This is a chicken and egg problem. Of course there's hardly any demand for a slow, expensive and often late service which only runs once a day. It's not useful

This is a chicken and egg problem. Of course there's hardly any demand for a slow, expensive and often late service which only runs once a day. It's not useful. A journey I do often in the UK is London to Edinburgh by train. The distance is almost the same (400 miles). London is a bit bigger than Chicago (12 million metro vs ~8 million metro) but then the Twin Cities are quite a lot larger than Edinburgh (1 million metro vs ~4 million metro). However, the track has been improved, is at least doubled the whole way and has significant portions at 125 mph. As a result the journey takes just over 4 hours. If the trains are more than 1 hour late you get all your money back. On an average weekday there's 41 trains travelling each way between those cities. And many of them are full. They're constantly doing improvements to try and increase the number of trains travelling. I understand it's a different situation - the result of decades of political apathy towards railways. But I think it's important to understand that the Amtrak situation doesn't have to be the way it is. There's not an inherent lack of demand for fast, regular train services between major cities.