Hacker News Reader

Comment by herbst | Hacker News Reader

> I was so excited about auto-pilot and dreamed of getting in my car and sleeping while it made cross-country trips. So much for that, that seems way far out.

This is more a hijack than a direct critique but I think the general issue is the assumption that we need a private vehicle for that.

Trains are perfectly capable for bringing me from A to B while I am sleeping for years now.

Edit:// with years I mean years. Before that pressure made longer rides usually more uncomfortable than they are now with modern trains. Probably only because my area has plenty of mountain tho.

View on HN

In the US you will have lots of time to sleep due to waiting for an oncoming train to clear.

In most parts of the country we don't have dedicated passenger tracks. Amtrak (our passenger line) just rents track time on the freight lines. The problem is that freight lines are often single track lines so if there is oncoming freight you just wait until the freight clears. Sometimes this his hours.

Until we have dedicated passenger lines, long distance train travel is a non-starter here. It was too slow for my 75 year old uncle on a site seeing tour. His exact words were "fun, but never again"

Nah, I love it.

My last Amtrak ride was my very last for this reason. My train was delayed four and a half hours!

I've ridden a lot of Amtrak and it's never been on a single track line. Are you sure that's an actual problem? Long delays, sure, but is that the reason? Seems to usually be train equipment failure.

Having ridden a lot of Amtrak almost makes it less likely that you'd have experienced the single track problem, since quality rail experiences in the US are pretty concentrated such that someone who has good train experiences probably lives/works in an area where that is the rule. On the East coast, pretty good service arguably extends as far south as Richmond, but past that sitting on the tracks is very common. And with that you get the classic downward spiral of crappy transit. Ride a train in SC or GA, and you'll see that anyone with the money for a plane ticket has abandoned rail there.

I mostly rode the train from SC to Boston and back (Southern Crescent) ... it's dual track all of the way. Also DC to Chicago, southern route, dual track all of the way.

I love Amtrak and am willing to put up with the delays, but DC to Chicago stop all the time, especially in the mountains, to wait for higher priority trains to pass. Sometimes it's only for a few minutes at a time, but sometimes it adds up to hours.

Agreed entirely, in some parts of the world you can even drive your car onto a train, have a nice meal, watch a movie and sleep in a luxurious cabin. Wake up the next morning and pick-up your car.

I think demand for trains has diminished which is why they're not as nice as they could be; However I found plenty of nice trains on offer in Europe and Asia.

In Asia and Europe it's only developing since ever in my pov

Not in the United States. Rail coverage is terrible. If you can get to your destination, good luck doing that without switching trains.

To be fair. I used trains on any continent other than America. My comment is a passive critique to any system who aren't able to build such a transport system yet.

The US was able (and had) a passenger train network. It didn’t stay updated because cargo is a much more profitable business with professional customers. There is not one aspect of passenger travel that is a bonus over cargo for rail companies. As others have pointed out, you get to optimize the rails for either cargo or passengers.

You're almost certainly from an area with a population density much higher than the US.

We need IoTrains

>Trains are perfectly capable for bringing me from A to B while I am sleeping for years now.

For a very limited subset of points A and B, though...

Depends where you live. I had no issues in Europe or Asia so far.

Even in Europe to get from A to B you need to switch trains super often. Like in France you almost always need to go to Paris first before going somewhere else because the network is so centralized around Paris.

But even then you can get to paris pretty fast. I have had similar problems where I had to go to Karlsruhe from Flensburg to get a train to paris, as that was the fastest route.

To be fair that's not really a reasonable train trip for people that want to actually get there as opposed to riding a train. Probably above 9 hours compared to a sub-2h flight. Train routes that are more meaningful tend to be better serviced.

I regularly take a train that takes 6.5 hours. The flight would be 45 minutes.

Getting to, into and away from the airport easily ads another 2 hours tho. Also this route has 3 flights a week compared to a train every 2 hours.

With the train I just get in and enjoy nice service, free power and WiFi and usually get some work done.

Not to mention the difference in my ecological footprint.

My point is that it's not like you are wasting time in a uncomfortable environment usually. So I dont mind taking the train, actually usually even prefer it, so do millions of people all over the world.

> Not to mention the difference in my ecological footprint.

Only as clean as the electricity is produced. In many countries electricity production relies on coal, petrol or gas, which are far from being clean energies.

I'm a big train fan and do impractical train rides quite often. I dont think millions of people share our appreciation of trains. Most people use whatever is faster, or cheaper. Trains over 3 hours tend to be neither. Paris to Flensburg is both slow and expensive. By most people's standards, the 6h additional duration of the trip offsets the airport annoyance by far.

LA to NYC is the distance of London to Poti, Georgia.

Or Shenyang to Kunming which takes 18 hours on a train. But what's your point? Trains aren't meant to replace crosscontinetal flights. It would be better to compare regional routes like LA - SF which is super inconvenient.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com