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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 ne
by 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 agoIsn'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 agoThere 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 agoYep, 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.