Amtrak’s Empire Builder: The Train That Deserves Better
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It was by far my favorite mode of travel for my commute. The scenery through the Gorge and relaxation it brought me relative to the drive were so valuable. I got to know the staff, and in the evenings, could kick back with a beer in the observation car while looking at Multnomah Falls.
I'd rather spend 2x the time on a train and have the full time be usable than driving, where I would always show up stressed out and feeling behind in my day before I even started.
I also took it eastbound one time to ski in Montana. That was wonderful. I boarded about 7pm, dinked around on my computer for a couple of hours, fell asleep, and woke up at a world-class ski area where I could walk to my motel, catch a bus to the slopes and back, and walk to a top notch concert downtown at night.
In my opinion anyone travelling 4 hrs between work is living in a poverty of sorts. Perhaps not financial poverty, but in my opinion a lack of freedom to enjoy your life outside of work is a considerable deficit in your short time here.
The stress of the commute mainly comes from not knowing how long it's going to take and how different it is every day. If I was able to buy an assigned seat on a train and was able to work (either sending emails or coding) during the commuting time, it could allow me to shorten my time in the office and use that time only for necessary face-to-face meetings.
That'd be awesome, and would presumably let me transition into more full-time remote work.
In a more ideal situation we'd be backstopping all forms of public transport right now at the federal level so that they don't suffer any diminution of service after covid is over. It's understandable - and necessary - that people don't want to travel in various types of metal tubes right now, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be an option again post-pandemic. Instead there are actual attempts in DC to bail out cruise lines.
Also love the train station in downtown Portland - it was restored to it's 1913 glory some years back. It's so much more pleasant catching a train than a plane as you show up 15 minutes prior to departure and not miss your train. Also so much more legroom. Going by train just feels so much more civilized.
Also, a nominal hour to cover 93 miles by rail, and just three trains a week, is just laughable. That's a tourism charter service, not a transport network.
It's no wonder Americans don't think in terms of rail travel as mass transport. If you can't run trains like commuter planes, something's badly wrong.
Amtrak has proper service in the areas where it's economically viable like the northeast. The rest of it loses money and is basically there because it's legally required.
edit: San Francisco to LA, a relatively short trip as far as the US goes, is the same as going from London to Scotland. Seattle to LA is the same as London to Rome. That's not counting cross-country which makes those distances look small. Rail just isn't competitive at those distances.
When we got to the station in Seattle and checked in our bags they told us the train was at least 5 hours delayed, so we should go do something else for 3 hours and then come back for a status update. We also left our mobile number and email address with them in case there was anything else. (Though in theory they should already have had these from the ticket booking.)
Anyway, we went off to a café round the corner (it was an apparently rare snowy day in Seattle - hence the delay, plus we didn't want to stray too far) and had some drinks and brunch.
After about 2 and a half hours later we wanted to stretch our legs and wandered back to the station. Whereupon we were told the train had already left without us… but with our bags, but we could have a refund or take the train on a later day. ️
We only had overnight bags, and an onward journey planned the other end, plus we were now super annoyed so we ended up scrambling to find a flight that would get us there by the next day. That was the closest to the flight time I've ever bought an airline ticket, less than 3 hours I think. It worked out OK in the end, we got our bags from San Jose station the next morning as we'd beaten the train there, though the contents of one of the bags was damaged from rough handling.
In contrast, in Europe, while some cargo is moved by rail, the focus is on passengers. Freight trains (all trains) are short, and passengers have priority over freight.
A quick google brought this up, though I haven't read through it in full:
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/railroad/us-and-european-f...
When the fully automated, electric car and buses arrive, I would imagine that passenger rail in the US will disappear entirely except for nostalgia operations and metro systems already in operation. It is much easier to be B2B or B2G than deal with individual customers for any of the railroads, and getting passengers off the rail will be a bonus for them. The nodal nature of rail will always be a handicap compared to roads.
The US could have “chosen” to do both (there’s no single policy decision or document to point to), as it had done in its railroad heyday, and as other countries do (e.g. Switzerland, China, Russia, etc.). It was and continues to be a failure of public policy and political system that passenger rail is so bad, and even freight rail is as underinvested in. That’s not a knock on the other forms of transport, all of which form a vital part of a larger interconnected, intermodal transportation network, but rail should be an important trunk of that system given its capacity and efficiency. Yet rail has had the least amount of public financial and policy support. By comparison, the US has invested trillions of taxpayer dollars in building and maintaining millions of miles of publicly owned roads (almost all non-tolled), airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC) system, and seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS).
>When the fully automated, electric car and buses arrive, I would imagine that passenger rail in the US will disappear entirely except for nostalgia operations and metro systems already in operation. It is much easier to be B2B or B2G than deal with individual customers for any of the railroads, and getting passengers off the rail will be a bonus for them. The nodal nature of rail will always be a handicap compared to roads.
We do need autonomous, electric buses and trucks, but fully automated, electric railway technology exists now and has for many decades, and well over century in the case of electrification.[1][2] Standards-based electric trains and related technology are available for purchase off the shelf from multiple vendors, do not need to carry large battery packs in the vehicle, and no pie in sky hope for future automation of an insanely hard problem. Electric railways are the most optimized form of land-based transportation, and arguably the most overall.
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” - Bill Gates
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...
I don't really think that was in the cards. The car was already prevalent before the interstate system was built, and the military was much more about a road solution than rail.
As to cost, look at California trying to add high speed rail, as they have failed badly for what was a very modest set of served areas.
Rail does cargo very well. It's very easy to setup the factories and elevators on the rail line. Rail has some serious problems with terminal delivery of people in the US. You still need another form of transportation to get people home. Without fundamentally changing where people live or work, it needs something else.
