11 ms·

USA is a rather big country, coast to coast travel is going to take a good amount of time compared to travel times between major European cities

pavlov 2y ago
The Seattle-Chicago train operates at an average speed of 50 mph, so 80 km/h. Passenger trains between major cities in Europe are in the 200-280 km/h range. The problem isn’t the big country, it’s the slow trains (that even get deprioritized after cargo, to add insult to the injury).
- billfruit 2y ago
  Distance is also a factor. I see train timings listed for Madrid to Berlin to be more than 24 hours.
- trinix912 2y ago
  > Passenger trains between major cities in Europe are in the 200-300 km/h range. I don't know which country exactly you mean, I live in central Europe (Slovenia) and no train goes over 200 km/h, most go 60-80 km/h. Also, every time I'm at the train station in Ljubljana (Slovenia's capital), there's an announcement about the train from Budapest being ~40min late. And it's a way shittier looking train than the local commute ones going 60.
  - benterris 2y ago
    French high speed trains are fast, for instance the average speed of the train on the Paris-Strasbourg section (~400km in length) is 250km/h. This is the global average speed, so it is even faster on the high-speed section, going at around 320km/h. I often take this train, which is very convenient.
    - billfruit 2y ago
      Some information online indicates that the non high speed train takes about 20 mins more than the high speed train on that route. It does not seem a huge time difference
      - filmor 2y ago
        The connection that takes 20min longer has two additional stops (the fast connection is a direct one) but it is still served by TGV or ICE trains, like the direct connection. The distance between Paris and Strasbourg is >400km, so even the "slow" connection has an average speed of ~200 km/h. The actual regional train connection (TER) takes nearly 5 hours with plenty of stops in between. Slightly faster non-regional but non-TGV connections only exist on lines that are not served by TGVs.
        b112 2y ago
        This reminds me of Voyager buses in Ontario during the 80s/90s. They had two routes between Ottawa and Toronto. One took maybe 6 hours. The other 12+ or some such. The 12+ hour took almost the same route, but stopped at every. single. town. Woe to the person wanting to go from Ottawa to Toronto, and buying the wrong ticket. This is pre-Internet so research was less common and easy, and if you have no idea it could matter... I recall this being named the "milk run".
    - vitus 2y ago
      To emphasize just how fast this is in comparison to regular rail: When I was visiting France some years back and took the TER train on the way from Paris to Strasbourg (300mi / 500km), and that crawled. On the way back, we took the TGV, which flew. If you look at booking tickets on SNCF's website, the difference is stark: about 5 hours via the TER, versus a little under 2 hours via the TGV. (From that perspective, it's a little funny to describe the TER as crawling, seeing as that's not meaningfully different from driving that distance.) There are some portions of Amtrak that have comparable max speeds (notably, the Acela) but even then, the average speeds on those routes are nowhere near 200km/h.
      - usr1106 2y ago
        I took the TER from Strasbourg to Paris just weeks ago (just 2 3rds of the distance for me because I was not in Strasbourg). It travels well over 100 km/h all the time and it makes only a few stops. That is only half or even less of the TGVs' speed, but still faster than by car. Definitely not crawling.
        vitus 2y ago
        As I mentioned -- it's not actually slow in absolute terms! The experience is lodged in my mind because it took so much more time than the reverse trip, and it was sweltering to be stuck on a train with inadequate air conditioning on a rather hot summer day. There are of course many benefits to taking even the TER over driving the equivalent distance: you don't have to be laser-focused on driving (especially in a foreign country where you might not speak / read the language or necessarily know the rules of the road), you don't have variation in travel times due to traffic (which, by driving, you would only contribute to), reduced per-passenger emissions, and so forth.
  - rsynnott 2y ago
    Most Western European countries have networks of 300km/h trains; assume that’s what they’re referring to.
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    See https://openrailwaymap.org/ https://openrailwaymap.org/ and choose "Max speeds". Much of Western Europe has yellow, orange, red and purple lines, i.e. lines over 200km/h. Parts of Central and Eastern Europe do not, as you say.
- dagw 2y ago
  To be fair, Europe also kind of sucks at long distance trains. If you want to go the same distance as Seattle-Chicago in Europe by train (say Lisbon-Warszawa or Rome-Northern Sweden) you're often looking at 40-50 hours, mainly due to having to make 5-7 connections.
  - wslh 2y ago
    Which is obvious because they are different countries? And, also tourists select specific countries to visit so your "use case" is very rare. Edit Rare = majority of tourists in Europe go to specific cities and countries. There are trips between countries but it is rare to go around ALL Europe by train. Trains are significantly more expensive that flights.
    - albumen 2y ago
      If continental Europeans want to visit another distant European country, that's a rare use case? Or are you only referring to e.g. US tourists visiting Europe?
      - wslh 2y ago
