18 ms·

American trains need more than railfan nostalgia

136 points by aww_dang 5y ago

exabrial 5y ago
The times I've taken Amtrak have been in the NE corridor and it's been a nice experience. I don't think I'd consider it for a long distance trip however, unless I needed to pack some extra large cargo like a mountain bike.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  Acela on the NEC is literally the single best Amtrak route in the entire country, but even it is pathetically slow. Acela's average speed from DC to NYC is only 75 mph and NYC to Boston is even slower. We desperately need true high speed rail on that route.
t0mmyb0y 5y ago
I love trains, watching & riding, and not a railfan. What we need is secure lines. Way too easy to derail trains in middle of nowhere. It happens and is not reported so we can feel safe.
occz 5y ago
If car use and infrastructure wasn't so heavily subsidized, then trains would likely fare a lot better.
- aww_dang 5y ago
  Japan's private rail system is sometimes characterized as a real estate development scheme with a railroad attached. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-05-18/the-secret-to-tokyo-s-rail-success https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-05-18/the-secre... >That's the most of any private railway in Japan, as of 2006, according to Calimente. That year Tokyu generated $2.63 billion in revenue en route to $587 million in profits. Rail fares brought in about a third of that figure, real estate holdings reap another third, and retail about a fifth. Even in a highly managed economy, private or semi-private rail may be able to compete under the right circumstances.
  - pm90 5y ago
    I could totally see railway stations becoming “hubs”, with restaurants/bars/coffeeshops for people to just hang out pre/post journey. In SFBA the Caltrain stations are totally deserted and have maybe a parking lot; this seemed really unusual to me as someone who grew up in Mumbai where the train stations have all kinds of stores selling food/books etc. It seemed so… dead. Somewhat alarmingly they don’t even have public restrooms! This is predicated on foot traffic though. And American transit systems are, let’s say, not the most appealing. I do hope that it changes.
    - newleaf 5y ago
      This is the model being tried at the Miami Brightline station. The owners were (are?): Florida East Coast Industries, which is owned by Fortress Investment Group, which owned by Japanese conglomerate Softbank.
    - drdeadringer 5y ago
      > In SFBA the Caltrain stations are totally deserted Whilst some are, there are also a lot that are right next to "downtown areas" with restaurants/bars/coffeeshops. Sunnyvale, Mt View, Palo Alto, Redwood City for examples. Are you thinking just of the San Francisco terminus or the current "pre-Google development" San Jose Diridon terminus?
      - pm90 5y ago
        Yes, I use the Sunnyvale/Santa Clara - SF route.
- samstave 5y ago
  Im really surprised that there is no "Train Ferry" -- A train that one drives their car onto and takes the train across country/states and then disembarks with their car... I used to take the train very often from sacramento to the bay area... It was clean, has wifi, quiet, power, drinks, food... It was a great commute - but the prices are still too high...
  - aww_dang 5y ago
    https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train
    - samstave 5y ago
      Well Hot Damn!... this is definitely on track. The only problem that I have with Amtrak is their disconnect with modern pricing for value of service. Case in point being a train ride from say SF to Seattle is WAY more expensive than a flight, many times longer and other than no plane crash risks... what value is it for that price? I find it akin to the guy on a slow sunday morning drive on an impassable two-lane highway where his old restored 1938 ford only goes 45 mph and the speed limit is 65 and there are mad waitresses trying to make it to clock-in time and the old guy is oblivious to other's need to be to work on time... (this is a true story based on a close friend of mine who works at the French Laundry and is constantly thwarted by oblivious slow drivers)
      - aww_dang 5y ago
        It only makes sense if you value it based on other factors. Some of these items are more valuable to me than the cost. The time factors are difficult depending on your circumstances. 1) No TSA (at least when I last used it) 2) You can show up with a bicycle. They will provide a box and you pack it yourself. Your bicycle will not be molested. 3) You can get a private compartment and drink your own liquor 4) You like trains
        macintux 5y ago
        About 8 years ago I was caught off guard by TSA running a checkpoint at the Amtrak station in Chicago. I don’t know whether that was a common occurrence at the time, and I haven’t ridden in years, but certainly in the moment I was not enthused by the potential encroachment.
sokoloff 5y ago
I live in Cambridge (across the river from and on the same subway system as Boston). In theory Amtrak should be able to attract my business for trips to NYC. Prior to COVID, about twice as often I flew to NYC as took rail. The times I took rail, the train literally never arrived on time at either end of the journey. We’d sit for an hour waiting for some track or switch problem to be fixed. Or we’d sit for a few 15 minute stretches for no apparent or announced reason. If I could count on the arrival time, I could use the train for business meetings near the train station. Since I can’t, I fly in and Uber over which, even if it takes longer per the published timetable, has less tail-risk of being late. No one needs hourly rail service between city pairs (as the article implicitly calls for) while the variability is -10 to +150 minutes. Looking for a Nov 15-19 trip to NYC, Amtrak is $306 on Acela and I could plan to start working around lunch on Monday and work a full day on Friday if I was willing to arrive home around midnight. On Delta, waking up around the same time, I could reliably attend a 9AM meeting on Monday and working the same full day Friday, get home in time to say good night to my kids. That would cost $157 plus two Ubers. That’s with spotting Amtrak the advantage of a meeting walking distance from Penn Station and riding on the crown jewel of the Amtrak network: Northeast corridor Acela.