We do need autonomous, electric buses and trucks, but fully automated, electric railway technology exists now and has for many decades, and well over century in the case of electrification.[1][2] Standards-based electric trains and related technology are available for purchase off the shelf from multiple vendors, do not need to carry large battery packs in the vehicle, and no pie in sky hope for future automation of an insanely hard problem. Electric railways are the most optimized form of land-based transportation, and arguably the most overall.
Electric, Automated trains still don't reach people's homes. You are not going to change the fundamental idea of living in suburbs or the country. In fact, current events make living away from the cities a good option. The cost of rail in the USA is too high even for states that really want it. It will be much easier to alter how the USA builds roads to add cues for automation than try to add rail everywhere. Electric, automated buses will replace passenger rail and be much more flexible for changing trends in where people are going. Automated cars will make personal transport to individual destinations much more efficient and easy. Other than the metro systems that exist, there won't be much place for passenger rail.
These are policy decisions. Other countries chose to invest in rail. The US chose to invest in other forms of transportation and created adverse policy conditions in which rail largely withered and nearly died. I made another comment [1] where I talk about the political milieu that likely contributed to this.
I would also call out the fact since WW2, the US has lost more than half its railroad route-miles (300,000+ to ~147,000 today). Other countries had to rebuild their infrastructure after the destruction of the war. No bombs were dropped on American railroads. Aside from figurative bombs of bad policy by political leaders, competitors in automotive/airlines, and the deeply ignorant idea that railroads and trains are an obsolete 19th century technology.
>As to cost, look at California trying to add high speed rail, as they have failed badly for what was a very modest set of served areas.
I am well aware of the California HSR project and its many failings. It has nothing to do with anything inherent to rail technology. I view it as symptomatic of and the inevitable result of a broken political system, poor project management, a Transportation/Construction-Industrial Complex (similar to the Military-Industrial Complex), monied special interests like construction and engineering contractors run wild with no oversight, capturing the agencies they work for and transferring as many public dollars into their bank account.
Alon Levy’s blog Pedestrian Observations [2] covers transportation construction costs extensively, and generally calls out Anglo countries (UK, USA, CAN, AUS) as the most troubled. There’s also the Caltrain-HSR Compatibility Blog [3], Systemic Failure [4], and others in the technical transportation commentary space.
>Rail has some serious problems with terminal delivery of people in the US. You still need another form of transportation to get people home. Without fundamentally changing where people live or work, it needs something else. >Electric, Automated trains still don't reach people's homes. You are not going to change the fundamental idea of living in suburbs or the country. In fact, current events make living away from the cities a good option. The cost of rail in the USA is too high even for states that really want it. It will be much easier to alter how the USA builds roads to add cues for automation than try to add rail everywhere.
There is an access problem or first/last mile problem, but rail does not exist in a vacuum. It can work in concert with buses, taxi/rideshare, friend/family pickup/dropoff, biking, walking, etc. as part of a larger comprehensive transportation network. Rail can act as the high capacity core of the network. A pair of optimized, electric, modern signaled rail tracks with has the transportation capacity equivalent of a 8-10 lane highway. This should be taken advantage of, then use lower capacity/higher flexibility transport for the first and last mile problem. Otherwise we continue have a congestion problem with transportation network centered around single occupant vehicles (SOVs), or even zero occupants with autonomy. Autonomous vehicles do not fix that, if anything it makes it worse.
Without getting into third rail politics unique to post-WW2 American suburbs/rural life and notions of “freedom,” historically trains were one of the primary form of mechanized land transport for about century, from the mid 1800s to well into 1900s. Suburbs were originally enabled by rail during this period (e.g. NYC, Boston, Chicago, LA metro areas), many of suburbs grew up around a local railroad or streetcar system, and their historic downtowns are often next to a rail station [5][6]. It was only later, we got auto oriented suburbs where you need a car to get anywhere. These were decisions, we could choose to create transit oriented communities, including suburbs.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24651127 [2] https://pedestrianobservations.com/ [3] http://caltrain-hsr.blogspot.com/ [4] https://systemicfailure.wordpress.com/ [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetcar_suburb [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_town
The trains with mixed types can be unit trains but they can also have intermediate stops where cars are added or dropped off.
The optimizations the rail companies perform to maximize the freight movement (and profit) is very interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_usag...
edit: Furthermore https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3098444/chi...
From the point of view of a SimCity/Civilization/Railroad Tycoon player, they seem to do everything right.
While the rest of the world is engaging in useless Command&Conquer-like clashes, always on RED ALERT!
China's rail freight, as a percent of intercity freight has been steadily declining [0], in large part due to development on high speed rail, which has hurt freight rail networks.
[0] https://www.mdpi.com/sustainability/sustainability-12-00583/...
I think it slowed a little bit because "change of management" due to imprisonment of
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Zhijun
and consecutive dissolvement of
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Railways_(China)
transforming that into
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Railway
under supervision of the
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Railway_Administratio...
Imagine what would happen if Warren Buffet suddenly got jailed (for instance caused by Cancel Culture), along with about 40 to 50 others from higher management in connected companies, leading to break up of Berkshire Hathaway, Inc? Not exactly bye bye BNSF, but not good either (for a while).
Just handwaving here, but the timeframe fits IMO.
That likely won’t last assuming it is still true. China’s rail network is largely electrified, providing inherently lower operating costs over diesel-electric [1]. They also have more widely deploy advanced train control systems, safely enabling more capacity and future driverless operation.
>China's rail freight, as a percent of intercity freight has been steadily declining [0], in large part due to development on high speed rail, which has hurt freight rail networks.
That’s a very flawed interpretation. Excluding Covid-19, China freight volumes have been growing dramatically for many years and is expected to continue; while US growth is smaller, and generally mature/steady-state. China’s growth in land-based freight volumes has been largely captured trucks on roads, hence the falling relative mode share of rail freight, even though absolute ton-miles/TEUs/railcars/etc. by freight rail have grown significantly year-over-year. This trend will continue and relative mode shares will likely turnaround eventually.
