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Comment by TylerE | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever actually taken Amtrak? Outside of the North East Corridor (which, at 125mph max is still glacial by EUropean standards) Amtrak is way slower than driving - and that's assuming it directly connects to where you want to go, which, against, outside of the North East, it doesn't.

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This did not used to be the case. The mid-century expansion of the highway system coincided with massive disinvestment in the rail system, which had carried the country out of international backwater-dom. Many of this country's small and medium-sized towns would not exist without the now-defunct, often-demolished train stations that they used to be built around or nearby (including my hometown).

AmTrak is primarily slower because all commercial freight has priority on the pitiful amount of track we have in the US (the NW/West coast routes are what I know best) so passenger trains have to regularly sit around waiting for freight traffic to pass. Other than that, travel times are about equal to cars, which is pretty amazing given how awful our rail infrastructure is.

Edit: grammar

I think everyone has heard this claim from Amtrak. Anyone who has actually caught Amtrak has seen the gigantic inefficiency’s (the ridiculous boarding process, ancient trains). I’ve been stuck behind freight traffic on Amtrak, but only after we were already running late and had stopped for random “signaling” issues.

If Amtrak want to prove it’s the freight traffic causing the slowness they should quantify how many otherwise ontime routes are delayed by freight.

the trips I take between Seattle and Vancouver are regularly 1h+ late due to sitting for 30min a few times waiting for freight

I also arrive and get onto the train in ~5min. getting off in Canada is slow though

Signals on the lines are also owned and maintained by freight railroads, because outside the NEC literally the only thing Amtrak owns is the trains themselves.

I think the various state departments of transportation that Amtrak serves own quite a bit of the equipment as well.

> the ridiculous boarding process

What's the boarding process over there? In Europe you just .. enter the train.

Wait in a central waiting hall until the train arrives, at which time a big screen shows what platform the train is on. Then you and everyone else rush to be first to get to the single escalator going down to the platform. A conductor checks your ticket at the top of the escalator. That's how it works in NY. It's also approximately how it works in China, unfortunately (though their stations put Penn Station to shame in almost every other way).

That’s because there isn’t room on the platforms under Penn Station. And it’s very common in Europe not to announce the platform until 10 minutes or so before. What Amtrak could do though is have actual reserved seats on their all reserved trains.

It depends on where you are in Europe. In Germany and Switzerland, the platform is announced up to a year in advance, and you can go and wait there for your train. Sometimes you can even buy a coffee directly on the platform while you're waiting.

Furthermore, most tickets have assigned seating so there's no race. Also tickets are inspected when the train is moving, not on the platforms.

Same as the US.

I have ridden a fairly large amount of Amtrak. I have never seen the boarding process cause a delay. I find the boarding process to be much preferable to airplanes.

"Signaling issues" usually means traffic and sometimes means under-invested infrastructure. There is no question that the slowness of Amtrak is directly related to underinvestment.

>I have ridden a fairly large amount of Amtrak. I have never seen the boarding process cause a delay. I find the boarding process to be much preferable to airplanes.

Same here. I frequently ride between Boston and New York. In New York, I've seen over 200+ people leave the train and another 200+ board the train, especially on Sunday evenings. The whole process takes < 15 minutes.

Boarding is heaven compared to flying. No security theater, no ridiculous parking issues. I used to ride from Rhode Island to DC, and I could literally arrive 10 minutes before my departure time, grab my bags, lock my car, walk 100 feet to the platform, and still make the train. The trip took most of the day, but now that cell service is no longer an issue, it's possible to spend the entire ride relaxing or getting work done.

And I can't believe no one has talked about how much better the seating is than any other form of long distance travel in the US.

I recently traveled from BOS<->NYC for business. I left my office an hour before scheduled departure and walked 30 minutes to Penn Station. A slightly different experience than getting to Newark/La Guardia/JFK. As a bonus, I was returning on short notice, so I was able to easily change to an earlier train 10 minutes before it departed, with no extra fee.

At the end of the return trip, I overheard a group of four other travelers saying that they got so much work done, they should just ride the train back and forth every day.

Seat and ride comfort are totally different as well. To me, it's well worth trading in some time for a much better travel experience. I've had a year where I logged close to 50k air miles in coach and over 10k train miles in coach, so I've seen the good and bad of both modes of travel (on and off the NEC for the trains).

For the long distance trains, I consider the time it takes to travel one of the benefits. In today's highly connected, highly active world, I find having 24 hours to simply look out the window and be alone with my thoughts to be incredibly rejuvenating.

49 U.S. Code § 24308 says "Amtrak has preference over freight transportation in using a rail line, junction, or crossing unless the Board orders otherwise under this subsection" [0]

In practicality, I agree with you that freight lines abuse this without consequence.

