Chicago’s Railroad Problem
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For what that's worth, that used to be the case in many countries, it was certainly the case in most of europe before the inter-war period (e.g. the ancestor of Deutsche Bahn was created after WWI, the french SNCF in 1938, and British Railways after WWII).
And numerous traces of that remain if you know how to look. Paris has several major railway stations each serving a slice of the country (and inconveniently disconnected requiring connecting transit through the city) because each of these slices used to be handled by a different company, each with its own terminus station in Paris.
It was an interesting read, as a tourist I generally can get where I need to go, and that's no small accomplishment, but traveling otherwise seems to present more complications than I assumed.
In China, most long range railway services are centrally planned (this is not necessary a bad thing here.), but Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, etc. all end up with more than one terminal.
beijing seems a bit more complicated because it looks like they actually upgraded existing stations for high speed railway, but they also built a new high speed rail station is in the south, which at first seems odd given that the airport is far away to the north and there is no direct connection (unlike some other cities), but then they built the new airport also in the south and now the placement makes a lot more sense. (still no direct connection to the airport though)
in germany at least every larger city is trying to convert terminals into through running stations. vienna just merged its two major stations into one main station in the last decade.
Which is a multi billion dollar effort for very questionable gain. Stuttgart 21 is an unmitigated clusterfuck. Munich is probably never going to switch - the cost alone for the two-track S-Bahn tunnel exploded to well over a dozen billion euros and will take way over a decade to complete. Should the Bahn ever think it would be desirable to convert Munich Central to a through station (if they ever find the place to do so), they'll probably need to spend over a hundred billion euros relocating everything. Frankfurt is similarly bad.
The key thing is, if railways would hire enough conductors they could reduce turnaround times in terminal stations to well under a minute - driver in the old front hops off, new driver hops on at the old end, starts up the control unit and off the train goes. But that would require them to hire and invest into staff on their own dime, while the cost for reconstruction or new construction is almost exclusively paid for with tax money. That is why terminal stations fell out of favor.
> vienna just merged its two major stations into one main station in the last decade.
It's not a complete merger, only the ÖBB moved their long-distance trains - Wien West still serves the Westbahn and regional trains.
but that's not the only problem. the speed at which the train can enter the station is much lower, and the distance it must travel when coming from the "wrong" direction is also longer, and outgoing and incoming trains get in each others way. these factors all increase the travel time and reduce the capacity a station can handle. the new vienna hauptbahnhof is capable of handling more trains a day on much less space than its predecessors. the rebuilding freed up a lot of real estate space too. of course the location already had the benefit of tracks going in multiple directions that could simply be reused, whereas most other terminal stations probably would have to build new tracks in the other direction or pick a different location.
It's not a complete merger, only the ÖBB moved their long-distance trains
but that is the point. there is now a single station for long distance transfers, where it matters. regional trains leaving from westbahnhof will only be used by people starting or ending in vienna. those coming from other directions will mostly be able to take a through train or transfer in maybe st. pölten or linz instead of vienna. the westbahnhof is no longer a transfer station except for destinations in vienna itself. the same for the franz-josephs-bahnhof. if you come from the south or east you transfer at hauptbahnhof and then somewhere outside vienna.
I also don't think transiting between stations is particularly difficult, as in most situations there are massive transport lines (S-Bahn and U-Bahn, RER, metro...) connecting them.
in beijing getting from a long distance train on one station to one on another could easily take an hour, whereas a direct transfer if both trains are at the same station would take minutes. but that's an academic example because the chinese long distance rail system is not designed for transfers anyways. you would almost always get a direct train between major cities, unless you are going extremly far, like guangzhou to harbin. i don't remember ever having to transfer trains when traveling in china.
> There are technical difficulty with connecting the stations
Both points of yours are right, but something is missing in the picture.
Several non-connected terminals are the right solution is you only consider the service to the people living in the city, but if such city also acts as a transportation hub for a greater region, then you must ensure that travelling via the hub be possible without having to load your luggage on a crowded bus.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooklyn%E2%80%93Manhattan_Tra... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Subway_System [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interborough_Rapid_Transit_Com...
Ah -- should have continued reading comments, I see marc__1 already posted about this.