China is investing hundreds of billions of dollar equivalent in their railway systems, both high speed passenger (300-400+ km/h) and “standard speed” passenger (up to 200-250 km/h) and freight (up to 100-130 km/h). There is also large investments in “dry ports” inland intermodal rail facilities. While high speed passenger lines capture a lot of attention and dollars/yuan, there are still large direct investments in the “regular” rail network improving freight capacity. And where high speed lines parallel standard mainlines, standard speed passenger services are reduced or eliminated, freeing up capacity for more freight in an indirect manner by separating them.
China has made a strategic decision, at the highest levels of government, to invest in railways and to mode shift as much possible to rail, passenger and freight. Tens of thousands of miles of railway have been built in just the last decade. It is likely the largest rail expansion in a century. More trackage of high speed lines than the rest of the world combined twice over, and it only started in 2008 (0 to 22,000+ miles; 0% to ~67%). They continue to plan and build major expansions in the decades to come, there does not appear to be a slow down. [2][3]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran...
Chaos!
Anyways, this chaos is self inflicted by building back switches, which would enable a more granular partition of the tracks, and more flexible passing of trains.
All in all, our railways are indeed "'ne Lachnummer"(laughing stock).
OTHO not so ridiculous at all, considering the massive build back of infrastructure.
It's also worth remembering that the US is huge. For the routes many of these trains cover, especially west of the Mississippi River, you have a choice between plane, bus or train. Getting to an airport could be a 6+ hour drive, and 18 hours on a train is often a much more comfortable experience than 10 hours on a bus.
Despite the not-so-great timekeeping, there are many rural areas where the train is still the best of options. Keep in mind how large the US is.
Los Angeles to Las Vegas on Amtrak is ~500km and takes over 7 hours.
Oh, except that you don't finish in Las Vegas. You finish in Kingman, AZ (more that 160km from Las Vegas) because that's as close as you can get with Amtrak.
The Shinkansen is travelling through significantly populated areas on the trip. Amtrak is travelling through a barren desert.
The service frequency is laughable but an hour to cover 93 miles doesn't sound too bad. Plenty of intercity train services in the UK are slower than that. e.g. London Waterloo to Brockenhurst is 92 miles and takes about 1hr30 making three stops
My impression is that most US intercity passenger lines _are_ basically tourism services, and not used for normal intercity travel.
For reference, the distance between Minneapolis and Chicago is about 400 miles.
If the Amtrak schedule [0] is strictly adhered to, the travel time is ~7.75 hours. Current prices are ~$116 roundtrip.
Google Maps says the estimated time by car (assuming no traffic) is ~6.25 hours. At ~30 miles/gallon at $2/gallon, the cost of a roundtrip for just gas would be ~$53.
A roundtrip, non-stop flight lasting ~1.5 hours each way can be had for ~$80~$175 with the passenger's choice of at least 10 distinct flights/3 separate airlines.
I like rail. But it's clear that there's not a market fit for rail between Minneapolis and Chicago without massive subsidies. A car is faster and cheaper. A plane is much faster and about the same price. Both car and planes are strictly more convenient.
[0]: https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
They initially used Bristol Superfreighters, which were replaced by Aviation Traders Carvairs (converted for the purpose from second-hand Douglas DC-4s). The Carvair could carry 5 cars and 22 passengers- the cars were loaded through a door in the nose.
The "air ferry" service was killed by competition from the new RO-RO car ferries (when it started flying, cars still had to be loaded onto cross-Channel ferries by crane) and especially by the hovercraft service which began in 1968- a crossing by hovercraft with a car didn't cost much more than the conventional ferry while being as fast as the plane. The hovercraft, in turn, stopped being viable because of competition from the car-carrying trains through the Channel Tunnel- it stopped running in 2000.
I'm a car owner but it's stupid expensive and if there were a reasonable alternative I'd stop in a heartbeat.
Imagine!
I don't own a car and never learned to drive. What's my upfront cost before the $53 incremental cost?
Car ownership begets car ownership.
AAA says car ownership costs $8,558 per year. I'd have a hard time spending that much on public transport.
https://www.aaa.com/autorepair/articles/what-does-it-cost-to...
Winter biking is enjoyable when you dress properly for the weather and use spiked tires.
https://valientemott.com/blog/chances-of-dying-in-a-car-cras...
Buy a used car and do your due diligence before purchasing.
Not sure what state they're using for license, tax, and registration. I pay less than $100 a year for that.
Maintenance is about right and can be lower, especially if you don't buy junk.
My insurance is lower than that, but that's a perk of my state.
I fill up maybe once every three weeks, so my fuel usage is way lower than that.
It'll probably go to the scrap yard once I'm done, and this thing was worth around maybe $3k when I bought it some years ago.
All in all, I'm sitting somewhere around $2000 a year for my car. Totally worth having.
Just be smart about it. Cars are very useful to have.
(Disclaimer: I own a car)
$400ish (get lucky on a $250 "ran when parked" car, pay by month for insurance and live in a low tax state) on up.
>AAA says car ownership costs $8,558 per year
They say it costs that on average. That's very different from the floor or baseline cost which seems to be what you're implying.
How to get an absolute hooptie sitting in your driveway waiting for replacement parts.
If you can't source parts in this day and age it's not the car's fault. Anything made in the last 30yr you can readily get service parts for. What you can't get at the parts store are interior trim and non-wearing suspension items that are specific to a narrow range of vehicles (also true for new cars) but if you expect to keep the interior of a bottom dollar car in tip top shape you're out of your mind. The internet makes finding everything that isn't a normal wear item super quick and easy but you're gonna have to wait 24-96hr to get it.
