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It's a kind of interesting chicken and egg situation. The Northeast Corridor has at least hourly service through out the day, 'high-speed' (for america) trains
by mikeocool 3y ago
It's a kind of interesting chicken and egg situation.
The Northeast Corridor has at least hourly service through out the day, 'high-speed' (for america) trains, and lots of newish comfortable equipment, it's arguably the most civil way to get between NYC/DC/Boston.
A lot of the rest of the lines have once-per-day service, that runs on old equipment along freight lines. If you want to ride the Empire Builder from Fargo to Minneapolis, your only option is to get up at 2 o'clock in the morning to catch the one train of the day, and if that train had to wait for a freight train (which has priority) along it's previous 2 day journey from Seattle, it wouldn't be unusual for it be delayed until 3 or 5am.
Since the US doesn't invest in passenger rail outside the NEC, it becomes less and less viable for anyone to actually use it.
- gradys 3y agoThe key feature of the NEC is that the cities are large and close together. This is true almost nowhere else in the country.
- mikeocool 3y agoFair, though if we invested in high speed rail a lot more cities would be within 4-5 hours of each other (and have the added advantage that the train would be consistently be faster than driving).
- sofixa 3y agoIt's true in the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, Texas, Florida, California. Rail is still mostly shit over medium distances there, although finally there are concrete efforts being made in California, Texas and Florida to fix that.