Amtrak Explorer
amtrakexplorer.com
amtrakexplorer.com
My wife an I met in the Pacific Surfliner's dining car, and our 2 year old is obsessed with trains of any type, so you could say we're becoming a train family.
I'm currently building a raspberry-pi based "train coming!" / "ding-a-ling!" machine for my son which scrapes the real-time location of trains from the above site. The response to this thread is inspiring me to write about it!
Getting the actual data from Amtrak's api isn't super straight forward, but a nice hacker beat me to it and published some hints: https://gist.github.com/chriswhong/aa4a2911883904310b3c342e7...
"Galisteo" by Burl Ives
...
Looking out my door, about a quarter to four / I wave when the Chief goes by / and though it’s just a train, I never could explain / why a tear comes to my eye.
...
No need for an RPi scraper for me. I live in that village, and hear the (Southwest) Chief's whistle/horn in both directions. Long live the analog!
Glad to hear about your train-loving family. We need more!
I hop on at Lamy, either to Raton or LAX, depending on the trip. If only there were still a stop in Folsom, I'd walk to family place up there...
Lamy is an interesting place to wait on the train; George R2 Martin (Game of Thrones author) sponsors a special excursion train that comes up there from Santa Fe. They do fun bits, wine tasting tours, mystery role-playing dinners, art shows. The train is painted like a huge dragon.
A strange juxtaposition with authentic tumbleweeds and abandoned adobe remnants of a whistle stop village that's faded away.
Lots to keep you entertained for the extra three hours it will take for the Amtrak train to actually arrive. They do crew change, cleaning, restocking food, and often address any operational issues with the trains at the Albuquerque station. Seems to be one of the few places where that's done, because Northbound quite often hours behind schedule at Lamy.
It's my favorite way to travel anyway.
Consider the feature scheduled!
There’s something magical about certain machines that make some people emotional.
Concorde was another one for me.
Killed by bean counters, as so much is.
And I can’t go without two of my favorites:
Had no idea steam engines could move like that!!!
And in return I give you:
Cool link, thanks! It would be awesome if Amtrak could have a webcam or two on board their trains so that you could ride along and enjoy the vistas.. (Yes, I know, connectivity, bandwidth, costs, something something... :-( )
It was just the local Caltrain commuter (and some freight trains) but I remember my 2yo commenting that we were so lucky to live close to a train crossing so we could hear the horns and the trains go by.
I've started commuting by Amtrak, as I'm lucky enough to have the flexibility to work around its limited schedule. My quality of life is so much higher now that I don't drive. Also every single Amtrak employee I've met so far has been super nice.
The website and app are trash. I was not able to buy a ticket on my desktop, I had to use the app. The app decides to reload all the time, sometimes losing my ticket if I don't have cell service. I have no idea what kind of APIs are available, but if anyone has an idea for fixing this please let me know.
I've taken 4 Amtrak trips in my life, 3 basically ruined the trip.
First, when I was a kid we took a train to Chicago from Michigan and for whatever reason we checked a bag. They lost the bag with my favorite stuffed animal in it and I remember spending most of that weekend crying.
Second, we tried going skiing in Whitefish Montana from Seattle and they made us take a bus to Spokane to "get the train back on schedule." We were something like 7 hours late getting to Spokane because of traffic and snow (not enough snow to mess up the train) and we missed a full day of skiing on our 2 day trip. (There'a a LOT more to that story that made it even more ridiculous.)
Third trip was from Seattle to Portland and it went fine.
Final trip was from Seattle to New Mexico. I had the time and figured it would be kinda cool to see the country by train. The first leg of the trip to LA was actually pretty fantastic, but shortly before arriving the second leg was canceled because one of their bridges burned down in a wildfire near Palm Springs. I realize that was a freak accident but they offered zero help and I had to scramble to find lodging and eventually a Greyhound bus to my destination.
C'mon, that's not a big sample size for such sweeping conclusions. I've taken many trips, more than I can count. On-time hasn't been a problem for me. But they've become very expensive.