- ardit33 5y ago
  I am the opposite of you. I live in NYC and my parents in Boston, and I take the train all the time. Flying is very unpleasant, as you still have to deal with getting in and out of airports, the whole stay in the TSA line, remove your shoes and belt thing. You are completely omitting the security crap you have to deal with air travel. Meanwhile the train trip starts and ends in downtown. (I live in manhattan and can just walk to the train station). Also, just the taxi fare from JFK to Manhattan is about 70+ tips. Sure, you can take the subway ($8), but that will add another 1hr to your trip.
  - carbocation 5y ago
    Doesn't really strike me as the opposite. If the GP post is talking about being on time for specific meetings and you are talking about visiting family, you're optimizing for different objectives. Personally, I use the train vs fly to NY from BOS depending on my objective.
supernova87a 5y ago
Well, as much as some of the (usual) points make sense about Amtrak sharing rail unreliably, the role of subsidies (hidden or overt) compared to other modes, I find that stories like this miss a fundamental truth / constraint that I have come to believe. For better or worse, we have a country that is in its middle age of infrastructure and people. We are a rich country with established interests and property rights where land for railroads can no longer be just appropriated or bought cheaply to reconfigure a rail system. We have people who can pay to have individual transportation and not have to put up with the minor inconveniences of public transport. We have all the debt of a middle aged country, plus we need to think of our other healthcare expenses in middle age, and don't have the appetite to pay for another muscle car from our youth. All these reasons make investing in rail a relatively expensive proposition compared to alternatives, and not only that, but it's especially expensive because of our high wages, standards of construction, environmental reviews, etc. So we stop investing in it. By the way, what happens along with this? When you get into this phase of a country, your engineering capabilities change, and specifically, your ability to even build these systems even starts to degrade and fall out of practice. Take rail, or any heavy construction/engineering industry. People working in such a field join it to have exciting careers, see growth, etc. Generally few people join just to maintain a static system. Unfortunately, there's much less excitement in being "maintenance" although some people are quite innovative even in such fields. So where you used to have a cohort of thousands of people trained and skilled at all aspects of rail building (engineering, operations, finance, project management, etc), now those people have either consolidated to the few projects remaining in the US (traveling around, moving cities to where the work is), work for Parsons or others who can aggregate enough work to keep a team together, or aged out, attrited away, gone to where the actual business is booming: Asia. You think about how in the US, if you had to get together the expert team to build a new rail connecting 2 cities, you would have to search far and wide to find the people qualified, and pay them huge contractor sums. Not only that, they would be out of practice of how to pitch such a deal to the cities and the people along the route. Everything would have to be done custom. In China, just to take an example, there are (up until just recently) 10,000 rail engineers who stamp out such a rail every goddamn month. How can you compete with a country that's in such a growth phase, unless somehow your country has an active strategy about how to renew itself in middle age? It's a problem. A very hard to solve problem, deeper than just rail schedules or simple subsidies.
kumarsw 5y ago
Somewhat tangentially, I watched a recent Not Just Bikes YouTube video that discusses the merits of commuter rail [1]. The video is obviously trying to discourage infrastructure that supports car-based suburbs, but another point came out that struck me: commuter rail is very expensive infrastructure with very low utilization, say 4 incoming trains in the morning and 4 outgoing trains in the evening. Any public transportation option needs to be compared against the default choice of "run more buses," which it turns out is pretty hard to beat in terms of cost-effectiveness. [1] https://youtu.be/vxWjtpzCIfA https://youtu.be/vxWjtpzCIfA
- closeparen 5y ago
  Even in clear traffic, buses are slow. I find the breakeven point with walking is about 2 miles, and with cycling about 7 miles. Going more than 7 miles on a bus sucks badly enough that I'll order my life not to do it. As such, the bus is never a first choice, but can be a lifesaver in some edge cases: * Weather is bad enough to pay the (very large) time penalty vs. walking or cycling. * You have moderate cargo hauling needs, no car, and delivery is impractical. * The train is broken, your trip is too long for active transport, and you don't have a car. * You are too elderly, infirm, or handicapped to walk or bike. * You can't afford a bike. * You can't afford to be anywhere else that's heated and enclosed. There are enough of these edge cases, and you're sufficiently likely to meet one of them at some point, that I think we should all be in favor of bus coverage. Backups and resilience are important! But we should take it as a positive sign when ridership is minimal. If we want people out of cars and can't afford trains, the answer is active modes.
- Spooky23 5y ago
  Busses are similar in some ways to the Amtrak issue. They are cheap, but very variable — although things like bus rapid transit help. I live in a small city, and the return bus trip takes 45-60m. The morning trip takes about 20. I pay about $80/mo to park at work, and my commute is 6-10m each way.