[0]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/49/24308

Ha, I never knew! Thank you for the citation. I have taken hundreds if train rides from Portland to Seattle, and sat waiting for freight trains to pass, or for a passenger train that was late due to freight traffic, nearly as many times.

Agreed - I used to take NY to Baltimore a few times a month. Typically I had a few co workers with me. So let’s do the math: if we shared a car and left at 8:30, we’d spend .. what $30 in tolls round trip? Another $50 in gas..one of us would drive and the other two could take calls or work on their computer. If we took Amtrak, we’d have to add an extra half hour to get the station and park, each one of us would spend $150 in round trip tickets, another $20 each in parking, etc and we’d be shushed the whole way down so calls were out and half the time the internet didn’t work. If it’s just one person going alone, I can see the case because you can actually focus on work... but ironically the more people in your party the worse the benefit of rail gets.

There is more productivity by having four coworkers sit together on a train and travel together than to have people in a car. Psychologically it’s easier for most to work on a train then a car, even if it’s a perfectly fine medium for you. Those time and financial costs are minimal when compared to the productivity you create by working together uninterrupted on the train.

If I were a manager I would ban driving and insist on trains (if the work would benefit from the added collaboration)

I've done the NYC to DC train numerous times. Penn Station (no parking, take the subway), hop onto the Acela, grab a 4 top. Now me and my coworkers can chat on the way to DC and work on our laptops with shoddy WiFi. There's no shushing unless you are in the quiet car, which you shouldn't do if you are expecting to have a working commute. This is much better than a car - can't work on your laptop unless you enjoy motion sickness. Or taking a flight - now you have real costs of time because of security and commute. Big fan of Amtrak in the NE corridor. Better than driving or flying for business trips.

This has been my frustration in Ontario trying to use VIA for family trips. Once you have two adults and a couple kids, the train is significantly more expensive than just driving, and only faster than the absolute worst case traffic conditions.

It's even worse for long-haul. I have family along the Canadian route (Toronto -> Vancouver), and taking the overnight sleeper train out there is about 4x the cost of flying.

Yeah long haul on Amtrak also has this annoying feature where connecting trains are often 1 day apart because the connecting train left an hour before the arriving train gets there. And forget about the cost. I’m about to fly to the west coast on frontier for $75/RT... go price that on Amtrak.. I’m guessing $400-$600 ... and easily 4-5 days of travel. We’ve also looked into NY to Orlando because you can bring your car... you might as well buy a car down there! I get the romance of rail travel - I’ve done Chicago to Minneapolis and LA to Santa Barbara.. it’s beautiful. But wildly impractical.

Well and in some ways the branding for it even leans into that, with promotions more akin to what you'd expect from a cruise line than from a transportation company.

I mean, maybe that's just the obvious path given what they're working with in terms of cost structure, but it's still annoying.

You're discounting the San Diego - Los Angeles Pacific Surfliner route. It connects many cities in Southern California and is often faster than driving with traffic congestion as it is, and a useful commuter rail in its own right.

Unless your final destination is Union Station, downtown San Diego or some other place that happens to be very proximate to the various stations in between, using the Surfliner still requires you to use another form of transport like ridesharing to get where you’re going.

Southern California is very spread out and still organized around private automobiles.

Union Station in LA directly connects to several subway, light rail, and commuter rail lines. There are lots of places it's still not convenient to get to, but it's way better than it was 20 years ago, and at least a few million people live within the area that's easy to connect. For example you can easily get to/from Pasadena or Hollywood.

And on the San Diego end, Santa Fe depot connects to all 3 light rail lines as well as most of the major bus routes in the city. Once the Blue Line extension opens in 2021, you'll be able to get off Amtrak at Old Town and be in the center of the UCSD campus in 15 minutes.

San Diegans tend to have a bit of a defeatist attitude toward transit, and there are plenty of suburban areas where transit is bad, but there are also many places where transit is a reasonable option.

I used to take the number 2 bus to work in downtown SD every day. It was fantastic: frequent, comfortable, quick, and a nice mix of passengers!

Also, not to mention SANDAG is proposing to drastically expand the existing public transit system with commuter rail and other modes of transit along major commuting corridors, even going so far as to divert funds historically used for (with, we can say now, disappointing results) highway expansion.

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/transportation/sto...

As someone who’s lived in LA for 4 years now without a car, I think it’s a trap that we’ve all fallen into to assume SoCal was fundamentally designed exclusively for the car. While, yes, automobiles have dominated the regional planning conversation from the 1960s up until very recently (LA and neighboring cities are finally taking public transit planning seriously), up until the 50s Los Angeles had one of the world’s largest streetcar and interurban train systems in the world. The city was, quite literally, built by and for transit — even its far-flung suburbs, like the town of Huntington Beach or Claremont, were built and developed as terminuses to train lines (and the train line to Claremont, on the very eastern edge of LA County, still exists in the form of the MetroLink).