        Take a flight, much cheaper.
    - nutrie 2y ago
      Not at all rare. I used to make somewhat regular business trips by train from Prague to Berlin.
      - wslh 2y ago
        You =/> major tourists [1]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/487572/leading-european-city-destinations/#:~:text=Overall%2C%20Paris%20and%20the%20%C3%8Ele,and%2017.4%20million%20arrivals%2C%20respectively https://www.statista.com/statistics/487572/leading-european-....
      - pantalaimon 2y ago
- aetherson 2y ago
  Wait until you find out how fast passenger jets are.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    Wait until you find out how quickly you can board and exit a train at a station that’s right in the center of the city, versus traveling to an airport, going through security, waiting to board, and then waiting some more for the plane to hopefully get its take-off slot from air control. You can get from London to Paris by train in less time than it takes to go from Manhattan to boarding a plane at JFK.
    - aetherson 2y ago
      Ah yes, the fake line of argument that for airplanes you have to drive an hour to get to the airport two hours before your flight, while in the case of trains, a powerful genie comes into your house, packs your suitcase and whisks you away in his powerful arms directly to your seat on the train 13.21 seconds prior to departure. It's BS. In existing cities, train stations are just as hard to build in the city center as airports -- neither happens. You do not in fact need to get to airports hours in advance, and security theater in airports is still excruciating, but you can get PreCheck or Clear and cut the time way down. There is some time advantage to boarding trains, but it's on the order of 20-40 minutes, not hours. Paris and London are only 213 miles apart! It's about 2/3rds the distance that SF is from LA, much less say SF to Seattle or NYC to Chicago. Rail travel works great in Europe because distances are small, density is high, and the cities grew up centered around rail infrastructure.
      - em-bee 2y ago
        In existing cities, train stations are just as hard to build in the city center as airports -- neither happens only in countries where they neglected building train stations before the cities grew to todays sizes. but even then it's not true. US cities are less dense, so it should be easier to find space. train stations are also much much smaller than airports and trains don't make as much noise as airplanes. there are many more reasons not to build airports in the middle of a city, none of which apply to trains. the main problem for trains is finding a route for the track into the city. that can be and is solved with tunnels though. or the chinese approach where the high speed trainstations are sometimes built away from the center of the city and instead the center is connected by a dense network of subway lines. a process that started less than 20 years ago but now puts many chinese cities at the top of the list of the largest subway networks in the world.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  Is it really a mystery that long routes with less expected users see less investment? Or do you expect that fast trains would unlock a lot of travel between Chicago and Seattle?
- pfdietz 2y ago
  The "big country" contributes in that passenger-only high speed rail would be ruinously expensive to lay down and maintain. Long distance passenger rail exists at all in the US only because it can share track with freight rail.
- rgmerk 2y ago
  New York to San Francisco is roughly 3000 miles (4800 km). At 250km/h, that’s a 19 hour trip. A 19 hour plane trip from New York gets you to Singapore. Fast trains are great for journeys up to about 600km. For crossing continents, planes win, whether rail enthusiasts like it or not, and a future of transport that involves “just don’t fly” as the only solution to climate change is an absolute nonstarter in most of the world.
  - defrost 2y ago
    Not a single serious person I'm aware of has proposed “just don’t fly” as the only solution to climate change. Any solution would require multiple strategies in tandem to increase efficiencies, reduce unnecessary energy expenditures, reduce GG emmissions, transition to non FF sources, and reduce existing GG in the atmosphere. It's a daunting task and one that may be impossible to achieve.
    - rgmerk 2y ago
      Depends on your definition of “serious”. You see a lot of “just take the train” in centrist and left-leaning British media (example provided below). Easy to imagine in the UK. Not so easy from, say, Perth, Western Australia. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200218-climate-change-how-to-cut-your-carbon-emissions-when-flying https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200218-climate-change-h...
kmeisthax 2y ago
Yes, but we don't need a train to replace NY-to-LA. At least not right away. What we need are high speed trains between nearby city pairs. Short-haul flights both waste fuel, don't get up to speed, and have their travel times doubled by TSA security theater and airline boarding nonsense. A Shinkansen-spec high speed train (320kph/200mph) would beat the plane on 200-400 mile trips, both in terms of convenience, carbon emissions, and luxury. The 2,785 road miles between NY and LA would be 14 rail hours compared to the six a plane takes. Not competitive in the slightest, and not a serious mode of travel, but I'd consider it. The three days the train currently takes sounds like the worst of a road trip combined with the worst of a plane trip.