- nickpeterson 5y ago
  More high end, electric buses is probably the best option. They’re comfortable, take the room of 3 cars, fit way more people, and use existing infrastructure.
inglor_cz 5y ago
There are basically two modes of operation where trains can really be competitive: a. Suburban-to-city center commuter trains stopping every two miles or so, vacuuming up all the people from the suburbia that want to get to the city without the hassle of endless traffic jams. These need a certain density of the suburbs, so that the stops make sense and the train is "just full", but not absurdly crammed. b. High speed connections between metropolitan areas, like Madrid-Barcelona, Tokyo-Kyoto, Köln-Frankfurt etc. Usually, at least a million people must live on either end of the connection. One of the problems is that these two services need separate tracks. Suburban commuter trains are much slower on average than high speed trains and they cannot share the same track, unless you want to risk chaos every day. Unfortunately, few densely inhabited places in the U.S. have space left for so many tracks, especially in the wider city centers. A potential renaissance of rail travel in the U.S. would likely require underground tunnels. Which is possible (see London's Crosslink project), but not exactly cheap.
- ravitation 5y ago
  The Texas Triangle has a higher population density than France, a relative abundance of space between major cities, and four major metropolitan areas... But it's private companies trying to build high-speed rail, not Amtrak. The idea that it's a geography problem, at least for regional rail lines, is not very compelling.
- reillyse 5y ago
  I think relatively speaking the US is not densely inhabited. So sure in densely packed places there is not much space (by definition) but then almost nowhere in the US is densely packed. E.g. between LA and SF it’s 99% farmland, between LA and Vegas it’s mostly farm or desert. What the US needs is political will and I think the political will in the US has been eroded (by bribes) by the petrol, car and flying lobbies.
  - TheCoelacanth 5y ago
    DC to Boston is basically one continuous urban area, yet we still don't have high speed rail on that route.
wpietri 5y ago
Wow, this is a really good article. In my youth I took trains a fair bit in the midwest for journeys of a few hours. But I hadn't done a long trip until the summer of 2019, where we did SF -> Chicago. I truly loved it; there's a kind of enforced serenity to it that is a rare commodity these days. Admittedly the whole experience felt a bit retro; the the passenger cars could use a modern update. Or at least an attempt to seek parity with Europe. And there are long stretches with no internet access, which I have mixed feelings about. But overall, it was a joy. And of course it gave me an idea for an app to build. The number one question I had was, "What the hell is that out the window?" It was also a frequent question Amtrak employees get. So I taught myself Flutter and a little ML and built an app that was basically a dynamic, POV-specific rail travel guide. Whenever you opened it it would show you a map of your surroundings and nearby Wikipedia points of interest, with the ability to tap for details and photos. Happily, a friend did a long trail trip in early 2020, so I even had a beta tester. Result: positive! My other market data suggested that what I was doing was dicey as far as a sustainable business went, but it seemed worth a go. And then the pandemic came along, killing the recreational travel market. Oops! Anyhow, I also had joined the Rail Passengers Association, a pro-train lobby group, and went to one of their semiannual meetings. The audience wouldn't have been out of place in an Iowan retirement home. There was a modest sprinkling of middle aged people, and even a few representatives of the Numtot contingent. [1] That "railfan nostalgia" was a major driver of attendance. The people in charge were motivated by more, of course. They made sharp, analytical cases for the value of trains and were keenly aware of the pernicious underinvestment in rail and the difficulty of competing with (subsidized) car and air travel. I left convinced that a) especially as we decarbonize, there was a good case for rail, b) getting anything done versus vested interests, legislator cluelessness, and American business culture was very much an uphill slog, and c) the geriatric nature of the market meant the market for any sort of app was much smaller than I was hoping. I wish them all the best, though. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jul/05/meet-the-numtots-the-millennials-who-find-fixing-public-transit-sexy-urbanist-memes https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jul/05/meet-the-numt...
musesum 5y ago
Housemate is working on solar pod-cars - think of it package-switched trains (as opposed to circuit switched) Takeaway from our conversations: highest pain point is floodplains. Like Jakarta, which is sinking. Like Houston, after Harvey.
malchow 5y ago
For those interested in software in this space: https://cedar.ai https://cedar.ai.
Lammy 5y ago
Fun fact: the name “Amtrak” was a last-minute change. The company was planned to be named “Railpax” as a pun on the industry abbreviation for “passenger” (PAX) and “Pax Americana”.
JohnJamesRambo 5y ago
A good start would be reasonable prices. My gf and I would love to take a train, but every time we check Amtrak it is way more than flying. I mean come on! I can fly through the air cheaper than a train on tracks?
- pm90 5y ago
  Amtrak long distance trains have like 4 or 5 “cars”. Unlike planes that carry hundreds of passengers, the trains carry far fewer so the cost per passenger tends to be higher. I’m guessing they don’t add more cars because there isn’t much demand but IDK; could also be their engines can’t tow more.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    A "car" can easily be double decker and have hundreds of places (280 for a double decker TGV car); even a single deck can easily have more than a hundred places in non first class; meanwhile a traditional short haul airplane ( eg. A320 or 737 ) is in the <200 range. So your argument doesn't really hold up.
