars and airliners are considered critical passenger transportation infrastructure, trains are not.
The S-Line project is underway in NC and VA. It will rehabilitate an abandoned line (the former Seaboard Coast Line) to allow faster travel between Raleigh and Richmond. It won't be electrified but will allow trains to run at up to 110 mph/177 kph which is a big improvement over the current 60-70 mph (when the passenger train isn't being delayed by a freight train).
They are currently doing a couple of grade-separation bridge projects in north Raleigh and some minor curve straightening. Since the S-Line is not currently being used they can straighten many of the curves since there won't be any impact to existing operations.
The S-Line right of way is owned by CSX and they will be running freight on it. The budget wasn't there to acquire all of it by NCDOT and VA and dedicate it to passenger service.
I’m curious if a classic starlings antenna works at 100-300 km/h with occasional rotation, or will it need to be mounted on a targeting motor on top of the train?
Having ridden the trains of China fairly extensively and over a long period of time I am essentially ruined for what we have in the US. The older style Chinese trains were fine and I always enjoyed the journey (and remember excitedly riding the maglev when it first opened in Shanghai) but the newer generation of high speed trains is what pushed me from "It would be so pleasant to have this system in the US" to "We are losing out and falling behind the modern world".
Trips that take me 3 hours in normal traffic here would take less than 45 minutes in China... possibly as little as 30 minutes. Trains would be leaving for the main destinations in 15 minute intervals, travel times cut by an order of magnitude, arrivals would be in stations that connect to clean, modern, efficient, inexpensive and safe subway systems.
A typical journey. Hangzhou to Shanghai used to be a 3 hour bus ride for me. On top of that it was 45 minutes from home to the bus station. Now I can walk a few hundred meters to a gleaming, state of the art metro station (seriously, you've never experienced anything like this if you've never left the US), arrive in the ground floor of the train station, catch a glass smooth, spacious high speed train to Shanghai that leaves every 15 minutes and takes only 45 minutes and go downstairs to the subway to travel wherever I need to go in the city (usually within a couple of blocks of whatever destination I have).
We are so far away from this that I find it a bit distressing. We cannot afford it, we cannot overcome the legal and political hurdles to make it happen... we are just going to fall further and further behind.
China can do it because they have a command economy and the government can just take property to do what it wants.
To do this in the USA you'd have a thousand different emminent domain claims to get through, at least some of which will be contested, you'll need to pay the property owners fair market prices for the land you are taking, there will need to be environmental impact studies, planning commission approvals, fights with every interested locality over station locations and ammenities and how many trees will be cut down. China doesn't have to worry about any of that they just do it.
While I don't disagree with you as you described the US situation, many places out there have societies and government regulations closer to the US than China and they have built successful railway networks, including high speed ones. Many countries in Europe, for example.
It might be useful to compare the US with those countries instead, and find out what differs in the US so it's holding it back.
I think this narrative is kinda trueish but I still dislike it because it masks the real problem. Those property rights and review processes don't actually get us any benefit, they just allow a small number of people to grift the state and blow up costs for no reason and frequently for self-enriching nefarious reasons. So it's not like there's an upside to our system. This narrative suggests "well, we don't have great trains but at least we're free, unlike the Chinese" which I think is a load of shit.
People do get railroaded in China, it's true. But people get railroaded here in the USA too, because they have to live next to a loud choking freeway that gives them cancer and alzheimers, instead of a clean train line. And it costs $300 for car payment insurance etc to get anywhere which is basically a tax. 3 children a day have to die in car crashes because our whole society has been captured by the automobile. And in any case, they built all these freeways by railroading immigrant and black communities all over the place anyway. We got the worst of all worlds. Honestly net I think it sucks more than chaiqian because at least under their system you can ride the fucking train.
And even aside from this, China has way more civil engineers than the USA does and those engineers have many large projects under their belts. I think they are also just way better at executing large projects on time and under budget. Their engineers simply are better than ours. They build bigger things faster and cheaper than we do full stop.
The US built stuff though. Not even that long ago.
Subway systems don’t take all that much land from private parties and are effectively too expensive to build here. Not to mention how long they take.
It’s because we decided it must be this way. If we decided (as a society) building stuff was important we could do so. It will take an existential crises for this attitude to shift though.
When you propose building quite literally anything here you will have people saying “no” crawling out of the woodwork. We decided to empower such people both legally and socially.
Los Angeles is building a ton of new subway systems ( I think maybe more than anywhere else in the US ) where it is far from easy. If LA Metro can pull it off then so can elsewhere!
Long-distance passenger rail isn't something we (as a society) want. So it doesn't get built. We still build highways for cars. We still build commuter rail, where population density supports it.
Same. I lived in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China for about 10 years, and I only came back with my wife because we want to buy a house here in the States. After that, we're going back to Japan and China.
The US is so far behind in public infrastructure (trains, pedestrian, cycling, etc) that I can't see the States being a good place NOW, much less the next fifty years.
Delta has round trip flights from ATL->WAS for ~$800
TFA train round trip shows $306 without a private cabin.
TFA already mentioned the time differences.
The googs says it's 638miles doable in 9.5hours. Say an average of 20mpg at $4/gal (I have no idea what current rates are in that part of the country) needs 32gals for $128 one way or $256 to come back. Of course someone needs to drive it.
The train definitely looks like a decent deal for this route. I've priced train rides from my town, and prices look like plane routes but in days instead of hours. The train doesn't make sense all of the time, but I'm holding out hope I'll find a trip where it will make sense.
Like other commenters I was also confused at the "~$800" comment.
I tried this myself, picking a time a few weeks in the future (round trip April 15th to 22nd). Round trip as I'm assuming you'll want to go there and come home.
All of the following info is for ATL to Washington-Area airports (BWI, DCA, IAD). Amtrak is for Atlanta to Washington Union Station
Delta (20+ nonstop a day every 30min or so, ~2hrs flight time):
- ~$244->$304 Main
- ~$444->$504 Comfort+
- ~$769-$974 First
Amtrak (11:29PM->1:47PM, 14h18m):
- $356 Coach
- $1107 Private Room (Roomette)
I'm sure that a more accurate analysis would include a spread of days.