Imagine buying 4 Cokes in you life and 3 of them being flat. Most people would probably consider Coke a bad product at that point, even if the sample size _is_ small.
Or imagine going to a restaurant 4 times. and 3 of those times getting food poisoning. Most people would probably consider it a bad restaurant.
I don't even know if most people would even manage 4 visits after getting food poisoning twice, let alone thrice.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone had bad feelings about it, but that's different than drawing conclusions about all of Amtrak everywhere.
Freight train interference — a dispatching decision made by a freight railroad to delay Amtrak passengers so that freight trains can operate first — caused 1.1 million minutes (about 2 years) of delay in 2022. [1]
[1] also lists Percentage of On-Time Customers by Route – 2022 which clearly shows that it's abysmal.
See the report card [2] where they have put in 80% as the benchmark.
IIRC, I had also seen a full historical report across multiple years but can't find it now. We recently did a trip going from SFO to LAX to San Diego by Coast Starlight and the Surfliner. Thankfully I had read these reports and dropped the plan to do the Zephyr as it has only a 25% on time performance (in 2022). It would only be slightly better as 2022 reports state it has deteriorated further as compared to 2021.
The lesson we learn from looking at all this on time data and checking out some other forums was that when traveling by Amtrak, budget for delays, cancellations, re-reouting by bus and all the pain that comes with it.
We come from the UK and are train lovers, having done most of the train travel in UK and Europe, Amtrak has a lot to do to catch up.
[1] https://www.amtrak.com/about-amtrak/on-time-performance.html
[2] https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...
Have a look at Grand Junction station delays for the past week[1]. Seven out of eleven have delays of over thirty minutes. Three of those are an hour late. One of them is a five hour delay.
And in 2023 so far [2] it's 376 out of 524 that are at least 30 minutes late. 291 of those over an hour. 71 are over four hours late. 15 were eight hours late. And one was delayed by over 1000 minutes (16.75hr).
A lot of this is because Amtrak doesn't have propriety over the lanes and has to yield to cargo traffic (though I'm not familiar with the nuances).
[1] https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/history.php?t... [2] https://juckins.net/amtrak_status/archive/html/history.php?t...
You also need to consider the people who are on the train with delays. One of the sadder things I've seen is someone missing a post-midnight intercom announcement saying that all stops right before St Louis through Chicago would would be skipped (because delays), and they'd need to get on the next train. So when she inevitably didn't get off, she was forced to going all the way up to Chicago and had to get picked up by family and drive all the way back down to St. Louis.
Anywho.
I feel he did it because he felt bad for not waking them up, but still.
If Amtrak wasn’t forbidden from competing with greyhound it’d be more reliable I feel, even if trains became busses a bit more often.
Another legally imposed handicap is that they cannot compete with mail carriers - seems insane, the post offices used to be built on top of the terminals for good reason (adjacent to Chicago Union Station and NY Penn Station at least)
The legal means to enforce this was with the DOJ, which for Amtrak’s existence has had bigger fish to fry. Amtrak was granted the ability to sue freight carriers for enforcement in 2019, the first lawsuit is making its way through the legal process and Amtrak wants to establish it as case law for this legal priority.
What's the court # for that case? Are they explicit in their filings that they seek to change the case law?
I guess you missed the link I posted above. (It also seems to link to a slightly different page than yesterday.) The very best Amtrak line is only on time 70% of the time.
The majority of them are below 50% on time, some dramatically below.
https://www.amtrak.com/about-amtrak/on-time-performance.html
Sleuth the monthly Host Railroad Reports here[1], direct from the cow's mouth. The company sets an aspirational 900 minutes delay per 10k train miles target metric and their monthly reports are lit up in breach like a Christmas tree year round across the country.
[1] https://www.amtrak.com/about-amtrak/reports-documents.html
Pro tip - fly OUT to your vacation, and take the train back.
Then the worst case you miss work and oh so sad cry cry.
I did the other direction. It took over 4 hours, because the train had to go 20 mph due to flooding elsewhere.
On the other hand, Boston -> NYC and NYC -> DC went fine.
