I took my first out of town train for Halloween weekend. The Northeast Regional. Boston to NYC.
I enjoyed it. Watched Sunrise evolve. Plenty of water views. We found the seats comfy with plenty of leg room.
If anyone is trying to sleep, you’d need a good set of ear plugs. There was 11 stops along the way with announcements.
We’d definitely do it again. I might look into splurging for an express.
You can’t be grounded if you’re always grounded.
thinking.jpeg
Amtrak steadfastly refuses to respond to my proposal to add a ski-jump section to the Acela route. Bastard car industry knows it would be too popular, so they keep suppressing it!
I fucking love Amtrak, I’ll take it every time over planes.
BUT it isn’t without it’s own issues lol. Prices are outrageous these days, and more trips I’ve made have been delayed by a death (look before you cross tracks folks) than you’d be willing to believe (in case you’re wondering, it’ll be about 2h before they have the accident cleared).
That said the train can hit a car and only be delayed 2h, try that in a plane and all you leave is a crater in a Florida neighborhood. And instead of constant anxiety for 3h I get pleasant trip through countryside for 6h, I’ll take it in a heartbeat.
Wild of Amtrak to post this when their trains are always late, inaccessible and slow as fuck. Nice try. Post again when you run actual higher (note I said ‘higher’ not high bc that’s never gonna happen) speed trains that don’t get stuck behind freight.
Yep hich is why we should be investing in fixing those issues instead of say, spending $50 billion on the grifters that broke the FAA.
Train good, car bad.
I wouldn’t care about all the issues of Amtrak if the train tickets were actually cheaper than flying.
Amtrak can shut up and sit down with its slower than 1800s rail service while the rest of the world has already moved on to HSR.
But you can bring more luggage on and you get a lot more leg room.
Amtrak absolutely has plenty of tickets that are way cheaper than flying even reasonably long distances, but only if you book at least 3mo out. And even then there are plenty of exceptions. I took the Carolinian from Greensboro to DC for $57 last week, booked only a week in advance. The trains get plenty busy as is. At least for as long as the amfleet cars are still the default, people clearly will pay a premium to take the train over a bus.
I want to use trains so much. I love riding on them. They’re slower, more expensive, and more delay prone. Why would I do that to myself? I can afford the time usually, but you’d think they’d be less expensive than air travel. Nope. Every time I compare, air is cheaper.
I don’t understand why trains are so damn expensive. There’s is no way using thousands of gallons of jetfuel is cheaper than a train
It’s because of freight.
Also, I can go see my sister in 3 hours. Or drive 16, I’m getting older so I have to make stops. Or I can take a few days. It’s $60 to fly or $400+ on train. Even then I would rather be on a train but that’s not an option.
WELP.
Ok.
They’re rushing AI/LLM integration because they lost the midterms.
They’ll all be scrutinized, not funded, impeached, etc, so they have to do what they were either paid to do and/or will personally lose a ton of money if they do not do… NOW.
So we are basically getting the ‘logistics week’ version of DOGE, right now.
At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if they manage to break like, turnpikes, toll bridges, truck weigh in stations, port authorities, alllll that kinda shit.
… God help us if they attempt to ‘install AI’ into our powergrid, dams, water treatment facilities.
EDIT
Also, the last thread you and I were commenting on…
… doesn’t exist any more?
???
Lemmy is acting like it doesn’t exist for me, but maybe thats a problem on my end… somehow?
Or maybe its just the whole comment chain we were on???
Yeep, that sure seems like a pretty good read on the situation. Really not looking forward to the next few weeks of them grabbing everything they can and running. They’re already trying to AI-ify foodstamps for “fraud detection” which is just fucking insane. Revolutions start when people go hungry and hoo boy 6 million people is a lot of gambling on apathy…
(IDK why that post was removed, but it appears to have been removed. The OP might have deleted it or the mods??)
edit: Oh
Knowing the .world admin, news moderation team, my guess would be:
The title of the post indicated that the groundstop order is currently in effect, as of ~30 min ago, it has been lifted, so the post title does not reflect reality, therefore this news event and the discussion it spawned now need to be euthanized, to prevent the spread of misinformation.
… something like that, that seems like jordanlund logic to me.
If they only had some that could bear the load of national traffic.
In Europe, the security theater installed after 9/11 was a godsend for the trains. Suddenly, saving an hour by going by plane instead of bullet train didn’t matter anymore if you had to waste hours waiting at the airport security queues.
Two tough (but important) reminders for the US this week:
- You can’t rely on Big Tech.
- You need a national high speed train system.
American passenger trains suck, though.
Just as expensive as flying, except that it takes days of travel time instead of hours. And there are very few stations – some entire states don’t have a single passenger rail station.