In general, this means that with the train you'd increase your travel time by ~26 hours round trip (over a whole day) while also paying ~$112 more.
(Note that the Amtrak website prices each leg independently while Delta prices round trip, I made sure to go all the way to the cart to gather the end pricing)
I was curious so I also did a trip much sooner (March 30th to April 6th):
Delta:
- $616-$665 Main
- $785-$800 Comfort Plus
- $1065 First (they were all priced the same)
Amtrak:
- $517 Main
- $1369 Private Room (Roomette)
So for a much sooner trip you do save ~$100 for the tradeoff of ~26 hours more time spent.
It's also worth noting that this route's travel occurs primarily at night, in the dark. This means both trying to sleep on a train as well as not being able to see much outside as it'll be dark most of the ride.
Based on the last long trip I did in the U.K. where I averaged 43 miles per US gallon (52mpg) I’m shocked how terrible efficiency is in the US. That’s real world highway driving in a 4 year old petrol
car.
I deliberately chose a low mpg value. Most people are driving SUVs what I assumed 20mpg would be safe. My car averages about 26mpg. I have no insight into how many kilometers per liter UK cars get, but the translated £/litre to $/gallon has always shocked me at the price paid on that side of the pond. If Americans had to to pay the same rate, we'd have better mpg ratings as well.
Among SUV drivers in the US the biggest segment is compact SUVs (think Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR-V). Then midsize (like Toyota Highlander or Hyundai Palisade), subcompact (Mazda CX-30, Hyundai Kona), then full sized (Chevy Tahoe, Ford Expedition).
RAV4 non-hybrid is around 35 mpg highway. CR-V 34 mpg highway.
In midsize, Highlander is 29 mpg highway, and Palisade is 25 mpg highway.
In subcompact CX-30 is 30-33 mpg highway depending on options. Kona is 29-34 mpg highway depending on options.
The full size category, which does get down to around 20 mpg, is only around 3-4% of SUVs in the US. Tahoe is 20 mpg highway. Expedition gets 23 mpg highway.
Great, but it's still 9.5 hours of time on the wheel. Train/plane eliminates that. So even if it is 1/3 cheaper in fuel, it's something that needs to be considered.
> RAV4 non-hybrid is around 35 mpg highway. CR-V 34 mpg highway.
....35mpg at 60mph and little traffic, maybe. I can't speak for that specific model, but most vehicles I've driven do significantly worse than advertised.
My Subaru Legacy advertised 27 City, 35 Highway, 30 Combined. In practice I average 25-26 while commuting and on extended highways drives more like 29, still on stock tires.
I don't know where you're coming with deliberately here as if that's something I chose. I'm not familiar with cars getting 43mpg in the US. Maybe some hybrid, but that's definitely not the norm on this side of the pond. Even when I had a Corolla, which was the highest rated car I've ever driven, did not get 43mpg.
Your "deliberate" sounds a lot like victim blaming here.
<shrug> it's what my look up specifically for this comment gave me using Delta's website. I tried booking for 3/30 - 4/02 roundtrip. I went with Delta as that was specifically called out in TFA. Deliberately limiting the variables. Besides, I'd be in a really desperate situation to choose Frontier.
I am very much enjoying my weekly train rides to care for my grandson. I'd much rather do that than drive the 90 mi or so back and forth. I set up my laptop and hotspot and go. Or I just sit and watch the scenery. Or just watch the people. Sometimes the bathrooms are a little stinky and sometimes people are a little loud and sometimes the train is crowded. But that's all much better than the intensity of driving on the freeway for me at least. So much more relaxing.
I’m hoping it won’t be necessary but, if TSA is fundamentally broken with an international transfer through Dulles I will seriously consider taking the train from a union Station to Boston.
Honestly surprised how many TSA people are still working without pay. I wouldn’t in their shoes. Maybe if TSA just basically shutdown commercial aviation in the US it would lead to some progress.
I’m not sure historical precedent tells us a whole lot and Congress has now skipped Washington. It’s hard to say when this will be resolved. It could be a month or more.
A lot of people here talking about the northeastern routes, but there's another good one that is kinda worth it: San Jose to Santa Barbara on the Coast Starlight, on account of SBA being very expensive to fly through. It's about 8 hours (driving is 5-6) and comparable in price to a bus (and it is probably beating gas right now, to be honest). And the tracks go by some of the prettiest coastline in the United States, usually around sunset too.
The tone of the article, as well as some of the comments here, make me think of "City of New Orleans" (a song about the history and experience of American railways) instead of "Midnight Train to Georgia".
I rode the amtrak from NYC, to DC then finally to Atlanta. Beautiful all the way, but incredibly slow, and the train "station" at Atlanta is left to be desired to say the last.
I highly recommend everyone read “The Grass Frontier”. It provides a detailed account of the development of American suburbanization and its integration with the automobile industry. (and why cars > trains after that)
The United States is a very unique case—its capitalist development progressed faster than in other countries. Although many industries today are controlled by oligarchs and politicians and no longer serve the public interest, this history remains distinctive and worth remembering.
I've taken multiple Amtrak routes, all out of the Northeast Corridor but eventually crossing the country West or South.
You don't take Amtrak because you want to get there fast, and you don't really take it because it's cheaper than flying. You take it because you can, and because it's more important to you to be (comparatively) comfortable instead of rushing from A to B. You take it because of the sights, the people, the chance encounters, the proximity to city centers that airplanes can never hope to match. It's an experience in and of itself that's distinctly foreign to many Americans, and one I wholeheartedly recommend.
Sitting in a roomette, crossing from Boston to LA over a long weekend, sharing delicious meals with total strangers as the countryside whizzed by (or we sat on a siding waiting on a freight train).
Just not comparable.