If you like trains, then take Amtrak for that. Not because you expect a great trip.
Elsewhere, on tracks that are owned by others, especially commercial companies, Amtrak may not get priority, so things get dicier.
Congress would then say, "well, then, we're ending your subsidies."
It would be an interesting exercise to see if they could be profitable, albeit smaller.
If it has sleeper cars, it loses money.
However Amtrak serves a portion of the population that are in areas not serviced by much else and I’m perfectly fine with subsidizing that outright. But that may be because choo choo go choo.
It depends on the route. Long haul trains like the ones you describe are a dubious choice. I've done that twice, and that was enough.
I've also used Amtrak to commute on the Northeast corridor literally hundreds (if not thousands) of times. In that scenario, I'd be hard pressed to choose anything else. It's vastly more convenient and flexible than the alternatives.
There's ways to address that but we don't have the collective political will to do so.
Acela? Acela was fine but it's both expensive (presumably because of the demand) and a lot slower than it ought to be. That entire stretch of Metro North(?) tracks through Connecticut? There's no good reason the track is in such poor shape and no good reason to limit Acela to a snail's pace.
OTOH Acela still seems to be pretty popular, so perhaps Amtrak can afford to let it rot for a bit. Hopefully not for too long.
I thought it had improved since 20 years ago :-\
It’s a beautiful ride but on time it is not.
Pro tip: bring a pack of cigs even if you’ve never ever smoked in your life. If the train stops in the middle of nowhere because a corn train decided to leave the imposed restrictions of the rails, you will be let off the train, but only if you’re a tobacco addict. You can also sometimes order delivery to a stuck train.
There is the Northeast Corridor, including the Acela, and then there is everything else.
I mean this fairly literally: Amtrak both owns are operates the NEC vs. the situation for the rest of the country. They even operate different Twitter/X accounts for service alerts between NEC and "everything else".
The Northeast Corridor operates something like a typical middle-distance, reasonable frequency, reasonable timeliness rail system would do in a European country. The rest of Amtrak is for rail fans only.
Because Amtrak isn't all that great from what I remember, there are far better carriers but maybe not in the US.
Don't get me wrong, I'm also a private pilot and a car guy...I love our train alternatives too and flying and driving are things the US does a better job of. But leaving out trains as a realistic transportation option feels like a weird blind spot.
Small regional trains in general are decent, but they’re no match for planes across any long distance.
I just earlier today was trying to get a Eurail pass for some traveling around europe over the next couple weeks. The minimum you pay is $211 for 4 days of use across a month, but every train worth using has a “seat reservation fee” on top of that. I literally couldn’t find a more expensive way to do that route I had planned.
And that depends on how far you travel, of course:
Fixed overhead for planes is around 2.5 hours (depending on airport, etc.) for parking, travel to terminal, security, time to gate, 'deplaning', time from gate to ride/car. For Amtrak, that's about 40 minutes IME.
Marginal time cost for distance is, of course, far less on a plane.
Don't worry, they're working on remedying that.
His stance was that the government should not give a single dime to Amtrak in it's current configuration.
Apparently leadership is thoroughly toxic and only cares about two things: adding more stops and getting more tax dollars. Things like service quality, reliability, cost competitiveness, or even ridership numbers have any consideration.
I have seen stores with hours like “8-5, plus an hour around whenever the train shows up”.
Taking the train seems to double the duration of my trip over driving. Not having to drive is not a bad trade off though, if I have the time to relax.
Pros:
+ Comfort. You basically get a first class seat with cafeteria access. You can also purchase a whole room, but is less affordable than a plane ticket if you're traveling alone.
+ Regularity. The train leaves at the same time everyday both from DC and Chicago.
+ It reaches parts of the country not easily accessed by an Airport. If you need to visit someone in middle of nowhere USA, Amtrak might just be a better option.
+ Price. Book it in advance and you'll be saving ~$200 in airfare.
+ No TSA to check your luggage, some trains allow you to bring your bike, and there's always plenty overhead space.
+ Easy access to outlets for charging devices.