    - pm90 5y ago
      You are wrong. From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superliner_(railcar) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superliner_(railcar) > Pullman-Standard built 102 Superliner I coaches and 48 coach-baggage combine cars. Bombardier built 38 Superliner II coaches.[57] As built, Superliner coaches could carry 62 passengers in the upper level and 15 passengers on the lower level. The lower level's capacity would later be reduced to 12. The coach-baggage cars had a baggage compartment in lieu of the lower-level seating area,[58] and squeezed 78 seats into the upper level.[59] The total capacity of 75 to 78 represented a small increase over the 68 to 72 seats on the Hi-Level coaches, which lacked seating on the lower level.
      - sofixa 5y ago
        Even with this specific railcar, even if we assume 3 cars, that's 216 places. An A321, the biggest single-aisle airliner, can have up to 220 passengers in a high density configuration. So, a train can both have more passengers and transport them more comfortably with more luggage.
markus_zhang 5y ago
I think one of the problems is that passenger trains don't get a lot of business so it's difficult to scale up? Plus the railroads seem to be owned by different private companies so maybe that contributes to the problem too. Off-topic: In the early 90s I was a happy Chinese boy who travelled between Hefei (the provincial city of Anhui province) and Wuhu (another city in Anhui province) by train frequently. Back then the passenger trains had three categories: 1) Slow (stopped at almost every station); 2) Fast and 3) Passenger-Fast. "Passenger-Fast" was the fastest and other trains including freights gave way to it. But it was also the most expensive one so I generally took "Slow" or "Fast". For a mere 150KM it usually took 5 hours and more with half of the time spent on waiting for other trains to pass. The worst part was that Hefei and Wuhu sit at opposite sides of the Long River so I had to get off the train at the north side and take a passenger ship to reach Wuhu. The whole journey could take as much as 7~8 hours. But it was also pretty fun. I was able to lift the windows and stick my neck out to look for trains on the other track (very dangerous!). The locomotives were steam engines (steam engines were largely being replaced but some were retained) and I still dreamed of their roaring occasionally when dreaming.
- curryst 5y ago
  It's the staggering cost of building rails. It takes an extreme amount of money, and it pays off over a long horizon. I don't think there's enough confidence that trains will retain popularity over that long of a horizon. Climate change regulation might threaten it, another form of transportation might threaten it (i.e. flying, or underground super speedways), or remote work take off and cut demand for travel. Who knows, but I don't think anyone wants to stake billions of dollars on it. Then there's the fact that we've passed a lot of regulations since the last time we built a lot of railways. The environmental ones are a real killer for anything that traverses a lot of terrain, because you'll inevitably end up buried in a sea of lawsuits requiring surveys. The latest high-speed passenger rail I've seen is California's, which is up to an $80 billion budget for ~800 miles of track. I'm sure people will argue it's a bad example, but that's a massive investment, and it won't make returns until it's built. There aren't a lot of people that are willing to put $80 billion on the line in a flailing business sector, where they don't expect to see returns for at least a decade.
- 5y ago
jeffbee 5y ago
Here’s some math I have been trying to socialize for a few years. The cost of simply nationalizing the Union Pacific is not very high. You could take over the governance of the tracks with serious conflicts between freight and passenger service and spin off the rest of it into a new operating company with all of the remainder of the freight network, the rolling stock etc. The net cost would be a few percentage points of the value of the UPRR, single-digit billions at most. It would be well worth it to solve the conflicts in places like Sacramento-to-Bay Area.
- 1123581321 5y ago
  Seems like a tough sell without a believable model for the effectiveness of a nationalized company. It won't be the same company despite promises to that end (similar to the problem with acquired companies where the parent promises to be hands-off.)
rayiner 5y ago
I think it’s worth considering that maybe Americans are just bad at things that require centralized solutions (trains) as compared to things that can be decentralized (cars).
- nradov 5y ago
  Air traffic control is centralized and seems to work fine.
- pjscott 5y ago
  That sounds plausible on the face of it, but when I went looking for counterexamples they weren't hard to come by. Supermarkets, big box stores like Walmart, and online retail giants like Amazon all run centrally-managed logistics operations of staggering scale, and they do such a solid job that people hardly ever think about it. Airline companies suffer from weather issues and operational hiccups, but still manage to transport huge numbers of people all around the world, quickly, while surviving on slim profit margins. America has a lot of giant factories that actually do manage to have high manufacturing throughput. All of these are centralized, and all demonstrate truly impressive amounts of competence. (One thing these companies all have in common is that they have competitors and need to cater to their customers and shareholders. If they were poorly run, their customers would go somewhere else. Amtrak gets federal funding whether they're well run or not. This is probably a factor, though probably not the only factor.)
- adrianN 5y ago
  Cars need quite a bit of infrastructure too and central planning mandates that cities in the US be built to be maximally friendly to cars, at the expense of every other mode of transportation.