For what it's worth, I love trains, and the romance of them, but I ALSO love taking it from Oakland or Richmond to Sacramento and sipping a beer while I look through the window at all the poor saps stuck on I-80. I've had that drive take 4+ hours before on a Friday, especially when people are headed to Tahoe.
This is not really true, at least for the northeast corridor. Amtrak is the fastest way to get from DC to NYC for example due to traffic in the city if driving or taking the bus, and the distance from the airport (LGA or JFK) to the final destination in the city if you're flying. I take Amtrak somewhat begrudgingly because it often can be way more expensive than flights which are subsidized generally speaking over passenger rail these days, because it's simply faster.
And I honestly don't know what adventures people are talking about, most people keep to themselves. I've had more stranger experiences on flights than I have on Amtrak but maybe it's different in the West Coast.
This only applies to sleeper car routes. You're on the traib for 2-3 days, mostly with no cell service. If you eat in the restaurant car, they will seat you with strangers. If you sit in the observation car, there's a bunch of other people sitting there too.
I did NY to Miami 18 months ago having spent a week in Washington/NY and was due for 3 days in Miami before flying home.
Saturday morning in NY looking at a few sights I hadn't seen (Trinity Church), then a relaxing train down to Miami. Beat flying and spending Sunday in a hotel room.
I didn't sit with anyone else in the restaurant car, but that does sound an interesting way to meet people from a whole different world. The Friday night in NY though I did sit at a bar next to other people, so I guess that was horrifying?
Had i been that against it though there was an option to eat in my room.
And creeping along for hours at 25mph because you're following a freight train is frustrating in its own way, even if you have a comfortable seat and food and drink.
Do you fly in your own private plane, or commercial where you need to sit next to other peasants?
I spent the entire trip on the Acela Express first class (work was paying) from NYC to Boston talking to an absolutely fascinating man headed to his 60th MIT reunion.
I spent the entire trip (including a 4 hour delay where we didn’t move) in the cheap seats from Atlanta to New Orleans smelling the farts of someone with serious GI issues while a college kid walked up and down the aisle spraying axe body spray to drown out the smell.
I usually take the Regional on my own dime though last trip I got a deal on the return leg on Acela. The downside of Amtrak for me is that the Boston south suburban station is an hour drive in basically the wrong direction. But I hate hate driving into Manhattan.
Do you ever consider driving to New Haven and taking Metro North the rest of the way? IIRC it's as fast as Amtrak if you're on the Super Express train.
I have considered it. I’ve never done it. Parking used to be an issue for some of the commuter rail stations but I understand it isn’t in New Haven at this point. Also about twice as long a drive but likely more efficient overall.
Sat across from Dr. Ruth on the Acela going from NYC to DC for business. She was lovely and sharp as ever.
Many many years ago I took the train from San Luis Obispo to Sacramento and enjoyed a meal in the dining car, with set times and seating assignments. It was a really interesting conversation with my randomly chosen tablemates. Sadly I don't think they do that anymore.
You are still seated with randoms as of this month
it's very expensive though. i used to live in philly close to 30th and had a reason to go up to nyc regularly close to penn, essentially perfect for taking amtrak, but ended up taking boltbus just because the price difference was very significant and time wise it was only like 30-45min slower.
Pro tip for those who like risk and are traveling regularly for non timely purposes they have dynamic pricing that rewards literal last 5m. I do Amtrak for like $15-40 NYC-PHL. You have to be signed in to the app otherwise they won't give you the sweetheart deal. Refresh reguarly the price changes constantly in the last 3-4h though I'll typically rock up to Penn and buy one 10m before.
You take it for a variety of reasons.
The only profitable routes are Boston to Washington DC.
Outside of that it's both better and worse. Sometimes you meet friendly people, sometimes your stuck next to folks with hygiene issues.
I've had way more chance encounters flying, went out with a girl once.
It's cool, but so underfunded that I don't think it'll ever catch up to say Japan. An 18 hour highspeed NYC to LA train would be amazing.
I think I did Chicago to NYC once. Afterwards my thought was , cool I did it, I don't need to experience that again.
In fairness, we don't have many profitable freeways either.
Toll roads are profitable. They are basically money-printers in fact. More/all of our expressways should be toll roads IMO. Then the people who use them will pay for them, and there will be money to keep them in good repair without needing appropriations from the general fund.
Small thing - I generally haven't seen tolled motorways called Freeways - but I haven't lived in the US in a long time. I'm familiar with turnpikes of course, and a tolled motorway in Orange County, CA.
> An 18 hour highspeed NYC to LA train would be amazing.
Often I think of the cut intro scene for "Escape From New York" where Snake robs some sort of bank and then escape in the inter state subway[0]. That future is grim but at least they got high speed long distance underground subways.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsLT-zRWWdQ
High speed around the world rarely gets people taking more than about a 5 hour trip. I'm sure a few would take such a train, but not near enough to make it worth the cost of building an maintaining it. In the mean time everyone talking about that distracts from building transportation that people would use.
If you want trains in the US then you need to focus on the DC-NYC-Boston route - this should be an obvious route with affordable high speed trains every 10 minutes all day. You also need to get local trains to stop bloating the costs such that nothing but the most dense areas can afford to build them. Solve those and then start focusing on areas where trains are harder.
Well, you can take it because it's cheaper than flying. Prices are comparable to the dirtiest, cheapiest dirt cheap flights with no checked baggage, carry-ons etc., but with more space, free wifi + (often) functional mobile data, better amenities, no TSA, and all the luggage you can carry. It's amazing being able to bring a whole guitar in a gig bag without having to worry about it at all.
The romance of it is wonderful too, but even from a purely practical standpoint the only real downsides are the slow speed and inconsistent arrival times.
Except it’s not cheaper unless perhaps you’re willing to sit in a seat for two days.
At $5000 vs $2000 to take my family someplace over Christmas break (when the kids are off school flight costs go up because everyone else is trying to take their kids on vacation at the same time) I'll pay the time. I seriously considered driving instead (which would have been cheaper, and perhaps faster).