Cons:
+ Long! Chicago to DC takes 17 hours. Chicago to San Francisco can take two days. SW Pennsylvania is snaking route that feels like forever. It's really a question of how much you value your time.
+ No WIFI on most trains, so bring a book if you cannot scrum up a hotspot.
17 hours is fairly quick. But the timing is fantastic. Amtrak leaves after work in Chicago and arrives at hotel check-in time in DC the next day
Outside of major cities, it's generally a thing where you pour in money and faster track speeds come out.
>Additionally, it's running on freight rail, not passenger rail.
In many countries, there are no such distinctions outside of HSR which has it's own requirements - it's all mixed use. In Poland freight trains use the same 160-200km/h tracks as passenger railway, and move aside to let faster trains go through. Also they use tracks more when there are pretty much 0 passenger trains, like in the middle of the night.
>On top of that our cars are grandfathered in and can't be replaced at the moment.
I completely do not understand that part. Your railway cars can't hit 160km/h?
Hopefully with some decent lines appearing in the US, Brightline and California HSR in the future people will start to experience better rail and this stuff will get more focus.
People from Europe don’t quite realize just how much freight the US moves by rail. It’s absolutely batshit.
> U.S. freight movements will rise from around 19.3 billion tons in 2020
Point is, Cascades is one of the better services outside the NE corridor and it still tops out at only 75mph (120km/h). The average trip speed is closer to 50mph (80km/h).
We have a long way to go to achieve anything resembling European levels of service. Japanese levels feel like an impossibility.
That said it would be much tougher to justify if work wasn't footing the bill. A single round trip is up around $500 per person unless you are willing to leave at the crack of dawn. Doing this regularly, or with a family, would get prohibitively expensive for most people. I definitely wish rail travel was more viable and accessible in the US, it's got so much going for it.
Hell, I'd love to be wrong. Because again, I enjoy traveling by rail. If I somehow accidentally priced the literal worst case, that's good to know.
Looking at travel from Austin to SF, taking a train is a longer duration trip and costs more.
One way on Oct 20th, Kayak has a flight for $119 and Wanderu has a train trip for $662 that is 3 days and 8 hours in duration.
If I could take my car on this train it might be worth it, from a cost and logistics standpoint train pretty much always loses.
I say this as someone who grew up enjoying the metro in dc and ny and use rail and ferry's when overseas.
Until infrastructure, subsidies and other externalities are addressed train travel will not be competitive, I have far more hope for level 3 self driving cars than I do for walkable cities and train travel parity.
Take your bike!
(Don’t know if Amtrak would carry that. You can just about get away with taking them on UK trains.)
There have been numerous times when I’ve been very glad that I had a vehicle to load them all into to contain the current detonations occuring.
(but like, actually point to point. not, get to downtown and walk another 1.5 miles or wait 45 minutes for a bus transfer).
Part of this is that there's zero enforcement of the theoretical legal authority that Amtrak trains have over freight transit. Everything ends up slow and delayed almost everywhere because of incredibly predictable issues with passenger trains stuck behind much slower freight trains.
Or we could reallocate existing money, maybe stop subsiding people to grow corn to make gas and spend that money on improving railroads. Or buy one fewer F-35 every year or something. Lots of options, we don't spend very much on Amtrak right now.
Some of that subsidy also indirectly goes to the freight railroads.
For comparison, I found this map of European rails: https://www.eurorailcampaignuk.org/railway-map-of-europe/eur...
Seems the least dense (in terms of railway) European countries still have better coverage than the most dense US state.
Each leg of that trip on a commuter train probably had 5 to 25 stops in between stations I mentioned, and each of those rail systems branches out in various directions to serve the commuters of that area getting into the cities I mention. Amtrak also runs about the same route with way fewer stops.
The US used to be more rail dense. It still has the longest total railroad of any country in the world at 220k KM, but that's down from a peak of 408k KM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_rail_tran... (a fair bit over one light-second, kinda cool).
