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Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

First of all, I love trains. I've taken more than one trip across the continent (N. Am.) and it's incredibly fun, and you see so much of the country, and meet so many interesting (and annoying sometimes, sure) people. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

That said, passenger train travel makes about as much economic sense as riding in a horse-and-carriage. It's romantic but it's technologically obsolete.

That's why freight trains get priority over passenger trains (despite what the law says on the books) because there's no economic incentive and little political will to do otherwise.

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To fly from NYC to Philly will take at least an hour on the plane, plus about an hour to go from Manhattan to the airport, plus 30 mins or so to go from the Philadelphia Airport to Philadelphia...the train takes an hour and departs/drops you in the center of both cities. How is that technologically obsolete?

Short-range intercity can be usable, but cross-country travel in the USA is honestly just impractical by rail. Should it be kept operational? Certainly! Should it be seriously considered as a competitor for airlines? Unlikely.

The only way it will come back is if the intercity travel keeps getting better and better, and even then routes on the coast may work but once you hit the midwest the distances get unreasonably far.

Chicago to Los Angeles would be ten hours at Nozomi speeds assuming zero stops. Even the proposed California high-speed corridor doesn't have much to offer.

Anything you turn from a 2-3 hour flight into an 8-10+ (especially overnight) train trip has pretty much lost you every business traveler--and lots of others as well, particularly if it isn't any cheaper.

Oh I agree, it's a regional thing and not cross country (at least this country). It should connect metro regions and maybe have some long thin routes between those.

For California if they could do SF to LA in ~3 hours, that would be a huge change since the current drive is about twice that (and extremely boring from my drive last week). LA to Vegas is another route that should exist given the massive amount of 45 minute flights and cars that already do that.

Before we try to do SF to LA in ~3 hours, let's get LA to SD down from 3 hours (this seems to have improved about 10 minutes in 20 years).

You don't have to even look that far afield. I did a ride between NY Penn and Rochester NY that took longer than the 6 hour drive because of delays.

Heh I remember transiting Chi-town to PA and getting stuck waiting for the Late for Sure Limited (Lakeshore Limited).

Personally I'd rather have a slow train that kept schedule than a fast train that rarely did.

A direct train from Zürich to Milan takes 3.5 hours, departs every hour from the the center of Zürich, arrives to the center of Milan and costs €30.

A direct flight from Zürich to Milan takes 1 hour, plus hours of nonsense before and after, departs 3 times a day from the airport, arrives to the Milan airport, and costs €550.

So passenger trains sound pretty competitive to me, at least short-distance ones.

The answer to this is the same as the answer to gaadd33's comment: Distance and density. Europe and the East Coast are densely populated and the distances between the population centers are relatively short. The reasons are even the same: both were laid out largely before the advent of motorized transportation.

So you're right, in places where the density is high and the distances are not too great passenger trains can be competitive. (Especially if the tracks were laid a century ago, or more, eh?)

In the US we have "the largest highway system in the world." (For better or worse.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_System_(Unite...

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