Couldn't have said it any better. The experience and the people I've met make it worth it. It's a great little adventure.
I take the train to meet Neil Cassidy, still waiting, still trying.
Agree except for the meals. They are just OK. The experience of talking to other people on the train can be nice but the food itself is not “delicious”.
If you really like to have good food when you travel, the dining car wears thin quite quickly. I lament the lack of options for better food (I would happily pay more).
I was massively impressed by the food when I took it, certainly as good as any restaurant my expenses policy even attempts to allow me to eat in, and I'd say better than most first class on BA which I've flown a few times, other than the fixed meal times (in F on BA you can eat whenever you want)
Yeah, but airline is a low bar and IMO the bar is much higher for something you have to eat 9 meals on.
> The train is still longer, and time is money, we are taught. But certainty has value, too, even if it means at 11:29 p.m. departure.
Unfortunately this is misleading. Outside of the Northeast Acela corridor, there is no certainty in train travel in the U.S..
Although legally passenger trains are now supposed to have right of way over freight trains, in practice that’s just not the case. So a 14.5 hr train journey can easily be delayed by several hours.
So I took a consulting job in a small town in Illinois called Quincy. I couldn't fly there without connecting in St. Louis, but I could take the train from Chicago. It was billed at 6 hours.
It absolutely left on time but had to wait for three freight trains on the way. 9 hours later we got to the "station". One of the other passengers said that their previous trip was cancelled and Amtrak bought everyone bus tickets.
In the Midwest, there are no guarantees with trains other than you'll get there. Eventually.
Quincy IL, the capital of Forgottonia. Used to be a bigger city, was destroyed by politics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgottonia
From talking to people there, it seems like Quincy itself was less destroyed by politics and more just sort of left to rot by families with "important names" in the area who are resistant to change.
No idea which is accurate, that's just a consistent theme from almost every conversation when I was consulting there.
Common pattern in small-ish towns, where there is a core of older wealthy people who are stereotypical NIMBYs running everything, and who want to keep their quaint little town as it is. Problem is that forces all the young people to move away to find opportunity, and then 50 years later the town is dying.
Yeah if I can add. The lack of anything for someone 18-24 years old there was kind of startling. There is zero incentive for youth to stay in that town other than family, I suppose. But the weird thing was, it was kind of a joke. Nobody took it seriously. They just kind of laughed and rolled their eyes.
It was weird.
>So I took a consulting job in a small town in Illinois called Quincy.
Adams Internet/Telco/Fiber? Same. It always impressed me how early they were to fiber to the home down there in southwestern IL. ~15 years ago I made that same trip: Chicago down to Quincy then over to Steeleville and then to St Louis to drop off the rental car and fly back home. They really make the Coop system work out there.
Not them but I was legit impressed by the fiber coverage. They have towns of like 30 people with gig access, and all the roads between access points as well. It's kind of astonishing.
Seeing their setup is actually what spurred me to put together a coop at home to run fiber for the county.
Adams definitely knows what they're doing when it comes to managing resources in a rural area
The even more impressive thing is that they've had gig fiber for at least a decade, 15+ years. My town (nowhere near as rural) got us gig to the home municipal fiber 3-4 years ago, so 15 years was really impressive. I used to do sys admin consulting for them, they had really great people.
Freight is all you have in some places in the midwest. Ohio, for example, used to have some very cool passenger railway stations. Unfortunately now there is basically zero passenger rail in the entire state.
Haha hours. There is no upper bound. The average Amtrak delay on Norfolk Southern is 19 minutes per 100 miles. And the worst cases are all horror stories. A freight operator sidetracks Amtrak while a miles-long coal train rolls through at a jogging pace. The coal train breaks down. The Amtrak crew can't legally operate any more because of federal time limits. You are 1000 miles from a city in the middle of nowhere and by the time they dispatch another crew to your train you've been surviving on Fritos for days.
A couple of the lines I ride in California have decent on-time rates (mostly I ride the line formerly known as the San Joaquins)
> Although legally passenger trains are now supposed to have right of way over freight trains, in practice that’s just not the case
Amtrak has right-of-way over freight trains if they are claiming their pre-allocated rail time slot. If a freight train is already on the track at its own scheduled time, it's going to take it, regardless of scheduling priority.
Unfortunately, Amtrak is independently dysfunctional (I'm sorry, it's true, it's led by people who don't know anything about trains) and is rarely on time even independent of rail congestion, so they show up at times they weren't scheduled, and the lateness compounds as they get further delayed by congestion.
> a 14.5 hr train journey can easily be delayed by several hours
It can easily be delayed a lot longer than that. The last time I took Amtrak I was delayed over 24 hours.
Delays? What if you can’t buy tickets at all.
I was looking at Tucson to Seattle trip on a relatively short notice - all sleeping tickets were sold out multiple weeks in advance. And due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat.
For fun, I just got prices for taking my family to Tucson from Portland, a trip we took last week by airplane. It was relatively expensive from what I'm used to for a trip between two cities on the same end of the country, about $2500 total. Nonstop, just under 3 hours flight time. Amtrak would be about half that for a coach ticket. But as you point out, a coach ticket for a 40-45 hour trip is impractical. So I picked a family room (when possible, which was not on every segment). $7000. HAHAHAHAHAHA. I could waste money on first class plane tickets and still pay less than half that.
My fever dream for the past two decades has been an interstate "road train" roll-on/roll-offstation network where cars are towed at moderate speed for comfort (45-55 mph) on extremely long flat bed trailers between cities so people don't have to pay attention to the road between cities and can sleep or relax.
Different people have different standards. I've done many sleeper trips and several coach trips across the country over the years. Coach was fine when I was a teenager, now that I'm approaching 40, I'll pass.
Round-trip coach on Amtrak from Indianapolis to Las Vegas* in my early 20s is definitely a fun thing I'll never do again.