pavlov 2y ago

The Seattle-Chicago train operates at an average speed of 50 mph, so 80 km/h. Passenger trains between major cities in Europe are in the 200-280 km/h range. The problem isn’t the big country, it’s the slow trains (that even get deprioritized after cargo, to add insult to the injury).

billfruit 2y ago
Distance is also a factor. I see train timings listed for Madrid to Berlin to be more than 24 hours.
trinix912 2y ago
> Passenger trains between major cities in Europe are in the 200-300 km/h range. I don't know which country exactly you mean, I live in central Europe (Slovenia) and no train goes over 200 km/h, most go 60-80 km/h. Also, every time I'm at the train station in Ljubljana (Slovenia's capital), there's an announcement about the train from Budapest being ~40min late. And it's a way shittier looking train than the local commute ones going 60.
- benterris 2y ago
  French high speed trains are fast, for instance the average speed of the train on the Paris-Strasbourg section (~400km in length) is 250km/h. This is the global average speed, so it is even faster on the high-speed section, going at around 320km/h. I often take this train, which is very convenient.
  - billfruit 2y ago
    Some information online indicates that the non high speed train takes about 20 mins more than the high speed train on that route. It does not seem a huge time difference
    - filmor 2y ago
      The connection that takes 20min longer has two additional stops (the fast connection is a direct one) but it is still served by TGV or ICE trains, like the direct connection. The distance between Paris and Strasbourg is >400km, so even the "slow" connection has an average speed of ~200 km/h. The actual regional train connection (TER) takes nearly 5 hours with plenty of stops in between. Slightly faster non-regional but non-TGV connections only exist on lines that are not served by TGVs.
      - b112 2y ago
        This reminds me of Voyager buses in Ontario during the 80s/90s. They had two routes between Ottawa and Toronto. One took maybe 6 hours. The other 12+ or some such. The 12+ hour took almost the same route, but stopped at every. single. town. Woe to the person wanting to go from Ottawa to Toronto, and buying the wrong ticket. This is pre-Internet so research was less common and easy, and if you have no idea it could matter... I recall this being named the "milk run".
  - vitus 2y ago
    To emphasize just how fast this is in comparison to regular rail: When I was visiting France some years back and took the TER train on the way from Paris to Strasbourg (300mi / 500km), and that crawled. On the way back, we took the TGV, which flew. If you look at booking tickets on SNCF's website, the difference is stark: about 5 hours via the TER, versus a little under 2 hours via the TGV. (From that perspective, it's a little funny to describe the TER as crawling, seeing as that's not meaningfully different from driving that distance.) There are some portions of Amtrak that have comparable max speeds (notably, the Acela) but even then, the average speeds on those routes are nowhere near 200km/h.
    - usr1106 2y ago
      I took the TER from Strasbourg to Paris just weeks ago (just 2 3rds of the distance for me because I was not in Strasbourg). It travels well over 100 km/h all the time and it makes only a few stops. That is only half or even less of the TGVs' speed, but still faster than by car. Definitely not crawling.
      - vitus 2y ago
        As I mentioned -- it's not actually slow in absolute terms! The experience is lodged in my mind because it took so much more time than the reverse trip, and it was sweltering to be stuck on a train with inadequate air conditioning on a rather hot summer day. There are of course many benefits to taking even the TER over driving the equivalent distance: you don't have to be laser-focused on driving (especially in a foreign country where you might not speak / read the language or necessarily know the rules of the road), you don't have variation in travel times due to traffic (which, by driving, you would only contribute to), reduced per-passenger emissions, and so forth.
- rsynnott 2y ago
  Most Western European countries have networks of 300km/h trains; assume that’s what they’re referring to.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  See https://openrailwaymap.org/ https://openrailwaymap.org/ and choose "Max speeds". Much of Western Europe has yellow, orange, red and purple lines, i.e. lines over 200km/h. Parts of Central and Eastern Europe do not, as you say.
dagw 2y ago
To be fair, Europe also kind of sucks at long distance trains. If you want to go the same distance as Seattle-Chicago in Europe by train (say Lisbon-Warszawa or Rome-Northern Sweden) you're often looking at 40-50 hours, mainly due to having to make 5-7 connections.
- wslh 2y ago
  Which is obvious because they are different countries? And, also tourists select specific countries to visit so your "use case" is very rare. Edit Rare = majority of tourists in Europe go to specific cities and countries. There are trips between countries but it is rare to go around ALL Europe by train. Trains are significantly more expensive that flights.
  - albumen 2y ago
    If continental Europeans want to visit another distant European country, that's a rare use case? Or are you only referring to e.g. US tourists visiting Europe?
    - wslh 2y ago
      Take a flight, much cheaper.
  - nutrie 2y ago