This is true only if you consider passenger rail. In terms of freight rail, the US has 6: Canadian Pacific (which recently acquired the 7th), Canadian National, Union Pacific, BNSF, CSX, and Norfolk Southern. Note that the smallest of these has more track than all but ~13 other countries, and the largest would be #4.
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_L%C3%A4nder_nach_E...
EU seems to have a longer railnet, bit US net is also longer in german wiki. Density ist nearly twice in EU.
And some tracks are usable but unused until a customer asks for a train.
And some records show tracks where no rail has been for forty years.
Fun fact - some of those rail2trail trails are still considered railroads because the track can be readded at any time.
This is a deliberate part of "precision scheduled railroading" which is neither precision nor scheduled.
Management and investors believe railroads are in long-term decline so capital investments to improve capacity and/or speed are not done. The most important metric is the "operating ratio". If serving a new customer that adds $200m to profit would decrease the ratio by 2% the railroad will not serve the customer.
So as part of this the railroad wants to minimize crew time. On a given section of track with passing sidings the railroad could move more cars by having three train crews going back and forth, creating conists just long enough to fit in the sidings. They could also extend the sidings to allow longer trains.
Instead they reduce to two or even one crew and make longer consists. This often means one crew parks their train and leaves it for an entire day because they won't be able to pass the other train in the opposite direction. The crew has to take a taxi back home and leaves the train idle. Once the other train passes they or another crew comes back and resumes. It now takes 3 days to move the same number of cars it would have taken two before but over those three days the railroad only paid for 1.5 crew days instead of paying 3 crews over two days. Labor costs are reduced, operating ratio looks better, job done.
I'll also point out that US railroad companies hate carrying passengers. They spent decades begging permission to discontinue passenger service, cooking books, refusing to sell tickets, etc so they could discontinue their passenger services. For example what is Caltrain used to run down to LA and was very profitable right up until the day they terminated service.
edit: When management and investors punish railroads for trying to be a better railroad I don't know how you fix that brain damage. We seem stuck in an extremely sub-optimal local maxima.
For sake of argument here are made-up numbers: If you can, by paying some additional labor, with no capex, increase profit by 30% even though operating ratio may slightly decrease while also protecting your business from competitors that is clearly something in the interests of shareholders. If the railroads were run like this I could explain their behavior as standard short-sightedness where they refuse to make the capex investments required to grow their business in the future.
None of this gets into passenger rail service. I don't know that the US market would sustain anything like the numbers railroads did in their heyday but there are absolutely plenty of rail routes that would could have a sustainable and profitable business. With some minor capex they could even do high-speed passenger service to very high profit. Modern 150mph+ train service is stupid cheap and wildly profitable. At that speed you don't have many stops and the travel times are so short your crew labor costs are low. If you already own right-of-way your single most expensive and time-consuming blocker is a non-issue. So far Brightline and CA HSR are seemingly the only ones interested.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Class1rr... shows the "Class I" railroads; just the big eight. There's a whole expansive set of Class II/III tracks. 160,000 miles total.
The latter.
Openrailwaymap.org has a better picture of all the track in the US, although it seems that the US has a very different ratio of main/branch track (which you can't see until you zoom in) than Europe does.
Some commuter rail is operated by Amtrak but won’t appear I think.
If you have money you can get a private passenger train almost anywhere there are tracks.
It also doesn't show all the rail connections, e.g. between Leizig and Chemnitz there is a direct hourly connection, albeit a notoriously poor one (only single track, non-electrified) that's not on the map.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leipzig%E2%80%93Geithain_railw...
https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/US-Freight-Ra...
The idea of traveling across the country and actually getting to see it is amazing. Spending a couple days on the train is maximum leisure to me.
But... every time I consider doing it again, it's just too crazy expensive. Sometimes double or triple that of similar air travel.
Brightline Orlando<->Miami (occasionally at 125mph)
To make this more objective - you meet tons of folks in Florida who moved from another state recently and never the other way.
Also it’s patently obvious why people choose to move to FL - has something to do with the sun. They don’t call it the “Sunshine State” for nothing.