One of the friends I was with threw in the towel and bought a plane ticket home, though to be fair she was traveling with her 18-month-old daughter at the time and it's honestly a testament to youthful indiscretions that she even went along with the plan in the first place!
Personally, I find driving to be a much better way to see the US than trains, especially if you avoid interstate highways.
Living in Indiana with much of my family on the east and west coasts, I actually prefer driving
Like Amtrak, driving is rarely cheaper than flying, especially when traveling alone on a multi-day trip if you're not willing to sleep at rest areas and don't have friends to stay with at convenient points along the way.
For reference, from Indy, on the interstate, NYC is an easy one-day trip (~12 hours), and LA is a long but viable two-day trip with a stop in Denver (~15 hours/day), but SF and the Pacific Northwest are pushing it even in two days. Taking non-interstate routes can take much longer, especially when traveling through the mountains or major metro areas.
* Actually from Chicago to Needles, CA, with a bus between Indy and Chicago and a van between Needles and Vegas, because Amtrak didn't even offer service to Indy or Vegas at the time.
We should nationalize the rail lines, ensure Positive Train Control is mandatory, invest in the rails and sidetracks to allow for faster trains and less traffic jams.
It could be structured so the current owners don't lose money on the deal but America gets a faster, better utilized train system. So much winning!
America has the best fright system in the world. The other countries you are looking at have a great humans on train system, but freight is much worse because of it. Humans and freight generally want very difference things from transportation and so they should not be mixed at all.
I am in no way suggesting that the freight traffic be diminished, in fact it should be increased. We can have both but the rail owners only care about their immediate profits and have shown to be reckless with their management via deferring maintenance, improper staffing, and not investing in improving it.
I believe Brightline in Florida has ownership of its tracks from Cocoa to Orlando.
It does not, but it has a sane scheduling agreement with the railroad which the railroad actually respects.
This is a common misconception because Brightline’s parent company Florida East Coast Industries shares heritage with Florida East Coast Railway, but the companies were split in 2007.
The regular site (rather than aggregator): https://apnews.com/article/airports-shutdown-long-lines-trai...
This also includes some images that aren't part of the netscape.com version... which is probably part of the point of it: "A view of America from the tracks" has some pictures of Amtrak stations and Virginia countryside.
(and for some nostalgia- City of New Orleans by Steve Goodman https://youtu.be/fhHxNMyw0dI )
Changed from https://isp.netscape.com/news/story/0001/20260329/e4d8ea591b... above. Thanks!
> ”… booked the train overnight and into game day across a 650-mile route … A 14½-hour weekend train ride”
Just by way of comparison, in China the 819-mile train route between Beijing and Shanghai takes 4.5 hours.
Imagine if we had passenger rail like Asia does, it would be amazing. But sadly it's all a matter of political will, the US simply does not want to create such a rail system where we can take bullet trains from NYC to LA.
There is no world where bullet trains between NYC and LA would make any financial sense at all. The trains can't possibly go fast enough for passengers to be satisfied with the speed (even maglev isn't fast enough), and the cost of track construction and maintenance would never be paid for by ridership.
I live in Japan; bullet trains are great here, but the distances they cover are quite short by American standards. Extremely high ridership, with trains covering relatively short distances between extremely populated population centers (the Tokyo metro area has 38 million people for reference) means the trains operate at a profit. That could be done in America, maybe, but only between select cities that aren't too far apart, such as DC and NYC and Boston. Even here in Japan, no one is taking the shinkansen between far-apart cities in the north and south; they use inexpensive and faster domestic flights instead.
In China it's a matter of politics rather than financial sense, of unifying the country hence why they have them in ethnic minority areas too. The trains would be like roads, sure, most people wouldn't take them from one end to the other, A to Z, but there are enough people to take them from A to D, J to N, Q to T, so to speak. If one could commute in one hour from Boston to DC for example each way, daily without flying, it opens up more economic opportunities in total. But like PG said, the competition to an airline isn't a car or a plane, it's Zoom.
Yes, I can see how some people might think the same system would work in the US too, with a HSR network going from Boston to LA, with stops along the way in NYC, Chicago, Louisville, St. Louis, Denver, and maybe some smaller cities too.
But China has a much larger population than the US, by far, and an authoritarian government that has no problem using the "build it and they will come" business model for large infrastructure projects that may or may not work out as planned and no worry about opposition from local politicians, NIMBYs, etc. Don't forget, most of their population is concentrated on the east coast; the inland areas are relatively unpopulated. And they don't have a population that's been conditioned from birth, ever since the 1940s, to think that automobiles are the mode of transit that society should be based around.
So even if they did build an HSR network across the US, I don't think it would work out. How much travel is there between Denver and St Louis, really? A lot of the intra-US travel is really between places on opposite coasts, or on the same coast, because that's where the population is.
Denver is too far away from any other large city to make HSR work. At the distances involved everyone will fly. Maybe you can make it work within Denver, but not to get to any other state as there is no city of any size anywhere close.
Zoom isn’t a replacement for in-person meetings all of the time but it’s pretty good for a lot of purposes. I’m on a non-profit board and we do have a couple meetings a year when we ask people to try to make it in person but the rest is planned to be virtual.
Remote work is a good replacement for commuting.
It’s a workable replacement for commuting a lot of the time. Some face to face is useful even if it’s only quarterly team meetings.
Absolutely, and I'd far rather take a 6 hour train ride once a quarter than a 30 minute commute every day
> it's Zoom
I heard something like that about the Concorde at the Air and Space Museum. What killed it was not fuel costs, but cheaper long-distance phone calls and fax machines.
But if a country takes the Chinese approach and pushed inexpensive rail as a way to open new economic opportunities, the idea of flying as your daily commute moves from ridiculous to feasible (if you replace the airplane with a train).
British Airways certainly made a profit from Concorde, which was operated by a separate division of the company.
I don't know if (then state-owned) Air France did.
The thing that killed the Concorde was a fatal crash that killed everyone on board.