The IRS per mileage reimbursement rate is 57.5 cents per mile, putting the “real” cost to an 800 mile roundtrip around $400.
A different stand in might be the per mile rate I can get from a rental company, which is often around 20 cents a mile. That would be $160 in other costs + the $53 in gas $213.
Now, people chronically underestimate the cost of driving (and many of them are fixed costs) so the “competitiveness” of rail doesn’t really change, but IMO we shouldn’t just look at gas costs for automobile transport.
The idea is that people only take into account fuel costs when considering driving. They don't typically take into account capital costs like depreciation. So the DB sells a 250 Euro card that gives you a 50% discount on tickets for a year. The card creates an artificial sunk cost, and lowers the marginal cost of taking the train, making it more comparable with driving.
A nitpick that's so small as to almost be irrelevant: For people up to (and including) the age of 26, it's actually 60€/year. This makes going by train a financially pretty attractive travel method.
Once someone has paid the fixed cost of owning a car, that cost is sunk and shouldn't be factored into calculations for individual trips. The only thing that matters at that point is marginal cost.
For public transportation to be competitive, the overall public transportation system has to provide a level of service that makes it feasible for many people to not own a car at all. For example, having great inter-city train service doesn't help if I need a car to get to the train station. If I have to own the car anyway, and the marginal cost of driving is lower than the marginal cost of taking the train, I'm going to drive.
In most European countries, the overall public transportation system does provide this level of service. In most places in the US, it doesn't. A significant part of the reason for that is simply that people in Europe and people in the US have a different mix of preferences. Many more people in the US do not want to live in population dense areas that can support a public transportation system that makes it feasible to not own a car. (I'm one of them: I have lived in population dense areas and I know from experience that I prefer not to.)
Just some food for thought -- of course, if you have passengers it'll quickly be worth it even if you decide to factor in this kind of calculation.
The only difference is depreciation now vs later.
We spent half a trillion dollars building the IHS over five decades, and have historically thrown at least a few billion a year at US oil producers - is it really surprising to anyone that driving is cheap? We keep bailing out the airline industry repeatedly - we already gave them $25 billion in grants this year because of the coronavirus, and they're still asking for more.
But, dare we build an alternative to those systems, one that could be more ecologically and financially sound? Nope, too busy feeding our sunk cost industries. Keep blaming Amtrak for being terrible while refusing to give them their own run of rails so they don't constantly get stuck behind freighter traffic. Keep shuting down High Speed Rail projects around the country because the billionaires don't want it in their back yards.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2016/f...
> Highways: The FAST Act provides $45.3 billion for highway and bridge improvements in FY 2019 (the fiscal year from Oct. 1, 2018 through Sept. 30, 2019) and grows this amount to $46.4 billion by FY 2020. Most federal highway investment is used to upgrade and maintain the nation’s core highways, including the Interstate Highway System, and to repair and replace deficient bridges.
> An additional $3.4 billion was provided for highway and bridge investments as part of the final FY 2019 spending bills signed into law Feb. 15, 2019.
> Since 2008, revenues to the Highway Trust Fund (HTF) have been insufficient to fully support the level of federal highway and transit investment authorized by Congress. Prior to enactment of the FAST Act, the annual investment gap was nearly $15 billion. Congress has not increased the federal motor fuels tax since 1993, but federal highway and public transportation spending has grown substantially over the last 26 years. It should surprise no one that holding the trust fund’s inflow of revenues constant while attempting to address the nation’s growing transportation needs would lead to an unsustainable situation.
It is quite clear that even just the Interstates do not "pay for themselves." There's also the issues with the fuel taxes, namely that motorists are not necessarily the only ones paying those taxes, and in addition to the depreciating value from a flat fee not tracking inflation, the value of the tax is continuing to diminish as some motorists switch to alternative fuels and others are driving ever more efficient vehicles.
I do see their balances coming up positive though, thanks to a very massive balance transfer from the General Fund per the FAST act (https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/22), straight from US taxpayers' wallets.
I also see no mention to climate impact anywhere. $36 billion dollars of gas taxes at 18.3 cents per gallon suggests sales of nearly 200 billion gallons of gasoline were burned. That's a hell of a lot of climate damage that everyone's being forced to pay for.
So, you were saying about us not subsidizing the IHS?
So the system is broken, but it has a simple fix, just raise the gas tax. We haven't done that since 1993 and it isn't indexed to inflation. This is something that should have been fixed years ago, but alas I don't control congress.
If you want to go even further and discuss the environmental impact, again the solution is more taxes.
Given the latency on legislatively fixing things in the USA these days, any work at fixing stuff now should probably include the likelihood of a major shift to non-gas vehicles in the next couple decades.
It's hard to make an argument that rail is cheaper than driving without getting into a lot of mental gymnastics, and I really like taking the train when able.
Once they become a thing, the price of an autonomous taxi between the cities should approach the real amortized cost of road travel.
Namely, as fuel efficiency increases and some drivers switch to alternative fuels, people will need less gas for the same amount of driving.
A true market based solution would be to make all major roads toll roads and use the funds collected to maintain said roads. With EZ-Pass/SmartTag/etc... this could be practical. The problem with toll roads is that local governments tend to use them as a piggybank so you end up with poorly maintained expensive road.
Helps to find cheap tickets, so when you are somewhat flexible you can still travel for cheap.
On the super-long transcontinental trips, apparently the cell reception with the right gear on trains is much better than when I rode half the country westward many years ago. That makes the train travel mode even more valuable to me if I'm not on a tight schedule and the seating arrangement enables me to look forward to getting work done.
