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.
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.
No idea which is accurate, that's just a consistent theme from almost every conversation when I was consulting there.
It was weird.
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.
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
It can easily be delayed a lot longer than that. The last time I took Amtrak I was delayed over 24 hours.
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.
due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat
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.
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.
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.
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!
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 )
Just by way of comparison, in China the 819-mile train route between Beijing and Shanghai takes 4.5 hours.
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.
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.
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).
What killed it was not fuel costs
I don't know if (then state-owned) Air France did.
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.
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
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.
So, yeah, the train ride was actually a significant part of the experience for those particular vacations.
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
....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’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.
Your "deliberate" sounds a lot like victim blaming here.
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 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.
more info here: https://hackaday.com/2026/01/27/zombie-netscape-wont-die/
To be clear Sherman burned it to the ground which is why it got renamed Atlanta.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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).