Instead, the system has decayed.
A demonstration of how competition fuels progress in infrastructure.
Those earlier companies had the ability to do mostly what they wanted, including building incredibly piss-poor stations that can't withstand the test of time, while making it near impossible to renovate the station because they cut every corner possible and included no bypass tracks.
America does build infrastructure painfully slowly and bureaucratically, but I don't think we're ever getting the early-1900s esque speed of building back at a price public entities will pay (or a price private entities could ever realisticlaly recoup). Enough rules have been written in blood to ensure that.
I don't know the details so I could be wrong, I just remember there being separate rail companies in different regions and cities.
The companies do jointly operate though, in something that they call ‘mutual direct operation’ where they basically each agree to run trains on each others line as one continuous (to the customer) operation and split the fares.
The profitable ones are in the urban areas of Honshu. JR Kyushu is staying afloat, and Hokkaido and Shikoku are losing money hand over fist.
Euston: west coast line to Scotland; Kings Cross: east coast line; Paddington: west country; Waterloo: SE England. etc.
- The Baltimore Riots of 1861 occurred as northern soldiers from Massachusetts and Pennsylvania had to March between Camden Station (now the baseball stadium site) and President Street station to connect to Washington DC
- President-elect Lincoln had to travel incognito and at night to avoid assassins as he had to connect between the same two stations in Baltimore on the way to his inauguration.
Baltimore was such a hotbed of civil unrest and an important strategic location that cannons were placed by the Union on Federal Hill pointed at the city within range of both railroad stations.
Railroad interconnections (gauge and ownership) have been a problem in many places since the beginning. The U.S. was (and still is in many ways) the “Wild West” of commercial development (backed in no small part by London investors), and the building of the railroads was perhaps the most crazy, frenzied, back-room corrupt development of the 19th century.
An interesting (but long) read: “Railroaded”, by Richard White.
Ofcourse the economic importance of the railroads declined when trucks and automobiles were invented so a lot of investors were happy when the government stepped in
We had this sort of operation in the UK before WW2 when there were separate companies running trains and even more so pre WW1 when there were 10s/100s of companies running everything from a single short line through to main lines up and down the country.
It was, of course, very inefficient for the reasons that the OP discusses, the need to send a wagon anywhere from anywhere meant 1000s of "trip freights", although these would almost entirely have been made by trains. You also had stopping freight services that collected and set down at each station so you can imagine the shunting/marshalling was very time-intensive but, of course, in the early days, a day or 2 was still faster than most alternatives.
What happened in the 70s in the UK with Speedlink was that they realised the best way to utilise capacity was to try and create fixed freights that travelled good distances at relatively high speeds between a small number of very large yards where it could be broken down into smaller ongoing services or go onto trucks. Of course, this only suited certain customers and would not work for a small business shipping a small volume but it worked well enough that it became the standard pattern by which all freights now run in the UK. I guess the issue in the US is that the distances are so long, you don't want lots of smaller specific trains but a few much larger trains with an enormous mix of destinations.
The freight companies take federal money to expand the network, and the second they don't meet profit projections they tear the tracks up. They treat Amtrak like shit despite taking their money hand over fist, they have been terrible stewards of the system, and they would rather engage in the fuckery from this article than think holistically. It's a misalignment of incentives, and it's really starting to fuck us.
Nationalize the rails. It's what other sane Western countries do. The Erie and Lackawanna sold off the rails in the Lackawanna cutoff - considered at the time an engineering marvel, and capable of HSR - for scrap. That's insane, and should never have happened.
Imagine calling yourself a conservative and supporting the idea of nationalizing the rails. Nationalization is quite possibly one of the most unconservative ideas out there.
As a fiscal conservative, my views are that we should reduce government waste. As long as Amtrak continues to be worthless, the money we spend on it is wasted. When unprofitable rail lines are torn out, the money we spent building those rail lines may have been wasted. If we genuinely want eco-friendly transportation, one option to explore is to centralize our rail infrastructure with the goal of it becoming useful to all.
I don't know if it is the best option, but I think we should explore it and see what the benefits would be.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_Subway_rolling....