What prevents me from using trains more than I do is the demands of many clients upon my time. Not quite lucrative enough for me to justify a satellite data link, but if my financial picture improves by many orders of magnitude, a digital nomadic life with a private railcar set towing shipping container footprint custom structures as a "home base" that I operate vehicles from would be an enjoyable way to my mind to get deeply into locales, while staying in touch with the Net and maintaining full fabrication capabilities with me.
But Amtrak is the best fit for multi-day trips across the entire country for people who cannot fly. Amtrak also solves transportation for travelling directly from small rural towns to the large cities, and sometimes even from one rural town to another. It is the safest way to get across mountain ranges in the depth of winter (although not the fastest).
It doesn't solve every problem, and it does need subsidies, and it always runs late... nevertheless, it connects rural Americans to the large cities in ways that city folk don't even realize.
Agreed though that car or plane beats train 99% of the time.
One of the reasons I always take a train to Manhattan is that I not only don't need a car but I hate driving into the city and parking is expensive.
I've heard Uber and Lyft are popular.
Cities and regions built with density, walkability, bikability, and transit in mind avoid or greatly reduce this problem.
I'm about 200 miles from NY and actually backtrack to take the train. But I'm still guessing that an Uber (if I could get one) would be a a good 2x the train and a private car even more.
Some areas make it easier to get around other than in an auto than others. Of course, I'm often going somewhere out in the suburbs of a city anyway.
If you're making extended or multi-stop day or multi-day trips at a destination, you no longer have a simple long-haul transport need. A local car hire, group tour bus, bicycle rental, transporting your own bike, or similar arrangement could satisfy this.
Boeing 737s and Airbus A330s would be equally or more handicapped under such circumstances, though a Cesna or comparable bush plane might be appropriate in some regions.
Of course there's hardly any demand for a slow, expensive and often late service which only runs once a day. It's not useful.
A journey I do often in the UK is London to Edinburgh by train. The distance is almost the same (400 miles). London is a bit bigger than Chicago (12 million metro vs ~8 million metro) but then the Twin Cities are quite a lot larger than Edinburgh (1 million metro vs ~4 million metro).
However, the track has been improved, is at least doubled the whole way and has significant portions at 125 mph. As a result the journey takes just over 4 hours. If the trains are more than 1 hour late you get all your money back.
On an average weekday there's 41 trains travelling each way between those cities. And many of them are full. They're constantly doing improvements to try and increase the number of trains travelling.
I understand it's a different situation - the result of decades of political apathy towards railways. But I think it's important to understand that the Amtrak situation doesn't have to be the way it is. There's not an inherent lack of demand for fast, regular train services between major cities.
Lots of countries have good rail service that people actively choose over cars or planes between major cities. I find it maddening that my own country can't bring itself to really want that.
There's a lack of long-term policy here: do we want to be in a society in 20-30 years that's still using personal cars to do that journey, when a high speed rail would be much more efficient and pleasant? If a true high speed rail were enabled, that 400 mile trip might take 3 hours instead of 6-8 for other modes of transit, and it would incur less negative externalities to boot.
I'm all for individuals making informed decisions in the short term, while government and society should be taking long-term steps to promote the health of the commons as well.
The route in Madison was supposed to go to Monona Terrace, which is singularly inconvenient for most people, limiting the catchment basin. Getting out of Madison requires huge numbers of grade crossings, limiting speed, and disrupting traffic.
So this route was never going to be anything other than a slow drain on the treasury, and SW wisely killed it.
Back in the day the railroad would go right past your town, refuse to build a stop, buy the land along the tracks a few miles away, build a stop, and then start a new town there.
Cher had a monologue in the 1990 movie "Mermaids" where she talked about the feeling of freedom she had from getting in her car and that feeling can be best appreciated by understanding the way that pre-WWII Americans felt about taking the train. Today a car payment, insurance and all that feel like a millstone at your neck, but back then you could get in a new car and smell the freedom. That generation knew what it was like for somebody who could care less what you think to decide when and where you go.
Some decades back I spent some time listening to a denizen of flyover country speak with still-simmering anger of how the Interstate, already a couple of decades old, had bypassed his town, drying up local highway traffic and decimating local business.
Today, airlines are recalibrating expense-revenue models and determining what routes remain profitable. Telecoms monopolies try to provide the minimum viablequantum of service --- theoretical and net bandwidth, latency, and reliability --- for a given subscriber rate. Disruptions in live-work patterns tend to bugger this.
Any connections or network-based sector is subject to this, especially in private hands; transport, communications, trade (bulk cargo, wholesale, retail), energy distribution, utility services, information, broadcast, etc.
What's interesting about highways is that they produce a politically durable coalition around a combination of public ownership of the roads and private ownership of the cars.
Psychologically there is a double dose of the "feeling of ownership" because "we all" perceive the roads belong to us (e.g. a socialist feeling of camaraderie) but we also have a sunk cost in a vehicle we own that is tied to feelings of "I've somebody special because I drive a special car and such".
In contrast, investments in public transit are seeing as benefiting "special interests" in most places, except in California where normally skinflint taxpayers are notorious for ballot initiatives to fund public transit that they don't actually use.
Perhaps that's because they do?
In the subject article there is a link to another article on the author's site about intercity rail in Minnesota, in which I find the following interesting fact:
"Like most states, Minnesota had a large intercity rail network operated by private freight railroads. With the formation of Amtrak in 1971 this large system was reduced to a skeletal system of just a few routes, and then just one after 1985."
It never seems to occur to the author that perhaps Amtrak is the cause of the problems he sees, rather than the solution to them.
I'd noted a few years back that a chief problem in governance, or management, isn't simply creating necessary and effective regulatory institutions, but resiliant ones, most especially to subversion attempts from within the organisation or government itself.
Politically durable coalitions are certainly one such mechanism.