The thing was already losing money because it guzzled fuel and was horribly loud and uncomfortable inside, while still costing a fortune for tickets. Not many people really wanted to pay 1st-class fares for worse-than-economy comfort just to shave a couple hours off the flight. Also, the plane could only operate at supersonic speeds over the ocean, so when it flew to/from Texas, it had to operate at subsonic speeds (and guzzle even more fuel because it was inefficient at those speeds), and the average trip time wasn't that much faster than a regular jumbo jet. It had been going downhill for a while, but that fatal crash was the end; they stopped all operations after that.
Sure, better communications might have contributed to its downfall, but that would have affected all air travel; just comparing like-for-like, the Concorde really wasn't a great alternative to the subsonic jumbo jets which became more and more prevalent for transcontinental routes.
What amazes me is frequency of shinkansen for Tokyo-Osaka. Like more frequent than some metros! Just rock up Must change how people think.
> the distances they cover are quite short by American standards
Typical distances are about the same as SanFrancisco-LA, LA-Phoenix, Phoenix-LasVegas, Dallas-Houston, Houston-New Orleans, Portland-Vancouver. The longest service is 650 miles -- around the Atlanta to New York, Chicago to Washington DC, San Francisco to Portland, Austin to Kansas City
https://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda_weehawken_burrito_...
Asia, including India soon!
I’ve taken this line - as many have and do all the time. Ride it once and you’ll realize why it’s the better way to travel in every way but cost and time - and both of those are a result of the United State unwillingness to fully fund something like Amtrak.
As the author states traveling by train just a more pleasant experience.
I should note that even though there is technically wifi on every Amtrak train, it’s cellular based. You’ll find that at least from atlanta to NY, the train somehow threads the needle between cellular ranges. Both your phone and of course the train will often be either out of range of fast cellular service or out of range altogether. Supposedly Amtrak is getting starlink but we’ll see. So, don’t expect to be getting on any video calls.
Years ago I tried to book a train from San Francisco to Chicago as part of a trip I had planned but found it to be more expensive and, more significantly, a multi-day journey instead of a few hours. If you happen to be an American living near one of the useful passenger rail lines, and desire to go to one of the few destinations it can take you to quickly and affordably, more power to you. But most Americans live nowhere near a useful rail system.
Taking days to get to Chicago from Emeryville is all part of the fun of it. Enjoy the journey…
Spoken like one of the small percentage of Americans who can afford to tag on extra days to their PTO to enjoy a nice view.
I guess so. We took the girls when they were young to Omaha a few times from the Bay Area. I wasn't even sure passenger trains would be around when they were adults so wanted to give them that experience. I took a train between Kansas City and Chicago as a kid and found it magical.
So, yeah, the train ride was actually a significant part of the experience for those particular vacations.
> and both of those are a result of the United State unwillingness to fully fund something like Amtrak.
What kind of funding are we looking at? Is the issue that this is cost-prohibitive for reasons of scale that make this non-competitive for businesses themselves to fund as compared to elsewhere?
Amtrak was created to preserve the last vestiges of passenger rail when private businesses pulled out. It has conflicting missions so it's never going to be competitive in service.
Amtrak does not own its own rail network. It has priority over cargo trains de jure but in practice cargo takes priority. Many areas only have one set of tracks and trains can only pull over onto sidings when they exist. Class 1 railroads are capital intensive so to be more profitable they don't spend any money they don't have to. Such as more sidings, more train yards, not maximizing the length of trains so they fit onto those sidings, or more than one operator per train. Class 1 railroads are focused on cargo and making money, not helping Amtrak trains go first. The government doesn't care to enforce the law either. https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-13/tracking-productivity...
Amtrak operates routes that suffer from low demand instead of focusing on the New York Washington DC route. It's about counting US Senate votes as much as customer satisfaction or breaking even.
The Federal government heavily subsidized cars starting in the 1950s through the Interstate Highway System. Cars and airliners are considered critical passenger transportation infrastructure, trains are not.
The S-Line project is underway in NC and VA. It will rehabilitate an abandoned line (the former Seaboard Coast Line) to allow faster travel between Raleigh and Richmond. It won't be electrified but will allow trains to run at up to 110 mph/177 kph which is a big improvement over the current 60-70 mph (when the passenger train isn't being delayed by a freight train).
They are currently doing a couple of grade-separation bridge projects in north Raleigh and some minor curve straightening. Since the S-Line is not currently being used they can straighten many of the curves since there won't be any impact to existing operations.
The S-Line right of way is owned by CSX and they will be running freight on it. The budget wasn't there to acquire all of it by NCDOT and VA and dedicate it to passenger service.
https://www.ncdot.gov/divisions/rail/s-line-projects/raleigh...
https://vapassengerrailauthority.org/projects/richmond2ralei...
I’m curious if a classic starlings antenna works at 100-300 km/h with occasional rotation, or will it need to be mounted on a targeting motor on top of the train?
Works on planes at 1000km/h so should be fine on trains in the open countryside (not in tunnels of course)
Yes and the sats go a lot faster than 1000km/h anyway
Having ridden the trains of China fairly extensively and over a long period of time I am essentially ruined for what we have in the US. The older style Chinese trains were fine and I always enjoyed the journey (and remember excitedly riding the maglev when it first opened in Shanghai) but the newer generation of high speed trains is what pushed me from "It would be so pleasant to have this system in the US" to "We are losing out and falling behind the modern world".
Trips that take me 3 hours in normal traffic here would take less than 45 minutes in China... possibly as little as 30 minutes. Trains would be leaving for the main destinations in 15 minute intervals, travel times cut by an order of magnitude, arrivals would be in stations that connect to clean, modern, efficient, inexpensive and safe subway systems.
A typical journey. Hangzhou to Shanghai used to be a 3 hour bus ride for me. On top of that it was 45 minutes from home to the bus station. Now I can walk a few hundred meters to a gleaming, state of the art metro station (seriously, you've never experienced anything like this if you've never left the US), arrive in the ground floor of the train station, catch a glass smooth, spacious high speed train to Shanghai that leaves every 15 minutes and takes only 45 minutes and go downstairs to the subway to travel wherever I need to go in the city (usually within a couple of blocks of whatever destination I have).
