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.
I’ve been to one before, went to WY (and MT) as a young lad, saw Yellowstone, have a better camera now and would love to go back tbh. WY was gorgeous, I love trees and shit.
I suppose SD also has Mt Rushmore and Deadwood that’d be neat visits, and the Black Hills, and the Badlands. But I’m a nerd lol, I know I’m the exception!
I’m sorry, I fundamentally do not know… how to respond to someone earnestly saying they want to visit mount rushmore. I just. Sincerely, I hope you have a very happy life.
Eh, big carving is art, even if it is art of president faces.
Still neat even if anarchism is my ideal lol. I do still like (or “have interest in” at least, if we have to be rigid in our definition of “like”) history, and art (incl sculpture). I mean, would I prefer the undisturbed natural cliff face from before the carving of it? Yeah sure, but unfortunately my time machine is on the fritz lol.
Tbf I’d go see “world’s largest pheasant” if I was driving by Huron, and yes I know it’s made out of fiberglass, fuck it we’re in town lol. Same thing.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’ve been to one before, went to WY (and MT) as a young lad, saw Yellowstone, have a better camera now and would love to go back tbh. WY was gorgeous, I love trees and shit.
I suppose SD also has Mt Rushmore and Deadwood that’d be neat visits, and the Black Hills, and the Badlands. But I’m a nerd lol, I know I’m the exception!
I’m sorry, I fundamentally do not know… how to respond to someone earnestly saying they want to visit mount rushmore. I just. Sincerely, I hope you have a very happy life.
Eh, big carving is art, even if it is art of president faces.
Still neat even if anarchism is my ideal lol. I do still like (or “have interest in” at least, if we have to be rigid in our definition of “like”) history, and art (incl sculpture). I mean, would I prefer the undisturbed natural cliff face from before the carving of it? Yeah sure, but unfortunately my time machine is on the fritz lol.
Tbf I’d go see “world’s largest pheasant” if I was driving by Huron, and yes I know it’s made out of fiberglass, fuck it we’re in town lol. Same thing.
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)
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.