In the US, rail is the only form of transportation that mostly privately owned. Whereas the other forms of transportation infrastructure are publicly owned and maintained as a common good: roads, airports and Air Traffic Control (ATC), and maritime infrastructure (seaports, canals, dredged harbors and navigable inland waterways, Vessel Traffic Service (VTS)). Ideally the US should do the same for its rail infrastructure. This is what Europe is pursuing, publicly owning and investing the infrastructure, and allowing multiple competitors to operate on top.
Much the American political hostility to rail stems the monopolistic practices of privately owned railroads. Central Pacific, which built the Western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad, was founded by the Big 4, which included Leland Stanford, Governor and US Senator in the early days of California statehood, and of course founder of the University. They merged with another railroad they owned in Southern Pacific, later referred to as The Octopus, with tentacles that reached to every corner of the state and dominated California transportation and politics.
The solution to this problem is to bring the railroads under public ownership, not destroy the railroad with subsidized competition from public roads. The consequences of this have been enormous. The US once had over 300,000 route miles of railroad at its peak. Today it has ~147,000 route miles, less than half of its peak. The US National Highway System is ~160,000 route miles by comparison. Many communities lost rail service entirely. Even a rural agricultural state like Iowa, almost 90% farmland, was completely criss-crossed by railroads to an extent that no location in the state was more than 12 miles from a rail line. Today only a fraction of that rail network survives.
It is hard imagine something like this happening to other forms of publicly owned transportation infrastructure, because of that durable political coalition. People would not accept half of all roads or airports being abandoned because they are not nominally profitable. It is considered a common good provided for by the state.
Trains are the rational future, they were before, but irrational market forces are against them.
I've taken the train from central Pennsylvania to NYC several times. It's great, but it's also a hike and not something you want to do for anything shorter than a long weekend (4 days is perfect, especially if you can do Fri-Mon as the Sunday train is usually very full). I did it once for a Sat/Sun trip and you just spend too much time on the train watching a movie or staring out the window.
And the train network in germany isn't even very good.
It's all relative :) Coming from Ireland (where intercity is still diesel with max speeds around 160km/h, and average speeds far worse), ICE kind of seems like magic.
If you visit a country that actually invests in train travel you'll see it's a fast, convenient way to get around. The most underrated aspect, IMO, is that it's not a hike: the train stations are slap bang in the middle of every city. That's even true in the US, it's just the rails between the cities that let the whole thing down.
Its such a better ride as well- I mean I love getting a nice stretch of open road where you can go 60-80mph and such, but the reality of most travel in the northeast is just traffic and congestion and a lot of paying attention to that dude in the SUV who seems like he wants to jump in your lane without so much as a blinker of warning.
We have massively funded our highways, claim that Amtrak is a suck of taxpayer funds and do the bare minimum for it, and then complain about traffic, it's quite irrational.
From where in Central PA? It's definitely the fastest way to get into downtown NYC from anywhere between Philly and Harrisburg.
There are lots of places in the US where the train is a huge time sink, it's just that in my experience, getting into NYC is one of the few where it's much faster and more convenient.
West of mpls, the train drags 200k lb sleeping cars along with lounge and diner cars for only a handful of passengers. Swedish and Russian railways pack 6 to a compartment; Amtrak struggles with 2. No way this is cost effective or a good use of capital.
Deregulate the fra rules, allow electric buses on the rails (and eliminate the crazily overbuilt rail standards), and you might get real innovation and a competitive product...
Why not make freight fast, too?
> A nice bus gets you better service with lower capital expenditures
A bus can accomodate 80 people per driver, a train (German ICE) 750 seats+750 people standing. Sure, a bus is cheaper in upfront investment, but has higher operation expenses, is way slower and is worse for the environment. Additionally, buses get caught in traffic jams while railways are generally separate.
> allow electric buses on the rails
What? Why? And how should this be secured?!
> and eliminate the crazily overbuilt rail standards
These standards were written in the blood of thousands of people who died or were severely maimed in accidents.
Money. Most goods need to be on schedule, not fast. More speed costs more money.
>These standards were written in the blood of thousands of people who died or were severely maimed in accidents.
The standards were also written for a world who's conditions were very different from those of today.
I know that you can score easy virtue points by pretending like any rollback of regulation that is intended to protect something is a bad thing but let's be real here. With modern signaling infrastructure there's no reason that dedicated passenger rail can't be equally safe or safer than legacy passenger rail that has to be interoperable with legacy signaling systems and freight rail.
So were the European standards. They just tackled accident prevention more than accident survivability as the engineering goal.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/11/23/u-s-finally-legalizes...
> But FRA rules had required significant design changes. Most important, American train cars had to be built to withstand 800,000 pounds of frontal impact. Former Amtrak CEO David Gunn complained U.S. trains had to be designed like “high-velocity bank vaults.” Rather than just bulk up, European and Asian trains instead are designed to absorb impacts and avoid collisions in the first place. And they have better safety records.
There is a total lack of information why that route was taken in the 1920s, so I'm going to take a wild guess... in Europe, the train routes, especially for fast trains, are completely separated, often outright walled off, and level crossings with streets totally eliminated. In the US, you have a country that is many, many times bigger and widely un- or sparsely populated, which means that there is a lot more danger to trains from stuff that ends up on the tracks as it's infeasible to build a wall that long.
Herds of animals, heavy trucks/tractors ending up on the tracks of a crossing - that is something that I expect to be pretty much routine in the US, and it makes sense to build trains that can simply plow through such impediments.
In the USA everything on rails is Danger! Danger! and has to be signaled as such, even if it's only a tram servicing downtown. It has to Ring! Ding! Ding! all the times.
I'd go crazy if having to live near anything like that.
High-speed rail demands fully separated rights of way for reasons of route and destination, safety, predictable scheduling, minimum turning radius, and more. Unfortunately in a world of strong land-property rights and interests, this makes it extraordinarily politically vulnerable.
