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Comment by itsangaris | Hacker News Reader

In theory it would work well in the US as many major cities are spread roughly that distance from one another.

There are a few city pairs that are linked by Amtrak overnight, for example Pittsburgh->Chicago, Buffalo->Chicago, Omaha->Denver, Flagstaff->LA, Salt Lake City -> Reno.

As an aside, I used Amtrak to travel from Rochester, NY to NYC and it was totally weird when I asked people in Rochester (which has a population of about 200,000) for the train station. Most people literally didn't know where the train station of their city was! And it turned out to be as small as a regional rail or European sub-urb S-train stop. Only two platforms with no people on it.

For context: medium sized European city will have anything from 12-30 platforms - and often several main train stations and several dozen local ones in the city. E.g. Brussels, Paris or Berlin have several huge stations.

12-30 is a bit overkill.

Kraków, Poland with 780k inhabitants has "only" 10

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/50.06881/19.94768&laye...

A terminus needs at least double the amount of platforms to sustain the throughput of a regular station.

Rochester Native here, and yep: I've never been to the rail station. Probably because the frequent, short flights to NYC are relatively cheap. Checking amtrak vs delta for a random date in january, your options are a 7-9 hour train ride for $54 in coach, or a 1hour flight for $64 in economy basic.]

It will never work in the US until cities get their public transportation act together. Even if I can get to my parent's city, I can't get to their house (without walking many km). Since there isn't good transit (and never has been), they need a place with plenty of space to store a car, and there is no downside to getting way out where transit is hard to serve since transit doesn't serve the types of places they go anyway.

The fix is not easy. But building taj mahal type trains isn't helpful. (simplistic trains might be - using the lower cost to build more is useful). Those of you watching local politics need to scream "NO EXTRAS, only the cheap reliable system done fast" at all local meetings to counter those asking for beauty.

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