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Comment by brownbat | Hacker News Reader

Fascinating. In the lead up to that, passenger trains used to be heavily subsidized by the mail cars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_post_office

Postal employees would sort the mail while it traveled. Parallel processing!

Centralized automated sorting helped kill that model, along with the fact that an air and truck system really squeezes the viability of rail.

I read once that there's a sweet spot for passenger rail at about 250 miles, but it loses to air any farther and roads any shorter. Can't seem to find that source though, and I might be off by 50 miles. TSA might be one of the best things to happen to Amtrak, hard to say.

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> TSA best thing to happen to Amtrack

In both NYC and Boston, the track for boarding isn’t shown to the waiting area until arriving passengers had a chance to leave the train. Once your track number is shown you have only a couple minutes to board, and depart.

This means you can arrive at NYC’s Penn Station or Boston’s South Station 5 minutes before departure and walk right onto your train.

When I factor the terminal location and the boarding convenience at both ends of my trip, I can get door to door from midtown NYC to downtown Boston faster by Acela than by air.

Before TSA, the flights won. I could hit LGA curbside 15 minutes before gate close and be in my plane seat. Now, the variability is much too high, and TSA is too likely to be completely mismanaging surge situations, so typically 2 hours buffer is needed as a guarantee instead of 15 mins.

In that specific case, it's hard to justify taking Acela over a bus. Acela is at best an hour faster and something like 4x the cost (or more) It is certainly more comfortable, but unless we get true high speed rail that shortens the travel time between Boston and NYC to < 2 hours I can't ever justify personally paying for it. I've only ever taken Acela between Boston and NYC when an organization I was working for was willing to foot the bill.

In Europe, I took trains that hit speeds of 195 MPH for long stretches. That sort of speed would make rail a real viable third way between car/bus and air for long distance travel.

I’ve only taken the normal train between the two cities. For the regular train when you plan 2 weeks out the prices were comparable. The slow train is only 1/2 hour slower than the accela. I found it much more comfortable than the bus and easier than driving.

The main thing to me is the comfort level and that I can do other things than concentrate on driving.

I-95 congestion is so variable that you can’t depend on the bus if you have a meeting to make, though. I was once stuck on a Megabus that took 9 hours to get from College Park to the border of Maryland and Delaware.

Mail subsidized the aviation industry for the first 35 years after the Wright brothers.

The first passenger airplane that made money without carrying mail was the DC-3 with 21 passenger seats.

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