A few years ago I realised that virtually every successful large-scale rail system (both high-speed and earlier "conventional" services) emerged in a largely uncontested land-rights regime. For the 19th century US and British systems, a pre-industrial or pioneer domain in which land owners were few, poor, or both. On completion, the US transcontinental railroad was seen as a boondoggle "road to nowhere", though various "wheres" began springing up along its route nearly immediately.
(Famously, Denver, Colorado, saw a 10x population growth in the decade after a spur line was built to the transcontinental route.)
For Japan and Europe, planning for high-speed fail began following the physical and economic devastation of WWII. Landholders couldn't put up much of a fight.
China's HSR growth resembles that of frontier America and early-industrial Britain, benefitting by a different land-ownership regime.
The most pernicious obstacle to California high-speed rail is Atherton.
But there are two roommettes side by side. Both European and Amtrak cars have a length of ~26m. An Amtrak Superliner sleeping car can sleep up to 44 people. A sleeper as used by Austria’s ÖBB can sleep 12*3=36 people. A 3rd class Russian sleeping car holds 54 [https://www.vagonweb.cz/razeni/vlak.php?zeme=%D0%91%D0%A7&ka...]. Comparable.
most countries with extensive, speedy and reliable train service measure the "profit" of their systems by considering other measures in addition to these two very simplistic measurements.
Rail travel is just much more relaxing and interesting than air travel. People in an airport act like zombies, but people on a train act like people.
One time, I was on a Empire Builder that got stuck in a freight yard around midnight. The freight company had donated an engine to replace one that had broken on the Amtrak train, but apparently the crew didn't have a key to unlock it.
So we sat in a freight yard for about an hour, with snow gently falling around us. It had been several hours since our last stop, and the passengers started to get restless. 4 hours without a smoke break is considered a mortal sin in Montana.
Eventually, the crew relented and let people out in the freezing snow to smoke on the train tracks, under a litany of disclaimers about trespassing and liability and whatnot.
It was hilarious and surreal. Amtrak felt like a system run by human beings, so it was chronically late and haphazard, but I'll still miss it compared the the sterile almost-competence of modern airports.
Right now 90% of the route from St. Paul is forbidden from traveling to Chicago.
And dining service was being removed from many routes before Covid, I’m sure that has been accelerated.
Sunset Limited is worse, though. No activities. Fewer showers. And you can't even get your meals brought to your room.
It's maybe a 16-20 hour car trip. Less than a 3 hour flight. Amtrak turns it into a 23-24 hour train ride without delays.
We were more than 8 hours delayed getting there, which caused all kinds of havoc with our local transport and accommodations.
This is not in a sparsely populated part of the U.S. It's not the North-East corridor, but it's still pretty heavily populated for most of the run. I swore off trains ever again until many years later my wife thought it would be better to start taking trains around Europe and I finally understood how good they can be. More recently we were in Japan and took the Shinkansen (and a bunch of local trains) all over the country and experienced truly the dream that trains can be. As much of an improvement as the average Eurorail is over Amtrak, Japanese trains are the much of an improvement over Europe. Absolutely incredible.
I hope service is resumed after the pandemic, I haven't had the chance to take this route yet!
I got off in Chicago for few days, then rented a can in Montana and drove around for a few days before getting back on.
The Lake Sore Limited line had much better sleepers with windows on the top bunk. The Empire Builder has that amazing viewing car though with panoramic views.
Until I got to Glacier National Park the first leg between NYC and Buffalo was much more beautiful. Glacier is not worth trying to describe, just go see it.
We have the technology now to sling the last car (could be a sub-standard-size car) to a shunt track at a station to offload passengers at the station, which redirects much of the kinetic energy braking it to speed up an already-moving outgoing car off the shunt track to connect to the train to onboard passengers from the station, without the train slowing down at all. Some folks were working on it in France and separate group was working on it in China if I recall correctly from a handful of years ago, but it never got traction. I figure the amount of space the shunt track requires (more length the faster the train travels through the station) and the costs killed it, but it would be skookum tech.
The sheer scale of physically moving around humanity might be a problem uniquely facing our civilization that previous civilizations didn't have to contend with. Maybe on an available watts/person measure we have more than previous civilizations, but it is a fascinating megascale engineering problem to me to wonder about the efficiency optimization possibilities. Not just moving people around the planet, but how to get people off the planet.
[1] https://www.marieclaire.com/politics/a32363173/joe-biden-amt...
Those blog posts are from 10 years ago Is that plan still current? What have they actually built in that time?
From September 21:
"High-speed train between Dallas and Houston gets federal approval"
"Texas Central expects to start construction in the first half of 2021."
https://www.texastribune.org/2020/09/21/dallas-houston-high-...
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail
Michigan has been making steady enough progress on their parts of those plans.
The Wolverine (Chicago-Detroit/Pontiac) now runs at 110mph for significant sections of the route. While still not "fast", it does mean the total trip time for Detroit-Chicago is now time-competitive with driving, even if there's no traffic on the drive.
In the 1990s my immediate family would travel from MA to MI via Amtrak to visit grandparents. Travel time in each direction was measured in days. Later on we "upgraded" to planes which reduced travel time to hours within one day.
I miss the trains.
Nostalgia aside, diner car and all, I crave the rumble-tumble and the scenery and the idea of "cross country".
Tunnels.
Every day I commute into and out of work, I witness a random toddler jumping up and down or waving or waddle-running along the train because train.
I have an anniversary coming up in a few months. I and my partner are interested in celebrating by train.
Good grief. With all of that big country and having had more than a century to make rail routes 'broad way' with four tracks, it beggars belief that so many U.S. rail routes are this third-world, poverty spec. single track arrangement.