For example, if you wanted to conform the IRT lines in NYC (the numbered lines + the 42nd Street Shuttle) to the BMT/IND lines, you would need to (at minimum), update every platform (to back the edge away from the train), probably update every place two tracks are parallel and too close together, probably also update some of the routing and tunnels to enable a larger turning radius, and reapprove all of the tracks (including elevated portions) to support heavier trains.
Since all of the lines (barring the 7 and S) overlap at different points, you can't just make these mutually exclusive changes to one line at a time; you would have to shut down the whole system to make the changes, eliminating service to huge areas of the city for months (if not years).
Although during WWII and for some years after all the lines to the south and southwest of Tokyo were under Tokyu Railways (then known as Dai Tokyu, or "Big Tokyu).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_London_Underg...
(That may have been what you meant, but I think it’s an interesting distinction for those unaware!)
The NYC subway, not to be bested, manages to do this even with the correct cars :-)[1]
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/nycrail/comments/i4airc/whats_the_t...
Tens of thousands of work crews pulled the pins of the west rail and moved it 3in inward. Simultaneously crews at rail yards modified the primary rolling stock.
Service resumed Jun 2 on standard gauge and for the first time passengers and freight could cross the boundary without a changeover stop.
Amtrak already offers passenger rail from SF to LA. It takes 10 hours and uses tracks that are mainly used for freight, and much of the roadbed is single track, too narrow, and too low-quality to support 200 mph trains.
However: we're talking $100+ billion here! With that, you could buy a controlling interest in Union Pacific ($123 billion market cap), kick the freight to the side (), and fix the roadbed. It also wouldn't have to go through the San Joaquin Valley.
Freight: what to do with it? Well, with all that money, you could do something. I'm not a railroad engineer.
How much do you think that costs? Most of the costs in CAHSR are in building the 220-mph-capable track, not in acquiring new ROW for those tracks. For comparison, merely electrifying Caltrain is costing well over $2 billion. No new track, just stringing up catenary wire and installing electrical feeds. Rebuilding a single-line freight trunk into a high speed rail corridor would cost far money, and that's before considering what to do with the freight (hint: the answer is build a new line for them... and then you have to wonder why it wouldn't be simpler to build a new line for HSR and let the freight use the existing line).
It shouldn't cost anywhere near that much money, but the short answer as to why it does cost so much money is that the CA governments seem to be uniquely and disastrously incompetent at project management, on top of several other systemic cost issues in the US.
probably a f&cking lot. On the other hand, with the sums they're throwing away, nothing is off the table.
First, it's not on top of what's planned; it's instead of.
Second, the money to control UP is acquiring a profitable asset, not wasting it.
No, it's on top of. What you're proposing is to convert an existing freight rail line that is nowhere close to HSR standards (unelectrified, low speed, and single track) to HSR standards, and combining that with some sort of freight relief line (which is a new line that is unelectrified, low speed, and single track). There is no meaningful cost reduction in that process from retaining the existing freight rail line and adding a new line built to HSR standards.
You say that you are not a railway engineer. Do you have any explanation for why you think there's a cost reduction basis to buy a company, build a line to HSR standards and build a line to freight standards over not buying a company, building a line to HSR standards, and doing nothing to the existing freight line?
do you have any explanation for the fact that they're NOT "adding a new line built to HSR standards?" Possibly not even in the initial Merced-Bakersfield route, as I laid out in my article.
or that there is no published plan for doing it, or a credible budget? Particularly in heavily populated areas like LA and SF.
Or that going through the central Valley makes a mockery of the "two and a half hour" claim that sold the plan in the first place?
There are published plans for more parts of the project. Look up the Caltrain-HSR blended stuff for more information (I don't know the plans in LA offhand, but that's partially because a lot of my sources are still salty about which pass is being used to enter LA).
Yes, CAHSR costs at least 5x what it should to build (probably going to be more like 10x when you take into account idiotic decisions). But what it will deliver will involve HSR standards of track.
(Considering the tracks can't run in a straight line, 400 miles LA-SF is a ballpark figure. Even if the train averaged 200 mph, that'd be two hours. With stops, much more. But the projected route will be way longer than 400 miles, with more stops, and a slower average speed.)