136 points by aww_dang 5y ago

The times I've taken Amtrak have been in the NE corridor and it's been a nice experience. I don't think I'd consider it for a long distance trip however, unless I needed to pack some extra large cargo like a mountain bike.

TheCoelacanth 5y ago
Acela on the NEC is literally the single best Amtrak route in the entire country, but even it is pathetically slow. Acela's average speed from DC to NYC is only 75 mph and NYC to Boston is even slower. We desperately need true high speed rail on that route.

t0mmyb0y 5y ago

I love trains, watching & riding, and not a railfan. What we need is secure lines. Way too easy to derail trains in middle of nowhere. It happens and is not reported so we can feel safe.

occz 5y ago

If car use and infrastructure wasn't so heavily subsidized, then trains would likely fare a lot better.

aww_dang 5y ago
Japan's private rail system is sometimes characterized as a real estate development scheme with a railroad attached. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-05-18/the-secret-to-tokyo-s-rail-success https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-05-18/the-secre... >That's the most of any private railway in Japan, as of 2006, according to Calimente. That year Tokyu generated $2.63 billion in revenue en route to $587 million in profits. Rail fares brought in about a third of that figure, real estate holdings reap another third, and retail about a fifth. Even in a highly managed economy, private or semi-private rail may be able to compete under the right circumstances.
- pm90 5y ago
  I could totally see railway stations becoming “hubs”, with restaurants/bars/coffeeshops for people to just hang out pre/post journey. In SFBA the Caltrain stations are totally deserted and have maybe a parking lot; this seemed really unusual to me as someone who grew up in Mumbai where the train stations have all kinds of stores selling food/books etc. It seemed so… dead. Somewhat alarmingly they don’t even have public restrooms! This is predicated on foot traffic though. And American transit systems are, let’s say, not the most appealing. I do hope that it changes.
  - newleaf 5y ago
    This is the model being tried at the Miami Brightline station. The owners were (are?): Florida East Coast Industries, which is owned by Fortress Investment Group, which owned by Japanese conglomerate Softbank.
  - drdeadringer 5y ago
    > In SFBA the Caltrain stations are totally deserted Whilst some are, there are also a lot that are right next to "downtown areas" with restaurants/bars/coffeeshops. Sunnyvale, Mt View, Palo Alto, Redwood City for examples. Are you thinking just of the San Francisco terminus or the current "pre-Google development" San Jose Diridon terminus?
    - pm90 5y ago
      Yes, I use the Sunnyvale/Santa Clara - SF route.
samstave 5y ago
Im really surprised that there is no "Train Ferry" -- A train that one drives their car onto and takes the train across country/states and then disembarks with their car... I used to take the train very often from sacramento to the bay area... It was clean, has wifi, quiet, power, drinks, food... It was a great commute - but the prices are still too high...
- aww_dang 5y ago
  https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train https://www.amtrak.com/auto-train
  - samstave 5y ago
    Well Hot Damn!... this is definitely on track. The only problem that I have with Amtrak is their disconnect with modern pricing for value of service. Case in point being a train ride from say SF to Seattle is WAY more expensive than a flight, many times longer and other than no plane crash risks... what value is it for that price? I find it akin to the guy on a slow sunday morning drive on an impassable two-lane highway where his old restored 1938 ford only goes 45 mph and the speed limit is 65 and there are mad waitresses trying to make it to clock-in time and the old guy is oblivious to other's need to be to work on time... (this is a true story based on a close friend of mine who works at the French Laundry and is constantly thwarted by oblivious slow drivers)
    - aww_dang 5y ago
      It only makes sense if you value it based on other factors. Some of these items are more valuable to me than the cost. The time factors are difficult depending on your circumstances. 1) No TSA (at least when I last used it) 2) You can show up with a bicycle. They will provide a box and you pack it yourself. Your bicycle will not be molested. 3) You can get a private compartment and drink your own liquor 4) You like trains
      - macintux 5y ago
        About 8 years ago I was caught off guard by TSA running a checkpoint at the Amtrak station in Chicago. I don’t know whether that was a common occurrence at the time, and I haven’t ridden in years, but certainly in the moment I was not enthused by the potential encroachment.

sokoloff 5y ago

I live in Cambridge (across the river from and on the same subway system as Boston). In theory Amtrak should be able to attract my business for trips to NYC. Prior to COVID, about twice as often I flew to NYC as took rail. The times I took rail, the train literally never arrived on time at either end of the journey. We’d sit for an hour waiting for some track or switch problem to be fixed. Or we’d sit for a few 15 minute stretches for no apparent or announced reason. If I could count on the arrival time, I could use the train for business meetings near the train station. Since I can’t, I fly in and Uber over which, even if it takes longer per the published timetable, has less tail-risk of being late. No one needs hourly rail service between city pairs (as the article implicitly calls for) while the variability is -10 to +150 minutes. Looking for a Nov 15-19 trip to NYC, Amtrak is $306 on Acela and I could plan to start working around lunch on Monday and work a full day on Friday if I was willing to arrive home around midnight. On Delta, waking up around the same time, I could reliably attend a 9AM meeting on Monday and working the same full day Friday, get home in time to say good night to my kids. That would cost $157 plus two Ubers. That’s with spotting Amtrak the advantage of a meeting walking distance from Penn Station and riding on the crown jewel of the Amtrak network: Northeast corridor Acela.