Plus the options for delays are comical. You could understand a train being hours late if it was on its first outing as a prototype but really? Hot air balloons have a more predictable and reliable service.
Plus the heritage of U.S. railroads and the fantastic loading gauge mean that U.S. trains should be the best and the most stylish in the world. Those double deck carriages with observation domes and the potential for cool end carriages and comfy sleeping arrangements are just not so easy in other countries. Plus the scenery is spectacular in much of the U.S. Why the reality is people driving for hours with attention focused on the road the whole way - is this not a waste of human potential? You could be reading or doing your knitting on the train rather than holding that wheel.
I think that the rail network in the U.S. is not to be given up on. There could even be a whole new approach to it. I often wonder if you could build vastly lighter trains that used active suspension and other gizmos that you might find in a deluxe German road car to put some magic back into rails. Plus speed is a problem on U.S. rail. Even in the UK there are trains that slightly terrify you with a genuine perception of 120+ mph speed. In the U.S. you can be crawling along at 12 mph and that is if you are not stuck in a siding waiting for a mile long freight train to crawl past at 12 mph.
Recently I learned the PRR T1 trains in the days of steam would be doing an estimated 140 mph if behind schedule. Those streamliner trains from almost a century ago were just so cool. For the 21st century America needs trains that suit post Covid, post-boomer lifestyles that hark back to the majesty of times past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Railroad_class_T1 says "there was a drawback of the metallurgy used; the poppet valve could not withstand the stress of sustained high-speed operation (meaning over 100 mph (160 km/h) on production T1s)."
At least it didn't have the wheel slip that the 4-4-4-4 PRR train had or that poppet valve problem.
Size was also very different, like comparing a 737 to a 747.
Beautiful that the Mallard was, the U.S. trains had something to them and the expanse of the U.S. gave opportunities that were not possible in the UK for some truly fast trains. The mountain ranges of the US are vast compared to the mere hills of the UK, if you wanted a downhill run for top speed then the U.S. should have had options. But planes came along.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRG_Class_05
Streamlined, even.
After several test runs with trains with a mass of about 250 t and speeds of up to 195.7 km/h, the 05 002 reached a world speed record for steam locomotives on May 11, 1936, in front of a train made up of four cars (train mass about 200 t) on a level stretch between Hamburg and Berlin. The fact that only four cars were used in this test run instead of the five cars normally attached to the train happened by chance due to a hot-box on a car the day before. The record run thus took place without any special preparation and almost by chance.
(Diz iz verry good tränntzläyshn! Äm DeepL(y)impressed with DeepL!)
Even if we didn't end up with trains that went way FASTER than other methods of transport, we could be doing so much better. I saw someone advocating for a line along the Northeast corridor departing every hour in both directions.
Where I live we've got the Vermonter, stopping at a (admittedly charming) antique station in my town. It comes through once a day, in each direction. That requires that any trip has to include an overnight stay. If that train ran like a metro train and came through hourly, I'd be constantly travelling to places like NYC and Philly or even Baltimore, to do stuff, because I would be able to come home again once I was done, even if it was late.
NOrtheast Corridor, and some of the west coast trains as well as some routes around chicago serve a real transportation need, but long-distance cross-country travel is best handled by the private sector.
You can also brush shoulders with a diverse cross section of America and see and meet all sorts of interesting people. You can get pretty lucky in the dining car if you're traveling alone being sat with cool people with interesting stories to tell, or passing a covert bottle of whiskey back and forth with a stranger. There's a camaraderie you get on the train you never get in a car or on a plane, something more and more important the more fractured and divisive we get. People of all classes and backgrounds, mixed in a comfy tube with nothing better to do than to talk to each other.
Adding 3 more tracks would be a gigantic capital investment in never-used capacity.
Rail in the US could definitely use a model system to prove out it's viability. The biggest ongoing project is California's and that's shaping up to be a disaster.
The death spiral can sometimes be real, but lack of focus also is a death spiral. Amtrak has been around since the 1970s and most of the improvements to the east coast have been obviously needed and yet haven't happened. While we can (many do) debate what route to run new rails, what is the most important step to take first, and many other details, the big picture is the same to all observers.
Of course the reality is Amtrak exists for political reasons. Probably more realistic is to split Amtrak into two parts (with completely different leadership), one with the goal of making the east cost work well, and one with the goal of political appeasing people on in the middle of nowhere. The way you run the two systems needs to be very different and so there is no reason to keep them together as the concerns of each is a distraction from the other.
The money problem is in large part lack of money for capital expenditures, which Amtrak wouldn't have with a pure-NEC system anyways. The capital expenditure is going to have to come from Congress, and it's a lot easier to beg money from Congress if it isn't seen as purely benefiting rich coastal leftist elites.
> While we can (many do) debate what route to run new rails, what is the most important step to take first, and many other details, the big picture is the same to all observers.
Having read several transit enthusiast blogs, I will assure you that the big picture is not the same to all observers. The viewpoint of most enthusiasts tends to boil down to "just build something and people will get excited about it," whereas people like Alon Levy have instead argued that the real issue is that the US is relying on a century-old mindset of how to run trains and somewhere between ignorant and irrationally dismissive of how foreign countries run their superior modern rail systems.
Further the tracks in NA are designed to carry weight rather than for speed. The design considerations are quite different.
For instance, the Austrian Federal Railway operates a pair of overnight trains from Innsbruck and Vienna to Dusseldorf and Hamburg, which also transport cars. The only possible routes you can take your car on are Innsbruck-Dusseldorf and Vienna-Hamburg.
Meanwhile, as a foot passenger you can also get on or off at an intermediate stop like Cologne or Munich.
Foot passengers can also travel Innsbruck-Hamburg or Vienna-Dusseldorf (as sleeping cars are switched between the two trains in Nuremberg, but car carrying wagons aren't).