How the project ought to be done is pretty irrelevant; how it's actually going to be done, or has been done, is all that matters.
And converting a 19th century rail network into something that can support high-speed rail is no small task. You’d eliminate the land acquisition costs, but that’s about it.
It’s pretty defeatist to abandon new rail anywhere that land values are high. It’s expensive but at least you’d have something new and useful at the end of it, rather than sacrificing an excellent freight rail system and ending up with the bad balancing out the good.
The scale changes everything. Intuitive arguments like yours melt away.
Therefore, a simple rotation registers no change in the train driver's brain.
2. "Much of it transformed into commuter railways"? You seem to have no idea of how much of the US is rural. Commuter railways don't make sense in rural areas.
Roosevelt set aside hundred of millions of acres of land not for eternal preservation, but for future development by generations that would otherwise not had land considering the industrial barons of his time would have completely demolished it.
Yes, considering the distributed nature of the US's population pre-dates the car. Go look at a population density map from 1900. Tons of primarily agricultural small towns spread out over an enormous area. Back then most small-ish towns in the middle of nowhere probably did actually have commercial rail because there were no other options. It's just that when the other options did appear, rail went into terminal decline because it was simply a terrible way of serving those kinds of areas when cars and trucks exist. Even today when the spread is less driven by agriculture, people still prefer lower density housing because being stuck in an apartment building sharing walls with god knows who else stops being fun really quick. People like having a bit of space of their own.This results in lower population densities as a result of people's preferences about how they would like to live. Rail is a good means of transporting high volumes from one node to another. It is good at that and it should be used in that context. It is not good if you try to shoehorn it in as a replacement for all other means of transportation as some groups seem to be inclined to do.
The nationalized systems seen in the EU seem to be associated in dramatically higher cost for freight transportation, not lower[1]. The reason the rail companies stopped offering passenger rail services in the US was that nearly every one of them was absolutely hemorrhaging money by the end and the only reason they'd kept them that long is because the government made them do it. Transporting people by train in most of the US is laughably inefficient and inconvenient next to the car due to the low population densities across most of the country. There's a reason nearly the entire country switched to using cars for transportation almost the instant that it became possible for them to do so.
[1]https://etrr.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s12544-013-00...
Low population densities can be misleading; much of the US is highly urbanized, and dense urban centers would be very efficiently connected by rail service were we to improve it. I for one would almost certainly make more trips to cities in Ohio, Illinois, etc. if it was a < 6 hour high speed trip rather than an overnight one.
The contours of a successful HSR system in the US and Canada are roughly as follows:
The core linear corridors of DC-Boston (densest US population) and Detroit-Quebec City (that's 10/15 largest cities in Canada). Combine these with an east-west Boston-Toronto and north-south Montreal-NYC spine (timed interchange at Albany makes too much sense), as well as several other small feeder routes I'm not mentioning.
A Midwestern knot centered on Chicago with lines to (in ccw order) Minneapolis, St. Louis (maybe to Kansas City), Louisville (and thence to Nashville I think), Cleveland, and Detroit (not sure how to squeeze in Cincinnati and Columbus). At this point, you might consider connecting the tendrils to the northeast system as well.
CAHSR, with connections to Las Vegas and Phoenix. Texas Triangle. Maybe Portland-Vancouver.
Nashville-Miami via Atlanta, and Atlanta-DC via Research Triangle in NC.
Further I don't think you understand the cost, lot's of people out east think throwing a rail line together isn't more difficult than throw a couple of logs on the ground and some metal tracks. Let me tell you about what it is like trying to build a rail line through the west. There are mountains that make the Appalachins look mighty tiny that you've got to dynamite straight through, because you can't go up them, with the alternative being massive detours. If you want to go through the south you'll have hundreds of miles of tractless desert with temperatures being over 100 degrees on the regular, without water for miles.
Connecting the 19th and the 46th largest city over ~400mi of mountainous terrain with no intermediate cities of note to pick up along the way is not a recipe for success.
> Further I don't think you understand the cost, lot's of people out east think throwing a rail line together isn't more difficult than throw a couple of logs on the ground and some metal tracks. Let me tell you about what it is like trying to build a rail line through the west.