ardit33 5y ago
I am the opposite of you. I live in NYC and my parents in Boston, and I take the train all the time. Flying is very unpleasant, as you still have to deal with getting in and out of airports, the whole stay in the TSA line, remove your shoes and belt thing. You are completely omitting the security crap you have to deal with air travel. Meanwhile the train trip starts and ends in downtown. (I live in manhattan and can just walk to the train station). Also, just the taxi fare from JFK to Manhattan is about 70+ tips. Sure, you can take the subway ($8), but that will add another 1hr to your trip.
- carbocation 5y ago
  Doesn't really strike me as the opposite. If the GP post is talking about being on time for specific meetings and you are talking about visiting family, you're optimizing for different objectives. Personally, I use the train vs fly to NY from BOS depending on my objective.

supernova87a 5y ago

Well, as much as some of the (usual) points make sense about Amtrak sharing rail unreliably, the role of subsidies (hidden or overt) compared to other modes, I find that stories like this miss a fundamental truth / constraint that I have come to believe. For better or worse, we have a country that is in its middle age of infrastructure and people. We are a rich country with established interests and property rights where land for railroads can no longer be just appropriated or bought cheaply to reconfigure a rail system. We have people who can pay to have individual transportation and not have to put up with the minor inconveniences of public transport. We have all the debt of a middle aged country, plus we need to think of our other healthcare expenses in middle age, and don't have the appetite to pay for another muscle car from our youth. All these reasons make investing in rail a relatively expensive proposition compared to alternatives, and not only that, but it's especially expensive because of our high wages, standards of construction, environmental reviews, etc. So we stop investing in it. By the way, what happens along with this? When you get into this phase of a country, your engineering capabilities change, and specifically, your ability to even build these systems even starts to degrade and fall out of practice. Take rail, or any heavy construction/engineering industry. People working in such a field join it to have exciting careers, see growth, etc. Generally few people join just to maintain a static system. Unfortunately, there's much less excitement in being "maintenance" although some people are quite innovative even in such fields. So where you used to have a cohort of thousands of people trained and skilled at all aspects of rail building (engineering, operations, finance, project management, etc), now those people have either consolidated to the few projects remaining in the US (traveling around, moving cities to where the work is), work for Parsons or others who can aggregate enough work to keep a team together, or aged out, attrited away, gone to where the actual business is booming: Asia. You think about how in the US, if you had to get together the expert team to build a new rail connecting 2 cities, you would have to search far and wide to find the people qualified, and pay them huge contractor sums. Not only that, they would be out of practice of how to pitch such a deal to the cities and the people along the route. Everything would have to be done custom. In China, just to take an example, there are (up until just recently) 10,000 rail engineers who stamp out such a rail every goddamn month. How can you compete with a country that's in such a growth phase, unless somehow your country has an active strategy about how to renew itself in middle age? It's a problem. A very hard to solve problem, deeper than just rail schedules or simple subsidies.

kumarsw 5y ago

Somewhat tangentially, I watched a recent Not Just Bikes YouTube video that discusses the merits of commuter rail [1]. The video is obviously trying to discourage infrastructure that supports car-based suburbs, but another point came out that struck me: commuter rail is very expensive infrastructure with very low utilization, say 4 incoming trains in the morning and 4 outgoing trains in the evening. Any public transportation option needs to be compared against the default choice of "run more buses," which it turns out is pretty hard to beat in terms of cost-effectiveness. [1] https://youtu.be/vxWjtpzCIfA https://youtu.be/vxWjtpzCIfA

closeparen 5y ago
Even in clear traffic, buses are slow. I find the breakeven point with walking is about 2 miles, and with cycling about 7 miles. Going more than 7 miles on a bus sucks badly enough that I'll order my life not to do it. As such, the bus is never a first choice, but can be a lifesaver in some edge cases: * Weather is bad enough to pay the (very large) time penalty vs. walking or cycling. * You have moderate cargo hauling needs, no car, and delivery is impractical. * The train is broken, your trip is too long for active transport, and you don't have a car. * You are too elderly, infirm, or handicapped to walk or bike. * You can't afford a bike. * You can't afford to be anywhere else that's heated and enclosed. There are enough of these edge cases, and you're sufficiently likely to meet one of them at some point, that I think we should all be in favor of bus coverage. Backups and resilience are important! But we should take it as a positive sign when ridership is minimal. If we want people out of cars and can't afford trains, the answer is active modes.
Spooky23 5y ago
Busses are similar in some ways to the Amtrak issue. They are cheap, but very variable — although things like bus rapid transit help. I live in a small city, and the return bus trip takes 45-60m. The morning trip takes about 20. I pay about $80/mo to park at work, and my commute is 6-10m each way.
nickpeterson 5y ago
More high end, electric buses is probably the best option. They’re comfortable, take the room of 3 cars, fit way more people, and use existing infrastructure.