Well, yeah. There’s a reason planes got popular in the US, place is fuckin’ huge, takes a while to get anywhere especially thru the mountains. Well, that and our rail service was systematically crippled by a long series of utter fucking bastards so that people had no choice, that contributed too. But hey, it could be worse; we could be stuck with Deutsche Bahn…
(FWIW the only states without are South Dakota and Wyoming last I checked (well and hawaii/alaska), and lets be real the kind of person that would take a train would never want to go to SD/WY. Real pretty scenery - real ugly everything else.)
Gonna argue your last point, I would LOVE to take a train to WY or SD specifically for that scenery. Hate planes and don’t feel like driving that far.
But at that distance I’d need the sleeper and at those sleeper prices I’d have to sell a kidney, so I won’t be doing it any time soon as fun as it would be.
This is what happens when you don’t qualify your statements, you find the one person that’s a counterexample lmao.
I’m genuinely glad that there’s people in the world that lack enough cynicism to believe visiting there could be fun, but if you’re prevented from going to WY/SD by the lack of trains, that’s only an argument in favor of not putting more trains there for your own protection.
… Look I just really hate Wyoming. SD can have a station I guess but fuck Wyoming.
There was also the whole auto industry conspiracy to destroy commuter rail and public transportation.
Making up a rather significant portion of the aforementioned “long series of utter bastards” yeeeeeep. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a documentary…
I was gonna include that bit about it being the backdrop to Roger Rabbit but decided not to. Glad others know the true true.
People say that, but it wasn’t like there was anyone fighting for commuter rail and public transportation until it was too late. Private railroads hated having to serve passengers and multiple municipalities let mass transit due once it required a public subsidy.
Trains are so huge in Europe thanks to the wars of the 17th-19th centuries.
America is roughly the same size and only now has half the population of Europe.
In 1800 Europe had about 150 million people. That’s about half the current population density of the USA for landmass BUT still extremely dense populations around the capital cities in the countries.
A nationalized train system was a lot easier for a individual nation the geographic size of Virginia with the a population larger than current US states.
Especially when your neighbor is invading you every 20 years.
American Rail during the civil war helped the north dominate the south (though the rivers of the USA may have been even more beneficial for the north) BUT showed the need for off rail transport and helped usher in the military application of wheeled and tracked vehicles that can go off rail. Weird how that works.
TIL on Lemmy: the solution to the US’ atrocious transportation is a civil war between all states.
By any chance, would that help get decent bus services too? I’m guessing those are rather a post-WW2 thing.
Hey at least deutsche bahn has connections and a lot of rail. You can at least theoretically get somewhere using DB
It’s easy to have vast amounts of pristine rail if you never wear it out by doing something crazy like “running trains on it”. Seriously wtf is going on with that system - the last two interurban trips I tried to take on DB both involved going approximately to the city limits before getting stuck onto a coach bus because there was some massive technical failure that shut down the whole system. Like nah I’ll happily take Amtrak over that shitshow. Sure it’s slow and useless if you’re trying to go anywhere that isn’t between the country’s largest metro areas, but it’s reliably and predictably slow and useless. Moribundity you can count on!
(And non-sarcastically, even tho it sucks there’s straightforward ways to improve it pretty rapidly. It’s bad for sure, but it’s still shockingly useful for the few areas it’s able to be useful in. The incredible amount of overhauling that needs to be done for DB is… well, I’m glad it’s not my problem to deal with because holy shit is that a mess. Starting from nothing does have some perks and, yknow, at least amtrak’s radios don’t melt when it gets a bit warm out)
the kind of person that would take a train would never want to go to SD/WY
But people who live in SD/WY might want to go other places?
If you want a real answer, it’s because WY/SD have such a small and low-density population that there’s not really anywhere useful to put a train station. And yeah, obviously in an ideal world it would be better to have them connected with passenger rail for the usual host of very good reasons. But, with the limited resources and the minuscule (but growing!) ridership on Amtrak, it would be a tremendous expenditure to extend coverage and would grant no real benefit to the people living there that isn’t better served with intermittent air travel or their current car-centric infrastructure.
If you want a slightly less real, but possibly more honest, answer: Ew, no, fuckem they can stay put in their racist little shitholes. They wanted this, they can figure out how to cope with the result.
So it is not just flyover country, but also drivethrough country, too?
“Pass-through states” is what I’ve heard them called in logistics. Awful places, beautiful landscapes.
Do people live there? I think that’s just a legend.
Sure, but do the people in those other places want them there?
Well, North Dakota got a station, and we all know that North Dakota is Worst Dakota.
i regularly take an interstate trip on amtrak. $99 round trip, takes 8hrs vs a 5 hour drive.
That’s because American rail tracks have never been built for speed. Some time ago there was an article about a new (or completely rebuilt) track, and they were happy to save a few million on the project by building it in a way that limits the speed to 80-100mph, instead of spending just a few percent more that could have enabled 200mph for bullet trains.