    Not at all rare. I used to make somewhat regular business trips by train from Prague to Berlin.
    - wslh 2y ago
      You =/> major tourists [1]. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/487572/leading-european-city-destinations/#:~:text=Overall%2C%20Paris%20and%20the%20%C3%8Ele,and%2017.4%20million%20arrivals%2C%20respectively https://www.statista.com/statistics/487572/leading-european-....
    - pantalaimon 2y ago
aetherson 2y ago
Wait until you find out how fast passenger jets are.
- pavlov 2y ago
  Wait until you find out how quickly you can board and exit a train at a station that’s right in the center of the city, versus traveling to an airport, going through security, waiting to board, and then waiting some more for the plane to hopefully get its take-off slot from air control. You can get from London to Paris by train in less time than it takes to go from Manhattan to boarding a plane at JFK.
  - aetherson 2y ago
    Ah yes, the fake line of argument that for airplanes you have to drive an hour to get to the airport two hours before your flight, while in the case of trains, a powerful genie comes into your house, packs your suitcase and whisks you away in his powerful arms directly to your seat on the train 13.21 seconds prior to departure. It's BS. In existing cities, train stations are just as hard to build in the city center as airports -- neither happens. You do not in fact need to get to airports hours in advance, and security theater in airports is still excruciating, but you can get PreCheck or Clear and cut the time way down. There is some time advantage to boarding trains, but it's on the order of 20-40 minutes, not hours. Paris and London are only 213 miles apart! It's about 2/3rds the distance that SF is from LA, much less say SF to Seattle or NYC to Chicago. Rail travel works great in Europe because distances are small, density is high, and the cities grew up centered around rail infrastructure.
    - em-bee 2y ago
      In existing cities, train stations are just as hard to build in the city center as airports -- neither happens only in countries where they neglected building train stations before the cities grew to todays sizes. but even then it's not true. US cities are less dense, so it should be easier to find space. train stations are also much much smaller than airports and trains don't make as much noise as airplanes. there are many more reasons not to build airports in the middle of a city, none of which apply to trains. the main problem for trains is finding a route for the track into the city. that can be and is solved with tunnels though. or the chinese approach where the high speed trainstations are sometimes built away from the center of the city and instead the center is connected by a dense network of subway lines. a process that started less than 20 years ago but now puts many chinese cities at the top of the list of the largest subway networks in the world.
maxerickson 2y ago
Is it really a mystery that long routes with less expected users see less investment? Or do you expect that fast trains would unlock a lot of travel between Chicago and Seattle?
pfdietz 2y ago
The "big country" contributes in that passenger-only high speed rail would be ruinously expensive to lay down and maintain. Long distance passenger rail exists at all in the US only because it can share track with freight rail.
rgmerk 2y ago
New York to San Francisco is roughly 3000 miles (4800 km). At 250km/h, that’s a 19 hour trip. A 19 hour plane trip from New York gets you to Singapore. Fast trains are great for journeys up to about 600km. For crossing continents, planes win, whether rail enthusiasts like it or not, and a future of transport that involves “just don’t fly” as the only solution to climate change is an absolute nonstarter in most of the world.
- defrost 2y ago
  Not a single serious person I'm aware of has proposed “just don’t fly” as the only solution to climate change. Any solution would require multiple strategies in tandem to increase efficiencies, reduce unnecessary energy expenditures, reduce GG emmissions, transition to non FF sources, and reduce existing GG in the atmosphere. It's a daunting task and one that may be impossible to achieve.
  - rgmerk 2y ago
    Depends on your definition of “serious”. You see a lot of “just take the train” in centrist and left-leaning British media (example provided below). Easy to imagine in the UK. Not so easy from, say, Perth, Western Australia. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200218-climate-change-how-to-cut-your-carbon-emissions-when-flying https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200218-climate-change-h...

kmeisthax 2y ago

Yes, but we don't need a train to replace NY-to-LA. At least not right away. What we need are high speed trains between nearby city pairs. Short-haul flights both waste fuel, don't get up to speed, and have their travel times doubled by TSA security theater and airline boarding nonsense. A Shinkansen-spec high speed train (320kph/200mph) would beat the plane on 200-400 mile trips, both in terms of convenience, carbon emissions, and luxury. The 2,785 road miles between NY and LA would be 14 rail hours compared to the six a plane takes. Not competitive in the slightest, and not a serious mode of travel, but I'd consider it. The three days the train currently takes sounds like the worst of a road trip combined with the worst of a plane trip.