inglor_cz 5y ago

There are basically two modes of operation where trains can really be competitive: a. Suburban-to-city center commuter trains stopping every two miles or so, vacuuming up all the people from the suburbia that want to get to the city without the hassle of endless traffic jams. These need a certain density of the suburbs, so that the stops make sense and the train is "just full", but not absurdly crammed. b. High speed connections between metropolitan areas, like Madrid-Barcelona, Tokyo-Kyoto, Köln-Frankfurt etc. Usually, at least a million people must live on either end of the connection. One of the problems is that these two services need separate tracks. Suburban commuter trains are much slower on average than high speed trains and they cannot share the same track, unless you want to risk chaos every day. Unfortunately, few densely inhabited places in the U.S. have space left for so many tracks, especially in the wider city centers. A potential renaissance of rail travel in the U.S. would likely require underground tunnels. Which is possible (see London's Crosslink project), but not exactly cheap.

ravitation 5y ago
The Texas Triangle has a higher population density than France, a relative abundance of space between major cities, and four major metropolitan areas... But it's private companies trying to build high-speed rail, not Amtrak. The idea that it's a geography problem, at least for regional rail lines, is not very compelling.
reillyse 5y ago
I think relatively speaking the US is not densely inhabited. So sure in densely packed places there is not much space (by definition) but then almost nowhere in the US is densely packed. E.g. between LA and SF it’s 99% farmland, between LA and Vegas it’s mostly farm or desert. What the US needs is political will and I think the political will in the US has been eroded (by bribes) by the petrol, car and flying lobbies.
- TheCoelacanth 5y ago
  DC to Boston is basically one continuous urban area, yet we still don't have high speed rail on that route.

wpietri 5y ago

Wow, this is a really good article. In my youth I took trains a fair bit in the midwest for journeys of a few hours. But I hadn't done a long trip until the summer of 2019, where we did SF -> Chicago. I truly loved it; there's a kind of enforced serenity to it that is a rare commodity these days. Admittedly the whole experience felt a bit retro; the the passenger cars could use a modern update. Or at least an attempt to seek parity with Europe. And there are long stretches with no internet access, which I have mixed feelings about. But overall, it was a joy. And of course it gave me an idea for an app to build. The number one question I had was, "What the hell is that out the window?" It was also a frequent question Amtrak employees get. So I taught myself Flutter and a little ML and built an app that was basically a dynamic, POV-specific rail travel guide. Whenever you opened it it would show you a map of your surroundings and nearby Wikipedia points of interest, with the ability to tap for details and photos. Happily, a friend did a long trail trip in early 2020, so I even had a beta tester. Result: positive! My other market data suggested that what I was doing was dicey as far as a sustainable business went, but it seemed worth a go. And then the pandemic came along, killing the recreational travel market. Oops! Anyhow, I also had joined the Rail Passengers Association, a pro-train lobby group, and went to one of their semiannual meetings. The audience wouldn't have been out of place in an Iowan retirement home. There was a modest sprinkling of middle aged people, and even a few representatives of the Numtot contingent. [1] That "railfan nostalgia" was a major driver of attendance. The people in charge were motivated by more, of course. They made sharp, analytical cases for the value of trains and were keenly aware of the pernicious underinvestment in rail and the difficulty of competing with (subsidized) car and air travel. I left convinced that a) especially as we decarbonize, there was a good case for rail, b) getting anything done versus vested interests, legislator cluelessness, and American business culture was very much an uphill slog, and c) the geriatric nature of the market meant the market for any sort of app was much smaller than I was hoping. I wish them all the best, though. [1] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jul/05/meet-the-numtots-the-millennials-who-find-fixing-public-transit-sexy-urbanist-memes https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jul/05/meet-the-numt...

musesum 5y ago

Housemate is working on solar pod-cars - think of it package-switched trains (as opposed to circuit switched) Takeaway from our conversations: highest pain point is floodplains. Like Jakarta, which is sinking. Like Houston, after Harvey.

malchow 5y ago

For those interested in software in this space: https://cedar.ai https://cedar.ai.

Lammy 5y ago

Fun fact: the name “Amtrak” was a last-minute change. The company was planned to be named “Railpax” as a pun on the industry abbreviation for “passenger” (PAX) and “Pax Americana”.

