Tying up capital equipment and personnel for much less time to serve the same journey. Consider San Francisco to Chicago, a route I have done both ways. The fli

Tying up capital equipment and personnel for much less time to serve the same journey. Consider San Francisco to Chicago, a route I have done both ways. The flight is 5 hours, the train ride 50 hours. A 737 is more expensive than the California Zephyr trainset, but not by 10x. I'm not sure what noise has to do with efficiency - I doubt that the energy expended on vibrating the air is physically or economically significant - but it is worth noting that trains are loud. Particularly because regulations written in blood require that they blow their horns three times at every level crossing at all hours.