That's why I didn't suggest any routes like that. The closest you get is Portland-Vancouver, which is questionable in large part because of the mountainous region (and Portland, OR is quite frankly not a large city). CAHSR does have to cross two or three mountain regions (depending on how you count), but you're connecting 40 million people in several large metropolitan areas with it, so it's actually worth it. And outside of those, I'm not connecting anything else--you're the one complaining that I'm leaving out Denver-SLC after all--so how do you think I'm ignoring the expensive costs of what I'm not proposing to connect?
I get so tired of hearing this flawed argument, which places the cause and effect backwards. Ohio has the population of of Sweden, Indiana has the population of Denmark. Texas is almost twice as populous as The Netherlands, and its population is mostly confined to a triangle of urban areas that are within commuter rail distance. The Northeast Corridor is an uninterrupted urban development from Washington DC to Boston. The USA has numerous large population centers, many of which are completely unconnected by usable passenger rail despite close proximity. Over 80% of Americans live in urban areas, and most of the populations is confined to the coasts and the Midwest.
If you think trains are too inefficient, all you have to do is observe the ridiculously huge short hop flight network in the USA. There are at least 6 daily non-stop flights from Charlotte, NC to Washington, DC, which is a 6 hour drive. There are at least 30 nonstop flights from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which is also a 6 hour drive. There are 3 non-stop flights from LA to San Diego, which is less than 3 hours away. There are at least 10 non-stop flights form Chicago to Columbus per day, a route that has no passenger train service and under 6 hour drive time.
These short flights, which save effectively no time over high-speed train travel, exist because there is demand for non-car travel that is being unmet by the the trains that do not exist.
Switching to cars was not an inevitability, it was a not an obvious choice, we actually went out of our way to destroy existing, functional rail infrastructure and neighborhoods to replace it with interstate highways, and a lot of it was motivated by a massive automotive manufacturing lobby exerting government influence.
In the US, the automobile is also massively underpriced and subsidized as a policy choice, which pushes citizens toward choosing personal vehicles instead of alternatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbEuaCCV-zg
That is the often missed point of the movie Roger the Rabbit.
But Indiana particularly is a bad example. 1/3 of the population you mention is in Indianapolis that has tried many times to have commuter trains, the population does not want them! Even modern/modest attempts have failed[0]. If commuter trains aren't popular with the people there why would longer haul passenger rail be? Even if you could magic an Acela route between Chicago and Indianapolis into existence it would not be faster than a car or the many private bus routes that go there and you'd have to deal with the inconvenience of getting to the start and end locations in a city that has rejected public transportation.
The northern population centers which account for another 6th of the population of Indiana are already serviced by regular electric inter urban trains into Chicago, the nearest big population center. That line is seeing about 50% less usage compared to pre-Covid numbers.
So beyond just the policy choices, in Indiana at least there is strong evidence for a lack of desire for inter-urban rail.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_University_Health_Peop...
Rail is the highest volume mass transit solution. The layout of population centers in the US at a macro and micro level leads to this level of throughput rarely being necessary when all other factors are considered.
There are indeed several locations in the US where high speed rail lines which do not exist would be a very good idea and would obviously supplant short-haul flights which currently serve those routes.
There are also many cases where commuter rail systems which don't, or barely exist would make excellent additions to the metropolitan areas around major cities.
However, this is the exception, not the rule. It is not relevant to the vast majority of origin destination pairs when traveling in the US.
Passenger rail in the US needs to answer the question "How is this tangibly better than the alternatives?". To which the answer is usually "Its not". For shorter distance trips the inconvenience of not having a car once you get to your destination usually ends up outweighing the benefits of not having to drive yourself. For longer distance trips, flying is usually going to be dramatically faster. As mentioned, there certainly are examples which fall into that sweet spot in the middle but in the US they are relatively few and far between.
Texas triangle, Northeast Corridor (needs more speed and service frequency), Florida, California and Pacific Northwest, all need high speed service.
The problem of needing a car once you arrive locally is another correctable piece of policy failure, and that problem doesn’t stop a huge number of people from making a huge number of short hop flights in the United States.
