I live in the UK and caught a train to London then a Eurotunnel train to Paris and it was probably quicker and easier when you account for time spent in departures and going through airport security.
It seems that the cost of an additional passenger on a train is almost zero, so why do trains not attempt to reduce per-ticket prices to increase capacity and become more competitive against low cost airlines?
In your example, the train from London to Paris in my experience has almost always been nearly triple the cost of a flight.
It is. But the cost of the first passenger is massive.
Think of all these rails (and the terrain under it you have to pay a hefty price for), all the bridges etc.
You mention the Paris-London train, just the tunnel did cost $21 billions, add the high speed rails before and after it and you are probably at close to $40 billions in infrastructure before the first train can do the trip.
Trains are orders of magnitude greener than planes, but unless you massively tax planes, or massively subsidize trains, they'll always be more expensive than planes.
The east coast is already covered by an excellent train line. That line could be made faster to be more competitive but it already handles far more passengers than air.
Now let’s look at some other popular routes.
Chicago to LA? 2,000 miles. That would take around 10 hours nonstop on the fastest high speed train. Make that even worse for New York to LA, and you can bundle in destinations like Denver, Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco, etc into those long distance routes that simply don’t make sense from an eastern city.
How about popular vacation routes, like Boston to Orlando? 1300 miles, so that’s at least 7 hours assuming the train never stops.
The new-ish Amtrak CEO is correct to focus on intercity routes that are between closely packed cities. The US does need more train routes similar to the Hiawatha Service or Northwest Corridor and they need to go faster.
But even this type of buildout will be limited when you consider the size of cities in the US. If you fly from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh you’ll be on a 50 seat jet or you’ll transfer to somewhere like Detroit. What sort of train carrying 50 people will be anywhere close to economically viable?
Sure, we could use some rail connection between something like Houston and Dallas but then those passengers will also have to rent a car or use a taxi frequently at their destination. At that point you are competing with individual driving.
Back to the Hiawatha Service, if I’ve got two people in my party it’d be cheaper to drive and possibly even Uber the entire way if I had four people in my party.
The leader in high speed rail, China, has nearly ideal conditions to work with. They have huge populations concentrated in dense urban areas with low car ownership. They have almost all major cities concentrated on on one coast. They have low labor costs and a centralized government structure that doesn’t have to consider property rights or environmental impact when building out infrastructure.
I'm not even considering the delays because of weather, technical, etc.
Trains don't have as much potential for being delayed (train schedules have a lot less variance because the track is pretty much fixed and the timetables too), and they take you right from the city center to the destination's city center.
Comfort doesn't compare either, you don't have to pay extra so you can actually sit down like a human being and retain your dignity.
And if the trains were electric instead of diesel like they are in the US, I wouldn't be surprised if it was also cheaper than flying.
As a counterexample to China, Switzerland has an amazing rail network. Trains going from anywhere to anywhere, comfortably, reliably, quickly, and multiple times a day. And yet, the country is very mountainous, and has lots and lots of smaller cities.