5 ms·

Wow, I don't know why I thought there would be... Way, way more trains active at a given time. I suppose I overestimated passenger rail popularity in this coun

Wow, I don't know why I thought there would be... Way, way more trains active at a given time. I suppose I overestimated passenger rail popularity in this country.. I knew it wasn't relatively huge, but there's several hundred miles in some cases between trains.

Reason077 3y ago
It would be interesting to see a version of this for the UK, where there are approximately 24,000 train services operating every weekday. How well would it scale? The data is available and open!
- hengistbury 3y ago
  This is a similar site for the UK: https://www.map.signalbox.io/ https://www.map.signalbox.io/
  - Reason077 3y ago
    Very cool! I think it just needs a stats page to answer questions like "how many trains are running on the network right now?", etc.
gnulinux 3y ago
I regularly take Amtrak between Boston - NYC but this website is missing this. Just a single datapoint.
ska 3y ago
The passenger rail coverage [edit: service] in most of North America is basically pathetic, for systemic reasons.
- gosub100 3y ago
  > systemic you misspelled "union"
  - ska 3y ago
    If it were that simple, it would be much easier to fix.
- rgmerk 3y ago
  Intercity passenger rail makes little sense over most of the USA, outside the existing northeast corridor. In a sane world Amtrak would shut down most of the long-distance routes, fix the northeast corridor, and focus on gradually expanding that, but the politics of that are unattractive so it bumbles on with trains that only train nerds would ever consider actually riding on.
  - hattmall 3y ago
    If you ride them most of the people don't seem like train nerds. Properly done rail would be viable for most of the US. A cross-country trip not really. But anything from about 800 to 1200 miles could be competitive with commercial flights and have extrinsic benefits as well. A 1200 mile flight takes about 3 hours. Add in a minimum of one hour on each end for airport transit and moving about within the airport and your at 5 hours, and often times much more. High speed rail moving 200 mph with 6 to 8 stops may take a couple more hours in the most advantageous to air comparison. Also consider than many of those 6 to 8 stops would be serving places that may require connecting flights or where people are driving to the major airport from. It has the potential to be nicer, safer, cheaper and more environmentally conscious. There's no good reason America doesn't have top tier rail transit.
  - sofixa 3y ago
    There are plenty of locations in the US where fast intercity regional rail could easily be useful and work. Florida, Portland - Vancouver, Alabama/Georgia/Carolinas/Virginias, Midwest. Yeah, few people will take a cross-country train outside of for the novelty and the attraction itself (which are still not to be dismissed), but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of <4-5h trips that can be made via train if there was good, reliable and fast service.
- red-iron-pine 3y ago
  specifically, that freight has right of way at all times. they basically get what they want and tell amtrack to stuff it.
- kjkjadksj 3y ago
  Coverage is actually surprisingly wide, just the service level is something out of the 1870s for a lot of stations. The siting for a lot of stations is usually pretty poor as well with terrible/nonexistent walkshed considerations (see the Palm Springs station, try walking to your hotel from that).
  - ska 3y ago
    Fair enough, I was using "coverage" for actual trips, not nominal rail extent. "Service" is a better description. Your point about siting is very true.
condiment 3y ago
The site is incomplete, and there are way, way more trains active at a given time. For instance the Tri-Rail and Brightline (high-speed rail) in Florida each have 5-6 trains running simultaneously. Brightline is notable as the US's first credible foray into high-speed rail. Similarly most major cities in the US have either light rail, rapid transit, or both, which is maybe not included in this map. "Passenger rail" might have some highly specific semantic meaning that leaves these out of this map.
- solaarphunk 3y ago
  Bright line isn’t HSR. The average speed is something like 65mph
- benatkin 3y ago
  How is Brightline credible? It seems to be really expensive and has a high fatal accident rate.
- bjord 3y ago
  NJTransit is also a notable omission.
  - dumbo-octopus 3y ago
    As is the LA Metro (the rail, not Metrolink, the subway)
- ZanyProgrammer 3y ago
  Obviously it’s not the first credible foray into HSR in the US-that honor is Acelas. Edit: if you’re referring to Brightline West, construction hasn’t even started.
  - paddy_m 3y ago
    Acela isn't HSR, and Metroliner which came before had travel times from NYC to DC as low as 2.5 hours. Acela does the same trip in 3.5 hours. Metroliner lowered trip times primarily through faster acceleration.
tacostakohashi 3y ago
Outside the northeast corridor and a few others, there are many Amtrak trains are only once a day, or less, and often with long routes. It's unfortunate. The network is pretty good in terms of coverage / states covered on the map (since it's optimized for that), but lots of places it's pretty much impractical to use because the one time/day doesn't work. I really wish they could at least get to a minimum of two trains, a "day" and "night" train on every route. You'd think the marginal cost would be minimal considering all the track/stations are there anyway!
- threeio 3y ago
  Isn't that mostly based on the fact that they share rail time? Its not like these tracks are unused in the other periods of time, they're just not Amtrak trains.
  - Lammy 3y ago
    There used to be way way more lines forming more of a mesh than the skeleton we have today. Through a series of mega-mergers we are down to effectively a west-coast-duopoly and an east-coast-duopoly of companies that can run long-distance trains. When railroad companies merge they tend to abandon one or the other's trackage in areas where the formerly-separate networks ran between the same market areas, keeping the minimum segments of track to cover the maximum number of customers (not even maximum geographical area). Check out the 2023 North American Abandoned Railroad Lines map: https://www.frrandp.com/p/the-map.html https://www.frrandp.com/p/the-map.html
- bpye 3y ago
  Yep, I really like the train from Vancouver to Seattle but you get two trains each direction each day, one in the morning and one in the evening. Because of how long the trip takes it doesn’t really work as a day trip sadly - you’d be spending as long on the train as you would at your destination.
bonestamp2 3y ago
It would be a lot busier if cargo trains were added.
jcranmer 3y ago
US population can be approximated as relatively dense populations in California, the Northeast, a central portion of Texas, and parts of the Midwest, with rural Europe-ish levels of density (with some greater pockets of density nestled within) in the rest of the country ~east of the Mississippi (and a lesser degree in the Pacific Northwest), and truly empty regions basically everywhere else. In terms of where there should be lots of trains that there isn't, it's largely the Midwest outside of Chicago, Texas Triangle, and the Southeast, all of which could probably support hourly intercity HSR trains if they were competently built (although especially in the Southeast, this is going to be restricted basically to a single corridor).
- sofixa 3y ago
  What about Florida and the general Southeast? Memphis - Nashville - Birmingham Atlanta - Charlotte, going north to Virginia, and south to Florida definitely look like decently dense and urbanised to merit high speed rail between some of them.
screye 3y ago
The only half decent fast railway (acela) in the US costs more than an uber+flight for the same trip. I'm surprised anyone takes it at all. US rail is starting at negative 100. Only a small group of masochists (raises hand) choose to inflict this on themselves.
- woodruffw 3y ago
  This isn’t true, unless you’re doing something weird like booking the most expensive Acela the day before and comparing it to the least-expensive flight booked in advance. And even when you do this: taxi fare from NYC airports to downtown Manhattan is around $60, so I don’t know how you’ve worked this out.