There’s been some serious sprawl since then, yes, but at its heart Los Angeles is a city that is conducive — not contradictory — to public transit. And I think our planning decisions will only get more effective once we, as a region, realize that.

https://usp100la.weebly.com/history-of-transportation.html (scroll down for a map — and note that this doesn’t include the downtown/central LA streetcar system, which essentially covered every other block in downtown LA)

Very true, though "another form of transport" includes bikes, which you can bring on the train.

Then again, it's basically legal to use your car to kill cyclists in the states, especially in socal, which is why I gave it up.

I took the train from Dearborn, MI to Chicago in 2010, figuring I could work on the train and use the additional two hours of travel time versus the 4 hours and change driving.

It took 10 hours. Could've gone to Chicago, turned around and headed home, and still had time to grab dinner. That was enough to turn me off to long-distance train travel. All these years later I'm curious again, but still very dubious.

Has not gotten faster. Train travel is still limited to those who have time and patience for it

There are some short-line commuter rails that are absolutely worth it. Some of them are even run by Amtrak. That does not outweigh the general statement, but I do want to point out that rail is not a universal failure in the US.

That's why the push for true high speed rail in the US is so important. Amtrak would need a massive budget increase to make it happen.

We have high speed airplanes. Why not make airports and the TSA theater better instead? Airplanes don’t require maintaining thousands of miles of track — or buying up land to put it on. Capitol-centric countries like France do well with trains because Paris is the center of the country in terms of commerce and population, but the US has much lower population density. Who really wants to take a train from Chicago to Los Angeles other than tourists? If we cite China as a counter example, one ought not forget that most trains in China are slow and the population doesn’t have much money. Long distance trains are a 19th century affliction. We should be looking up and not down.

Who really wants to take a train from Chicago to Los Angeles other than tourists?

Pretty much no one. But Chicago to St. Louis? Or Chicago to Minneapolis? Or Charlotte to Atlanta? Or Dallas to Houston? Or LA to San Francisco? Etc/etc? Lots of people. That's here high-speed rail investment helps. High-speed planes are fine, until it snows in Chicago, or thunderstorms in Atlanta, or high winds in Denver and then the whole national air system gets screwed up. Alternatives are good.

There are certainly city pairs where it would make sense, if the rail lines were to be built for free by some genie.

But if you add up all the people who want to travel between Chicago and St Louis in a year, and then multiply by the hour-ish that they might be able to save by catching a high speed train instead of driving, and then divide by the tens of billions that such a railway line would cost to build and maintain, then... is it really a sensible use of funds per man-hour saved?

Yes. Because each one going in one car, specially in a american's very popular gas wasting cars is not only super ineffective in terms of energy and costs per trip but also extremely bad for the environment.

Also, you make a good high speed railway, and the demand will appear. In my coutry also nobody used the train, untill they were modernized, suddenly the word started to spread that it was nice, and now too many people ride the trains and we need more.

Not so obvious that it isn't.

How many hours are spent stuck in traffic? How much loss is that to society.

Perhaps people would start moving closer along the rail lines, now that frees up land from sprawl. Etc. The same rail line could carry goods (fewer trucks on the road). The rail line could be electrified, now pollution will be down and so on.

Billions of dollars is not all that expensive. The US is a rich country. First time realized this when I saw a small town with 30K population easily built a new high school for 150 million USD - compared to that, the "billions" does not sound all that big if it reconfigures the economy at that extent.

Air travel contributes greatly to climate change. When we are talking about High-speed rail in the US, no one is really talking about cross country trips like Chicago to LA. They are talking about regional trips like LA to SF or DC to NYC. Ideas like maglev or even the hyperloop are what I consider to be "looking up"

Airplanes generate an extreme amount of pollution, its not going to be a sustainable source of travel soon i think.

Used to take the train from Orlando to South Florida (Ft Lauderdale) it cost as much as me driving but me not driving is a convenience I appreciated. It takes 3 hours to drive. It takes Amtrak on a good day 6 hours to get me there. On one holiday date I took 12 hours.

How does Greyhound compare to that?

Never really took Greyhound. I just drive now that I dont go alone. It was only reasonable as a one person trip for me.

Generally cheaper than the train. Might or might not be faster depending on how many stops they have to make where you don't want to be. (they have to leave the freeway and travel to their stop which can eat a lot of time going places you don't care to be) Also depends on specific conditions of traffic, though in most cases the bus can detour around problems easier than the train.

Just noting that every time I'm stuck crawling down 80 from SFO to Sacramento I regret not being on the lovely, quick, and pleasant Capital Corridor which zips from San Jose to Sacramento and joins BART at Richmond and Oakland.

For what it's worth, on the Acela, there are a few areas where it exceeds 150mph.

Even in the Northeast corridor, Amtrak is often no faster than driving. Acela between NY and Boston is about 3.5 hours, which is barely faster than driving.

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