We are so far away from this that I find it a bit distressing. We cannot afford it, we cannot overcome the legal and political hurdles to make it happen... we are just going to fall further and further behind.
China can do it because they have a command economy and the government can just take property to do what it wants.
To do this in the USA you'd have a thousand different emminent domain claims to get through, at least some of which will be contested, you'll need to pay the property owners fair market prices for the land you are taking, there will need to be environmental impact studies, planning commission approvals, fights with every interested locality over station locations and ammenities and how many trees will be cut down. China doesn't have to worry about any of that they just do it.
While I don't disagree with you as you described the US situation, many places out there have societies and government regulations closer to the US than China and they have built successful railway networks, including high speed ones. Many countries in Europe, for example.
It might be useful to compare the US with those countries instead, and find out what differs in the US so it's holding it back.
I think this narrative is kinda trueish but I still dislike it because it masks the real problem. Those property rights and review processes don't actually get us any benefit, they just allow a small number of people to grift the state and blow up costs for no reason and frequently for self-enriching nefarious reasons. So it's not like there's an upside to our system. This narrative suggests "well, we don't have great trains but at least we're free, unlike the Chinese" which I think is a load of shit.
People do get railroaded in China, it's true. But people get railroaded here in the USA too, because they have to live next to a loud choking freeway that gives them cancer and alzheimers, instead of a clean train line. And it costs $300 for car payment insurance etc to get anywhere which is basically a tax. 3 children a day have to die in car crashes because our whole society has been captured by the automobile. And in any case, they built all these freeways by railroading immigrant and black communities all over the place anyway. We got the worst of all worlds. Honestly net I think it sucks more than chaiqian because at least under their system you can ride the fucking train.
And even aside from this, China has way more civil engineers than the USA does and those engineers have many large projects under their belts. I think they are also just way better at executing large projects on time and under budget. Their engineers simply are better than ours. They build bigger things faster and cheaper than we do full stop.
The US built stuff though. Not even that long ago.
Subway systems don’t take all that much land from private parties and are effectively too expensive to build here. Not to mention how long they take.
It’s because we decided it must be this way. If we decided (as a society) building stuff was important we could do so. It will take an existential crises for this attitude to shift though.
When you propose building quite literally anything here you will have people saying “no” crawling out of the woodwork. We decided to empower such people both legally and socially.
Los Angeles is building a ton of new subway systems ( I think maybe more than anywhere else in the US ) where it is far from easy. If LA Metro can pull it off then so can elsewhere!
Long-distance passenger rail isn't something we (as a society) want. So it doesn't get built. We still build highways for cars. We still build commuter rail, where population density supports it.
Same. I lived in Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China for about 10 years, and I only came back with my wife because we want to buy a house here in the States. After that, we're going back to Japan and China.
The US is so far behind in public infrastructure (trains, pedestrian, cycling, etc) that I can't see the States being a good place NOW, much less the next fifty years.
Why do you want to buy a house in the United States that you never plan to live in?
Delta has round trip flights from ATL->WAS for ~$800
TFA train round trip shows $306 without a private cabin.
TFA already mentioned the time differences.
The googs says it's 638miles doable in 9.5hours. Say an average of 20mpg at $4/gal (I have no idea what current rates are in that part of the country) needs 32gals for $128 one way or $256 to come back. Of course someone needs to drive it.
The train definitely looks like a decent deal for this route. I've priced train rides from my town, and prices look like plane routes but in days instead of hours. The train doesn't make sense all of the time, but I'm holding out hope I'll find a trip where it will make sense.
Like other commenters I was also confused at the "~$800" comment.
I tried this myself, picking a time a few weeks in the future (round trip April 15th to 22nd). Round trip as I'm assuming you'll want to go there and come home.
All of the following info is for ATL to Washington-Area airports (BWI, DCA, IAD). Amtrak is for Atlanta to Washington Union Station
Delta (20+ nonstop a day every 30min or so, ~2hrs flight time):
- ~$244->$304 Main
- ~$444->$504 Comfort+
- ~$769-$974 First
Amtrak (11:29PM->1:47PM, 14h18m):
- $356 Coach
- $1107 Private Room (Roomette)
I'm sure that a more accurate analysis would include a spread of days.
In general, this means that with the train you'd increase your travel time by ~26 hours round trip (over a whole day) while also paying ~$112 more.
(Note that the Amtrak website prices each leg independently while Delta prices round trip, I made sure to go all the way to the cart to gather the end pricing)
I was curious so I also did a trip much sooner (March 30th to April 6th):
Delta:
- $616-$665 Main
- $785-$800 Comfort Plus
- $1065 First (they were all priced the same)
Amtrak:
- $517 Main
- $1369 Private Room (Roomette)
So for a much sooner trip you do save ~$100 for the tradeoff of ~26 hours more time spent.
It's also worth noting that this route's travel occurs primarily at night, in the dark. This means both trying to sleep on a train as well as not being able to see much outside as it'll be dark most of the ride.
Based on the last long trip I did in the U.K. where I averaged 43 miles per US gallon (52mpg) I’m shocked how terrible efficiency is in the US. That’s real world highway driving in a 4 year old petrol car.
I deliberately chose a low mpg value. Most people are driving SUVs what I assumed 20mpg would be safe. My car averages about 26mpg. I have no insight into how many kilometers per liter UK cars get, but the translated £/litre to $/gallon has always shocked me at the price paid on that side of the pond. If Americans had to to pay the same rate, we'd have better mpg ratings as well.
That's way too pessimistic.
Among SUV drivers in the US the biggest segment is compact SUVs (think Toyota RAV4 or Honda CR-V). Then midsize (like Toyota Highlander or Hyundai Palisade), subcompact (Mazda CX-30, Hyundai Kona), then full sized (Chevy Tahoe, Ford Expedition).