Reason077 3y ago

It would be interesting to see a version of this for the UK, where there are approximately 24,000 train services operating every weekday. How well would it scale? The data is available and open!

hengistbury 3y ago
This is a similar site for the UK: https://www.map.signalbox.io/ https://www.map.signalbox.io/
- Reason077 3y ago
  Very cool! I think it just needs a stats page to answer questions like "how many trains are running on the network right now?", etc.

gnulinux 3y ago

I regularly take Amtrak between Boston - NYC but this website is missing this. Just a single datapoint.

ska 3y ago

The passenger rail coverage [edit: service] in most of North America is basically pathetic, for systemic reasons.

gosub100 3y ago
> systemic you misspelled "union"
- ska 3y ago
  If it were that simple, it would be much easier to fix.
rgmerk 3y ago
Intercity passenger rail makes little sense over most of the USA, outside the existing northeast corridor. In a sane world Amtrak would shut down most of the long-distance routes, fix the northeast corridor, and focus on gradually expanding that, but the politics of that are unattractive so it bumbles on with trains that only train nerds would ever consider actually riding on.
- hattmall 3y ago
  If you ride them most of the people don't seem like train nerds. Properly done rail would be viable for most of the US. A cross-country trip not really. But anything from about 800 to 1200 miles could be competitive with commercial flights and have extrinsic benefits as well. A 1200 mile flight takes about 3 hours. Add in a minimum of one hour on each end for airport transit and moving about within the airport and your at 5 hours, and often times much more. High speed rail moving 200 mph with 6 to 8 stops may take a couple more hours in the most advantageous to air comparison. Also consider than many of those 6 to 8 stops would be serving places that may require connecting flights or where people are driving to the major airport from. It has the potential to be nicer, safer, cheaper and more environmentally conscious. There's no good reason America doesn't have top tier rail transit.
- sofixa 3y ago
  There are plenty of locations in the US where fast intercity regional rail could easily be useful and work. Florida, Portland - Vancouver, Alabama/Georgia/Carolinas/Virginias, Midwest. Yeah, few people will take a cross-country train outside of for the novelty and the attraction itself (which are still not to be dismissed), but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of <4-5h trips that can be made via train if there was good, reliable and fast service.
red-iron-pine 3y ago
specifically, that freight has right of way at all times. they basically get what they want and tell amtrack to stuff it.
kjkjadksj 3y ago
Coverage is actually surprisingly wide, just the service level is something out of the 1870s for a lot of stations. The siting for a lot of stations is usually pretty poor as well with terrible/nonexistent walkshed considerations (see the Palm Springs station, try walking to your hotel from that).
- ska 3y ago
  Fair enough, I was using "coverage" for actual trips, not nominal rail extent. "Service" is a better description. Your point about siting is very true.