In 2019, 44.5 million cars were rented in the US, so I think people very frequently jump on a medium to short distance flight and renting a car at their destination. Plus, we have ride sharing apps.
This is I think something where I think you're in agreement with the substance, but not the wording.
If you look at a list of the MSAs in the US, the MSAs in the top 50 that aren't practically serviceable by HSR in some fashion are Seattle, Denver, Portland, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Salt Lake, New Orleans, and Birmingham. And five of those aren't entirely implausible.
So most people actually live somewhere where some form of HSR is plausible. In the Northeast and California, the problem is more that it hasn't been built yet; for the Midwest, Chicago is strong enough that it can drive HSR traffic without concomitant (and probably unlikely) planning changes in other Midwestern cities; Texas probably needs unlikely planning changes to be viable. For the Southeast, Florida would need unlikely planning changes to be viable on its own, but connecting to a strong Midwest and Northeast system via Atlanta could also be viable. Connections past that probably aren't viable (sorry, Memphis and New Orleans).
And I think you recognize that there are several strong areas in the US--I doubt your list of viable HSR routes are much different from them. I just think you're underestimating how much of the intercity traffic in the US that actually entails.
Busses have a bad reputation, as being ugly, uncomfortable, and smelly. So do trains, but with high speed rail, you buy some really nice trainsets. Well, for much less than the cost of rail right of way, you could buy some really nice busses.
But let's say you're going on vacation. Let's say you've got a wife and two kids. If you fly, you need four tickets. Same with rail. If you drive, you only drive one car. That shifts the economics massively.
> Indiana has the population of Denmark. Texas is almost twice as populous as The Netherlands
Indiana is 36,000 square miles; Denmark is 16,000 square miles. Texas is 268,000 square miles; The Netherlands is 42,000 square miles. The populations may be similar; the densities are not. That matters a great deal for this discussion.
The EU also has a dramatically lower accident rate.. https://imgur.com/CrzErQx
From: https://d-rail-project.eu/IMG/pdf/DR-D1-1-F1-Summary_Report_...
First, much of the country is never going to be capable of having efficient passenger service. There is no way you can make a viable passenger route between Chicago and LA; the distance is just way too large.
Second, passenger and freight rail just doesn't mix. A lot of European countries look at the US rail market and ask themselves "how can we move that much freight by rail?"
Third, nationalized rail has not worked out well in the US. The article here already talks about Conrail (the nationalized corpse of Penn Central) a little. But Amtrak's stewardship of the Northeast Corridor has been abysmal--here is a linear corridor about 500 miles long connecting 4 of the top 11 largest cities in the US, entirely in public hands, with no freight traffic running along it, and yet we still lack a proper 220mph high speed rail with frequent service along the corridor. US commuter rail systems generally suck even harder than that, and again, they are already all publicly owned anyways (and many of them can't even use the excuse that they rely on track owned by other people).
Finally, if you read the article and particularly some of the comments closely, you'll notice that the problem here can be boiled down in simple terms to "cost minimization in one domain creates secondary consequences that have problems elsewhere"--given the size of the US, even a nationalized system is going to have internal business unit divisions that will keep the same underlying problems. The comments give some examples of such intra-service turf wars causing solutions to not work out.
As an addendum, I assume by "entirely created by the US government," you're referring to the land grants to railroads. Well, land grants to western railroads--the eastern half was built out before they started giving out land grants. And the land grants were only given out during a short ~30 year window. I don't have the exact number on me right now, but I think it was about 40% of the US railroad mileage that was awarded land grants. Hell, one of the transcontinental lines received no land grants whatsoever.
We're still spending a lot of time and money recovering from Conrail's stewardship of the rail network. Lines closed or single-tracked, etc.
Outside of that, there's probably about 100 miles of track that can support 220mph speed limits in current right-of-way (large sections in MA, MD, and RI). Adopting better trainsets (switch to EMUs from locomotive-hauled) and rebuilding track to higher speed limit standards would help there. The track from about Kingston, RI to New Rochelle, NY basically needs dedicated HSR. You can, for the most part, use the existing I-95 ROW for this, and east of New Haven, there's basically no takings you have to consider; west of New Haven, you need to do a lot more takings for curve straightening, and that is going to be an eminent domain disaster.
