End of an American tradition: Amtrak kills the traditional dining car

And that’s a big deal when people don’t have 4+ weeks of vacation per year.

I usually avoid flying when equivalent land transport is available and will take less than 8 hours, since it seems like a waste of fuel, but trains are absolutely not exciting when you're sitting in a 40 year old carriage lumbering along uncambered track at the same speed as freight.

Even though we were 13.5 hours late (due to weather outside Omaha), it was a great experience and I'd love to do it again.

Free market, because first, rail leads itself to monopolies. Rail infrastructure is expensive, and you need significant area coverage until you can get enough customers. So if you built one, you as a rail provider will go at extracting the most possible value, since you don‘t have competition. Classic free market failure. The solution here would be to have at least four (proven number to avoid oligopolies) private train providers competing on public infrastructure. Since Americans shudder already at the word „public“, that‘s a significant hurdle.

Individualism because in the US, people have a propensity to not share rides with others. Same fear of „public“ IMHO, as long as public transportation is thought of existing solely for poor people until they can afford a car, nothing is going to change.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzB5xtGGsTc

Sure, the product is basically the same - a ride from Point A to Point B. But if you offer a private dining room, an observation lounge, a steward who attends to just you and 3 other cabins, you can charge way more than an economy seat.

By only focusing on the "Point A to Point B" aspects, they're entering a downward financial spiral.

Cargo makes more money than people transport and most people preferred air; and short range rail is very expensive due to all the legal barriers.

We have an amazing rail system in the USA, it's just not about people transport. It, along with barge and truck, make the modern US possible.

Personally, I'd still prefer to have mine boxed to prevent scratches.

If you really look into it you'll discover that the notion that checked bikes are available on most trains is a lie. There are so many exceptions. Just because it's available on a train, doesn't mean it's available at your station. Only the bigger stations allow them and you have no way of getting your bike off the train otherwise. So if you want to go somewhere nice to bike around, you're mostly out of luck.

I'm not going to deal with taking the handlebars and pedals off all the time in a train station.

What am I going to do with that box? I ride my bike to the station.

The checked bike thing is horrible even if you're willing to deal with all of this insanity.

> Amtrak is not the best, but still better than air travel for cyclists. For the cost of a flight + bicycle baggage fees I can get a room on Amtrak.

Air travel is far cheaper than Amtrak in the Northeast. Checked bicycles are about $40 to fly with if you pick the right airline and $20 on Amtrak. But what's even cheaper is travel by car. Just rent a car for the day and you don't need to deal with any of this.

I have a lot of experience taking trains all over Europe. In almost no case was a train cheaper than flying once I included transportation to the airport. The few times a train costs more the difference is marginal and you'd end up flying Ryanair or Easyjet --- no thanks.

> And then the profitability of short distance routes is a direct product of the density of population.

Not a problem in the Northeast in the US. Only Amtrak can fail to offer a service that works everywhere else in the world.

If you've mostly taken trains in the US on the coasts, or for long cross-country trips, you may have an overly rosy view of the situation here.

I live in a mid-sized US city, the capitol of its state, with a metropolitan area population of around one million (city A). To reach the nearest city of at least this size (city B) by car is only a two hour (<150 miles) straight drive along the interstate. Both these cities have train stations serviced by Amtrak.

The only itinerary Amtrak offers to get from A to B using their service passes through city C, which is more than 500 miles from city A or city B. It's a 30 hour trip.

UK train network is not perfect, but generally is in a decent state of repair. It does receive large amount of investment regularly (less so under Conservatives but still a significant amount) - and main disruptions of the recent years were caused by either railway worker strikes fighting for their rights or changes to timetables that were too ambitious (because of the amount of new services added to the network).

Yes, the maintenance closures are annoying - but no piece of infrastructure can avoid periodical maintenance. You usually get 6 months' notice and in most cases a diversionary route. In fact even then you could get to Leeds from London via the West Coast mainline and then Transpennine routes. And it certainly didn't affect all travel to the north - depending on how you count them, London has 3 to 5 separate rail routes to there.

The assumption that delays, cancellations, and odd rules are particular to only railways is frankly bizarre. And so is your statement that train travel is considered a second-rate service here - it is all of course highly anecdotal, but on routes that are competitive with local flights (and longer distance routes with high speed trains) - trains are usually considered to be the better option (although that might have something to do with the never-ending cost saving drive by the airlines).

Your particular example of travel from Brussels to Lyon is also incorrect now, as French railways recently introduced direct high-speed services avoiding Paris (and building even more tracks for that). Crossing Paris old-style involves a Metropolitain trip, but that is not an unusual problem for most places (Boston's infamous North-South railway gap comes to mind).

I have experience with Amtrak, UK, French, and German railways - and I don't think I ever saw Amtrak tickets cheaper - unless you are comparing them to some last-minute train tickets on over-subscribed services in Europe. In fact I was under a distinct impression of Amtrak being noticeably pricier.

And finally, railway redundancy in US is typically way worse - Amtrak doesn't own most of the tracks it runs on and is treated as a second class citizen there. And any contingency route is likely to be untested and not ready for use due to cost-cutting. And apart from North East Corridor most of Amtrak routes are double track only, shared with freight.

For example, Amtrak has constant scheduling issues because they don’t have priority over freight trains and many shared chokepoints which are very expensive to fix. If you’re comparing their performance to a system with dedicated right of way or priority scheduling, you need to include the costs spent building that infrastructure to avoid a completely misleading comparison.

Similarly, a system which has high ridership needs less subsidy since it has higher fare revenue for the same base operating costs (think about how those passenger miles change going from 60% occupancy to 80% when the operating cost of basically unchanged). Since the U.S. has massively subsidized car travel and often deliberately avoided rail improvements (think Chris Christie wasting a billion dollars to avoid expanding the congested NJ-NYC connection), there are many cases where American routes have the same operating costs but aren’t as competitive as the same route would be in Europe or Asia because we’ve chosen to subsidize road travel instead. Any meaningful discussion needs to at least acknowledge the difficulties of comparing numbers.

You don’t have to agree with his thesis to find the book valuable though. It’s useful to understand where people on the other side of the debate are coming from, and even someone with opposite views will probably enjoy the detailed history of passenger rail in the US that he presents.

So we're waiting to catch a train back to Prague and she ends up chatting with this other American who was there with her daughter. They continued talking the whole way back on the train and we ended up having dinner and romping around together for the rest of the night.

That's still not ok. When you get directions it tells you the end of the line it's going towards. If you aren't sure, you have to ask someone.

YMMV, but IMHO yes.

However I will say I have had to develop the skill of knowing when to stop searching my own and just ask someone

I must also say that the service, friendliness and humor of the staff on the ICE was almost always exceptional!

Long distance bus are much cheaper, but also much less comfortable and less reliable. DB gets a lot of flak for one hour delays on the first snow, my bus was delayed 3 hours at the start of winter. In general delays seem much more frequent with the bus. The concept of connecting to a different bus also doesn't exist (probably because of unreliable travel times), meanwhile with the train I can travel from anywhere to anywhere.

I would love cheaper trains, but they are already cheaper than traveling long distance by car and much more enjoyable and reliable than long distance bus. They lose badly to cheap flights though.

It's so much nicer than the new ones -- but the new ones normally are only half the car and there's normally business class or something taking up the rest of the car.