condiment 3y ago

The site is incomplete, and there are way, way more trains active at a given time. For instance the Tri-Rail and Brightline (high-speed rail) in Florida each have 5-6 trains running simultaneously. Brightline is notable as the US's first credible foray into high-speed rail. Similarly most major cities in the US have either light rail, rapid transit, or both, which is maybe not included in this map. "Passenger rail" might have some highly specific semantic meaning that leaves these out of this map.

solaarphunk 3y ago
Bright line isn’t HSR. The average speed is something like 65mph
benatkin 3y ago
How is Brightline credible? It seems to be really expensive and has a high fatal accident rate.
bjord 3y ago
NJTransit is also a notable omission.
- dumbo-octopus 3y ago
  As is the LA Metro (the rail, not Metrolink, the subway)
ZanyProgrammer 3y ago
Obviously it’s not the first credible foray into HSR in the US-that honor is Acelas. Edit: if you’re referring to Brightline West, construction hasn’t even started.
- paddy_m 3y ago
  Acela isn't HSR, and Metroliner which came before had travel times from NYC to DC as low as 2.5 hours. Acela does the same trip in 3.5 hours. Metroliner lowered trip times primarily through faster acceleration.

tacostakohashi 3y ago

Outside the northeast corridor and a few others, there are many Amtrak trains are only once a day, or less, and often with long routes. It's unfortunate. The network is pretty good in terms of coverage / states covered on the map (since it's optimized for that), but lots of places it's pretty much impractical to use because the one time/day doesn't work. I really wish they could at least get to a minimum of two trains, a "day" and "night" train on every route. You'd think the marginal cost would be minimal considering all the track/stations are there anyway!

threeio 3y ago
Isn't that mostly based on the fact that they share rail time? Its not like these tracks are unused in the other periods of time, they're just not Amtrak trains.
- Lammy 3y ago
  There used to be way way more lines forming more of a mesh than the skeleton we have today. Through a series of mega-mergers we are down to effectively a west-coast-duopoly and an east-coast-duopoly of companies that can run long-distance trains. When railroad companies merge they tend to abandon one or the other's trackage in areas where the formerly-separate networks ran between the same market areas, keeping the minimum segments of track to cover the maximum number of customers (not even maximum geographical area). Check out the 2023 North American Abandoned Railroad Lines map: https://www.frrandp.com/p/the-map.html https://www.frrandp.com/p/the-map.html
bpye 3y ago
Yep, I really like the train from Vancouver to Seattle but you get two trains each direction each day, one in the morning and one in the evening. Because of how long the trip takes it doesn’t really work as a day trip sadly - you’d be spending as long on the train as you would at your destination.

bonestamp2 3y ago

It would be a lot busier if cargo trains were added.

jcranmer 3y ago

US population can be approximated as relatively dense populations in California, the Northeast, a central portion of Texas, and parts of the Midwest, with rural Europe-ish levels of density (with some greater pockets of density nestled within) in the rest of the country ~east of the Mississippi (and a lesser degree in the Pacific Northwest), and truly empty regions basically everywhere else. In terms of where there should be lots of trains that there isn't, it's largely the Midwest outside of Chicago, Texas Triangle, and the Southeast, all of which could probably support hourly intercity HSR trains if they were competently built (although especially in the Southeast, this is going to be restricted basically to a single corridor).

sofixa 3y ago
What about Florida and the general Southeast? Memphis - Nashville - Birmingham Atlanta - Charlotte, going north to Virginia, and south to Florida definitely look like decently dense and urbanised to merit high speed rail between some of them.

screye 3y ago

The only half decent fast railway (acela) in the US costs more than an uber+flight for the same trip. I'm surprised anyone takes it at all. US rail is starting at negative 100. Only a small group of masochists (raises hand) choose to inflict this on themselves.

woodruffw 3y ago
This isn’t true, unless you’re doing something weird like booking the most expensive Acela the day before and comparing it to the least-expensive flight booked in advance. And even when you do this: taxi fare from NYC airports to downtown Manhattan is around $60, so I don’t know how you’ve worked this out.