RAV4 non-hybrid is around 35 mpg highway. CR-V 34 mpg highway.
In midsize, Highlander is 29 mpg highway, and Palisade is 25 mpg highway.
In subcompact CX-30 is 30-33 mpg highway depending on options. Kona is 29-34 mpg highway depending on options.
The full size category, which does get down to around 20 mpg, is only around 3-4% of SUVs in the US. Tahoe is 20 mpg highway. Expedition gets 23 mpg highway.
Great, but it's still 9.5 hours of time on the wheel. Train/plane eliminates that. So even if it is 1/3 cheaper in fuel, it's something that needs to be considered.
>So even if it is 1/3 cheaper in fuel, it's something that needs to be considered.
Not to mention wear on the car.
> RAV4 non-hybrid is around 35 mpg highway. CR-V 34 mpg highway.
....35mpg at 60mph and little traffic, maybe. I can't speak for that specific model, but most vehicles I've driven do significantly worse than advertised.
My Subaru Legacy advertised 27 City, 35 Highway, 30 Combined. In practice I average 25-26 while commuting and on extended highways drives more like 29, still on stock tires.
I paid £1.45 a litre on Friday my average, which I tend to treat as about 14p a mile or 18c a mile.
I’m not sure why I’d deliberately burn more fuel regardless of the price. Literally setting fire to cash for nothing.
That would be $120 for your trip to Georgia, about the same price as in the US despite fuel being $7.30 a gallon equivalent in the uk.
I don't know where you're coming with deliberately here as if that's something I chose. I'm not familiar with cars getting 43mpg in the US. Maybe some hybrid, but that's definitely not the norm on this side of the pond. Even when I had a Corolla, which was the highest rated car I've ever driven, did not get 43mpg.
Your "deliberate" sounds a lot like victim blaming here.
What? I can book ATL <-> WAS round trip for $74 with Frontier, $184 with Delta. With a checked bag $168-254.
<shrug> it's what my look up specifically for this comment gave me using Delta's website. I tried booking for 3/30 - 4/02 roundtrip. I went with Delta as that was specifically called out in TFA. Deliberately limiting the variables. Besides, I'd be in a really desperate situation to choose Frontier.
I am very much enjoying my weekly train rides to care for my grandson. I'd much rather do that than drive the 90 mi or so back and forth. I set up my laptop and hotspot and go. Or I just sit and watch the scenery. Or just watch the people. Sometimes the bathrooms are a little stinky and sometimes people are a little loud and sometimes the train is crowded. But that's all much better than the intensity of driving on the freeway for me at least. So much more relaxing.
I’m hoping it won’t be necessary but, if TSA is fundamentally broken with an international transfer through Dulles I will seriously consider taking the train from a union Station to Boston.
Honestly surprised how many TSA people are still working without pay. I wouldn’t in their shoes. Maybe if TSA just basically shutdown commercial aviation in the US it would lead to some progress.
Historically they've gotten backpay. Also they are trying to keep their jobs.
I’m not sure historical precedent tells us a whole lot and Congress has now skipped Washington. It’s hard to say when this will be resolved. It could be a month or more.
A lot of people here talking about the northeastern routes, but there's another good one that is kinda worth it: San Jose to Santa Barbara on the Coast Starlight, on account of SBA being very expensive to fly through. It's about 8 hours (driving is 5-6) and comparable in price to a bus (and it is probably beating gas right now, to be honest). And the tracks go by some of the prettiest coastline in the United States, usually around sunset too.
There are probably a few other city pairs like Seattle to Portland’s and Raleigh to Charlotte that are reasonable.
Wow, netscape is still around
came here to post this!
I wish we had high speed rail. Rail travel is actually pleasant. Air travel is a godawful nightmare that is somehow worse every single year.
The tone of the article, as well as some of the comments here, make me think of "City of New Orleans" (a song about the history and experience of American railways) instead of "Midnight Train to Georgia".
I took the Floridian and Silver Meteor last April in coach round-trip to DC. 19 hours getting bounced around so badly I couldn't sleep. :(
650 miles in 14 hours. Wow. That's actually slower than Irish intercity trains.
I rode the amtrak from NYC, to DC then finally to Atlanta. Beautiful all the way, but incredibly slow, and the train "station" at Atlanta is left to be desired to say the last.
If you were trying to highlight the Netscape ISP site OP, thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565264
Story discovered via usability of that site. Will use it more.
c00l. Stick to sources over syndication for submissions tho, as others noted, source has more photos etc.
Thanks to ever helpful commmenters!
I started to think, whether the UP-Norfolk Southern merger would bring major changes to the mid-line time-keeping measure in the CCG.
Interestingly mixed usage of en dash and em dash across the article.
Mixed usage—of em-dash and en-dash—is suspiciously human–like.
Whoa, forget the train, folks check out this website. This is active??
Active and beautiful, I can start reading without having to scroll down, which I have to do on the AP site.
I miss when the web looked like this, and pages were documents instead of applications.
We built the wrong web, we needed two, one for documents, and one for applications, but we built this rube goldberg contraption instead.
Just gotta zoom _way_ in to make the text readable, though.
My first reaction when I saw the domain
AOL Media LLC
more info here: https://hackaday.com/2026/01/27/zombie-netscape-wont-die/
See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565264
True :D
The song title is actually ‘Midnight Train to Georgia’.
“ That is what drew Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman for one of the Civil War’s seminal campaigns that helped defeat the Confederacy.”
To be clear Sherman burned it to the ground which is why it got renamed Atlanta.
Ah, Choo Choo trains
I highly recommend everyone read “The Grass Frontier”. It provides a detailed account of the development of American suburbanization and its integration with the automobile industry. (and why cars > trains after that)
The United States is a very unique case—its capitalist development progressed faster than in other countries. Although many industries today are controlled by oligarchs and politicians and no longer serve the public interest, this history remains distinctive and worth remembering.
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