Just out of curiosity where about are you taking this? Amtrak in the northeast corridor is a vastly different service from Amtrak in the rest of the country.
Tbf that’s true of any service. Internet, cellular, interstate, etc. it’s wildly different living in the West before you hit the coast.
texas eagle
Interesting, the stuff I usually look at for examples is Midwest areas. For instance Cleveland to New York city is around a 7 and to 8 hour drive but Amtrak schedules it at 13 hours and I guarantee that route will have a delay.
yeah that tracks. delays are common, and it tends to be a little under twice the drive time.
i wouldnt call it convenient travel, but for my ride its definitely cheaper than driving or flying.
Ah, that explains it. You guys are already used to moseying along, so the time the train takes doesn’t bother you.
I tried to take an Amtrak from Albuquerque to Denver, a 7ish hour drive. The train is over a day, i think closing in on 2 days. And about 4 times the price of a plane ticket.
Edit: Amtrak’s ticket finder was down last night. It is 44 hours one way, $310 for one way coach, $1600 for private.
Still ridiculous that it’s slower than driving.
And that’s a very short trip. Most people wouldn’t take a plane anyway to go somewhere that’s a 5-hour drive away. So I don’t think that’s very representative of what it would be like for the average person to replace an airline trip with a rail trip.
And trains aren’t immune to computer outages either, control rooms are basically all computerised.
Sure, let me just drive several hours to get to the nearest station :)
Now imagine if there was a local train line that leads to a rapid train line instead of a 8 lane highway
See, and that’s exactly why we should have more trains.
And just how are you supposed to get a train there? There’s no tracks! This cockamamie plan will never work!
You can lay down rail tracks…
Uh oh
FRASCC ADVZY 111 DCC 11/13/2026 NATIONAL RAIL AIR EVENT TIME: 13/2053 - 14/0400 MESSAGE:
DUE TO EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR REASONS OF SAFETY.
ATTENTION ALL LOCOMOTIVE OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL RAILROAD COMMAND CENTER ALL STATIONS AND YARDS ARE AIRED.
ALL DEPARTING TRAINS SHOULD REMAIN AIRED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
INBOUND CROSS-BORDER CONSISTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS.
EFFECTIVE TIME: 132054-140430 SIGNATURE: 26/11/13 20:54
Funny that Amtrak went down for a while too.
Europe is roughly the same size as the USA, geographically.
It has twice the population, roughly.
Population densities in Europe are much higher than the USA, saving for in cities.
Train isn’t as economically viable here because of the spread out populace.
Give us a couple hundred years of warring with each other without faster more direct means of travel and we too would have a robust rail system.
This is Chinas rail system superimposed over the US. China is bigger than the US.
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say, but neat picture.
There are several regions in the USA where high speed rail is viable, especially in areas with high aviation congestion. You don’t need to build out the whole country, but there are a lot of places where a system is economically viable.
Yeah, and there are several regions in the USA served by commuter rail.
The point I’m making entirely is that the series of rail systems that have been connected in Europe were created for a purpose other than “this is the right choice for the environment and people”.
I don’t disagree we’d be better served with more focus on rail.
Most of the rail in the USA wasn’t built to be the right choice for the environment and the people, but private enterprise using rail to make land valuable.
On the flip side for Europe, passenger rail is not a continental planned set of routes, but a set of national routes that follow national politics.
Train isn’t as economically viable here because of the spread out populace.
Doing only what is economically viable is precisely the problem.
It was only done in Europe to the extent it was because it was necessary for sovereignty.
It wasn’t done altruistically for the people, it was done to move armies from one side of the country to another quickly.
The USA didn’t have a couple centuries of war fought between its states to build the rail system that Europe now thumbs its nose at the USA about.
In 1800 France had roughly 27 million people. In a state about the size of Texas.
In 2026 Texas has 32 million people.
1800s France had nearly the population density of modern day Texas.
Germany 24 million or so, Austria/Hunagry another 23 million
Mind you Belgium and The Netherlands combined for nearly 6 million, which was larger than the population of the USA in 1800.
This is how Europe supported its railroads.
Ah yes, if I want to visit my mom in Atlanta, I can take the Amtrak train which takes 34 hours, ten minutes. Or I could take any number of dozens of flights that leave every day and be there in ~45 minutes.
Note: The train tickets are about 3x more expensive too.
now imagine if the government invested in a train you could take to be there in 3 h total without checkin/security that runs multiple times per day
Who the hell would ride it? Everyone going to Atlanta is just using it as a layover to go somewhere else!
Well you do if you want to visit her right now…
I know someone stuck in Honolulu. I should suggest this to them. Maybe we need a chunnel!