JohnJamesRambo 5y ago

A good start would be reasonable prices. My gf and I would love to take a train, but every time we check Amtrak it is way more than flying. I mean come on! I can fly through the air cheaper than a train on tracks?

pm90 5y ago
Amtrak long distance trains have like 4 or 5 “cars”. Unlike planes that carry hundreds of passengers, the trains carry far fewer so the cost per passenger tends to be higher. I’m guessing they don’t add more cars because there isn’t much demand but IDK; could also be their engines can’t tow more.
- sofixa 5y ago
  A "car" can easily be double decker and have hundreds of places (280 for a double decker TGV car); even a single deck can easily have more than a hundred places in non first class; meanwhile a traditional short haul airplane ( eg. A320 or 737 ) is in the <200 range. So your argument doesn't really hold up.
  - pm90 5y ago
    You are wrong. From: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superliner_(railcar) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superliner_(railcar) > Pullman-Standard built 102 Superliner I coaches and 48 coach-baggage combine cars. Bombardier built 38 Superliner II coaches.[57] As built, Superliner coaches could carry 62 passengers in the upper level and 15 passengers on the lower level. The lower level's capacity would later be reduced to 12. The coach-baggage cars had a baggage compartment in lieu of the lower-level seating area,[58] and squeezed 78 seats into the upper level.[59] The total capacity of 75 to 78 represented a small increase over the 68 to 72 seats on the Hi-Level coaches, which lacked seating on the lower level.
    - sofixa 5y ago
      Even with this specific railcar, even if we assume 3 cars, that's 216 places. An A321, the biggest single-aisle airliner, can have up to 220 passengers in a high density configuration. So, a train can both have more passengers and transport them more comfortably with more luggage.

markus_zhang 5y ago

I think one of the problems is that passenger trains don't get a lot of business so it's difficult to scale up? Plus the railroads seem to be owned by different private companies so maybe that contributes to the problem too. Off-topic: In the early 90s I was a happy Chinese boy who travelled between Hefei (the provincial city of Anhui province) and Wuhu (another city in Anhui province) by train frequently. Back then the passenger trains had three categories: 1) Slow (stopped at almost every station); 2) Fast and 3) Passenger-Fast. "Passenger-Fast" was the fastest and other trains including freights gave way to it. But it was also the most expensive one so I generally took "Slow" or "Fast". For a mere 150KM it usually took 5 hours and more with half of the time spent on waiting for other trains to pass. The worst part was that Hefei and Wuhu sit at opposite sides of the Long River so I had to get off the train at the north side and take a passenger ship to reach Wuhu. The whole journey could take as much as 7~8 hours. But it was also pretty fun. I was able to lift the windows and stick my neck out to look for trains on the other track (very dangerous!). The locomotives were steam engines (steam engines were largely being replaced but some were retained) and I still dreamed of their roaring occasionally when dreaming.

curryst 5y ago
It's the staggering cost of building rails. It takes an extreme amount of money, and it pays off over a long horizon. I don't think there's enough confidence that trains will retain popularity over that long of a horizon. Climate change regulation might threaten it, another form of transportation might threaten it (i.e. flying, or underground super speedways), or remote work take off and cut demand for travel. Who knows, but I don't think anyone wants to stake billions of dollars on it. Then there's the fact that we've passed a lot of regulations since the last time we built a lot of railways. The environmental ones are a real killer for anything that traverses a lot of terrain, because you'll inevitably end up buried in a sea of lawsuits requiring surveys. The latest high-speed passenger rail I've seen is California's, which is up to an $80 billion budget for ~800 miles of track. I'm sure people will argue it's a bad example, but that's a massive investment, and it won't make returns until it's built. There aren't a lot of people that are willing to put $80 billion on the line in a flailing business sector, where they don't expect to see returns for at least a decade.
5y ago

jeffbee 5y ago

Here’s some math I have been trying to socialize for a few years. The cost of simply nationalizing the Union Pacific is not very high. You could take over the governance of the tracks with serious conflicts between freight and passenger service and spin off the rest of it into a new operating company with all of the remainder of the freight network, the rolling stock etc. The net cost would be a few percentage points of the value of the UPRR, single-digit billions at most. It would be well worth it to solve the conflicts in places like Sacramento-to-Bay Area.

1123581321 5y ago
Seems like a tough sell without a believable model for the effectiveness of a nationalized company. It won't be the same company despite promises to that end (similar to the problem with acquired companies where the parent promises to be hands-off.)

rayiner 5y ago

I think it’s worth considering that maybe Americans are just bad at things that require centralized solutions (trains) as compared to things that can be decentralized (cars).

nradov 5y ago
Air traffic control is centralized and seems to work fine.
pjscott 5y ago
That sounds plausible on the face of it, but when I went looking for counterexamples they weren't hard to come by. Supermarkets, big box stores like Walmart, and online retail giants like Amazon all run centrally-managed logistics operations of staggering scale, and they do such a solid job that people hardly ever think about it. Airline companies suffer from weather issues and operational hiccups, but still manage to transport huge numbers of people all around the world, quickly, while surviving on slim profit margins. America has a lot of giant factories that actually do manage to have high manufacturing throughput. All of these are centralized, and all demonstrate truly impressive amounts of competence. (One thing these companies all have in common is that they have competitors and need to cater to their customers and shareholders. If they were poorly run, their customers would go somewhere else. Amtrak gets federal funding whether they're well run or not. This is probably a factor, though probably not the only factor.)
adrianN 5y ago
Cars need quite a bit of infrastructure too and central planning mandates that cities in the US be built to be maximally friendly to cars, at the expense of every other mode of transportation.