This is like arguing that the Trans-Siberian Railway is not viable because the distance is just way too large: the Trans-Siberian Railway is not even a high-speed railway.
To travel from NYC to Chicago on Aug. 21st:
Flight: $124 nonstop (2hr 40 min) or $85 with layover (7 hours)
Greyhound (bus): $170 (23.5 hours)
Amtrak: $144 (19.5 hours)
If you value your time and/or your money the flights usually win
Not sure what you mean by this. There is already a passenger route between Chicago and LA. Has been for a long long time. It's called the Southwest Chief it runs from Union Station LA to Union Station Chicago multiple times a day.
Like most airports, you mean?
I'm not against subsidizing train travel, but you should be getting something for it. You could decide to add a train between any two places and dump money into it until it's cheap enough to fill up. The question is if you're causing people to take the train who would have otherwise driven/flown, or if you're just subsidizing a new market.
I don't live in either city, but the concept of taking one of the other long-haul Amtrak lines from Chicago to Seattle has seemed interesting to me. It's not that expensive and it would be quite scenic. That said, if I took it, I'd be flying to Chicago, then taking the train, and then flying back home from Seattle. That's not replacing a flight/drive, it's creating net new flights. Is that the sort of train line that we should be subsiding the existence of? I can see the value of doing it as a matter of culture and history, but if the goal is to reduce the carbon emissions of flying and driving, it may actually be counterproductive.
Maybe they think that trains are like planes, and that you have to stay on them for the entire Chicago-LA trip, rather than getting off (or on) at one of the 50 other stops?
The Amtrak Southwest Chief exists. It may be subsidized by more profitable routes in the northeast, but it is nearly always full.
When I looked at the numbers some time back, the US had something like 10x more freight rail than Europe [per capita], and Europe had [at least] 10x more passenger rail.
(I suspect the difference is two-fold: our major river network doesn't connect our hinterlands to our population centers in an efficient way, and our country is big enough to have a continental divide within a single economic zone.)
My guess is it's scale. Chicago is the third largest city in the US, and yet it's 600 miles from any ocean-going port (the Great Lakes doesn't really count, since it's not practical to navigate for any interoceanic shipping). There's smaller cities in the interior of the US that are even further from the oceans. By contrast, in Europe, it's hard to get more than 400mi or so away from a major port.
The Erie Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, and that trade made both New York and Chicago what they are today. But railroads became a thing and they just built a new one that followed the same route as the canal.
You can also ship down to the Mississippi from Chicago, but again you're dependent on a canal to bridge the gap to the navigable waterways.
I've taken it dozens of times. It's not even vaguely empty. Largely because the train starts in Chicago. It takes a bit to get to less full stretches.
edit: in my head I was thinking Chicago-St. Louis. The answer is actually simpler - the train is relatively empty from St. Louis to Chicago because it is the last leg of the trip. Chicago is the end of the line.
I was going to make the observation that once the yard has been expanded, I doubt it would ever be reclaimed for other uses, but the number of paved-over spurs and customer connections disproves that point. It makes me sad to think about the amount of literally irreplaceable infrastructure that’s been ripped up rather than retained for future freight levels or repurposed for passenger use.
Hello from Philadelphia, this take is so completely of touch with reality. The Reading Company, now dealing solely in movie theaters, continues to squat on land and bridges that it has not improved in half a century, yet continues to own.
While the Reading Terminal was converted into a convention center and food market, the rail yards on the waterfront are largely parking lots and vacant land. The coal yards they fed in the center city are now home to a fenced in lot full of transformers.
Expanding an in-city rail yard is not a catalyst to improvements in the city. Reclaiming former railyards is not relatively easy.
The neighborhood in question, needs investment and it needs infill. Taking 5-10 square blocks off the table helps concentrate the investment and infill, and will accelerate the improvements. Or at least that's how I see it :)
mixing busy cargo and passenger tracks is a bad idea, because passenger trains need to be reliable without delays in order to be attractive. cargo can handle delays better but wants to travel as fast as possible which is pretty difficult when passenger trains with their multiple stops get in the way.
so without knowing the chicago rail network, i'd claim that there is no redundancy that could be freed