I am with you on the weather, but on the flip side it's VERY hot in the summer.
As for NYC vs Miami... there's a palpatable shift. It used to be "what does Miami have for me besides sunshine" and now it's more like "why would anyone stay in NYC?" The former question has more and more good answers now while the later fewer and fewer.
And again I say this as a new Yorker who hasn't moved yet so it's not like I am just talking my own book here.
I can't see how Miami (also having spent a decent amount of time there), aside from the weather, could provide anything close to either NYC or Chicago. You have to squint even harder since Miami has none of the public transit, entertainment or other amenities I would expect from a large urban center. Plus, if you lean left on the political spectrum, you inherit the unpalatable politics that come with FL.
At least in Chicago I can buy a house within a ten minute walk to a beach and not break the bank. Something that, unless you're in Rockaway/LI or are ballin out on Star Island/Key Biscayne/Bal Harbor/etc wont get.
If you find people asking "why would anyone stay in NYC", they had no idea why they were there to begin with.
[1] https://www.nextburb.com/us/compare-places/new-york-ny-vs-mi...
I understand NYC isn't for everyone, and I don't criticize people for living elsewhere, but it's hard to compare ....
The income tax thing is perplexing to me - you need to pay somehow, no? Without a graduated income tax, probably you are paying more tax overall (unless you are in the top 1%).
Your 2nd paragraph is 30 years out of date. Pre-retirement people don't move there unless there are jobs, education for their kids, and safety.
Instead, we could just rely on the in-migration and out-migration figures. I have to assume those people with personal experience know something.
It sorta looks like you are the one dismissing and arguing, alas. Have a lovely day.
By the way, NY does have the best theater scene in the US, but London's is much better.
Your talking point about NYC being some sort of hellscape is at least 30 years out of date.
Briefly it wasn't a hellscape, but y'all made it one again. Congratulations.
Glad you feel that way. Please don't come here.
In case you aren't familiar with this topic, the map about 30% down this page shows which cities and gaining and losing population. https://eig.org/city-population-2023/
I'd also argue a place where the state surgeon general posts anti-vax memes and the governor has made his national bones by gutting educational programs and rights isn't "well-run" by most definitions.
Would love to hear more about what you meant by "well-run."
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/01/us/amtrak-coronavirus-pro...
Freight companies manage the tracks and pay lip service to Amtrak's regulated priority. Until 2019 that enforcement was up to the DOJ, who didn't really do anything, but Amtrak was granted the ability to sue that year. https://enotrans.org/article/durbin-introduces-bill-to-allow...
Amtrak is currently trying to sue their host railroads but these suits take time. https://seekingalpha.com/article/4598703-for-all-rail-freigh...
But they’re incredibly fun to ride but you need to not have to be anywhere anytime.
If you want to get somewhere in the US in a reasonable amount of time at a reasonable cost, your options are usually roads (bus or personal vehicle) and commercial air travel. There's a couple corridors where boat or train actually work, but not many.
It helps that most of main lines are electrified twin tracks.
With regards for competitiveness, once it's in it becomes vital infrastructure that nobody asks questions about. Like nobody asks "are the USA interstates competitive". They're there so that country as a whole remains competitive.
Transcon rail will never be a thing but most people live in areas close by. The Midwest is roughly the size of France with similar population levels; and the upper limit of high speed rail travel is thought to be about five hours on the train, which is compatible with NYC to Chicago, or Chicago to Atlanta, or NYC to Atlanta, not to mention all the shorter trips in between.
* vastly more comfortable, with more space and amenities
* nice views
* single style of hassle (get to the train, sit down, enjoy; with a plane you get to the terminal, pass through security, then wait, then go in a plane in heavily restricted mode, then you can move/do stuff after take-off, then again you go in restricted mode, then you wait for taxi to finish, then you get to the gate, then you walk towards the exits, wait for luggage, etc.)
Long routes have their uses, but the bread and butter of any popular system should be the trains which leave in the evening and arrive the next morning. You do not lose a day and you do not have to pay for a hotel.
* make a “profit”
* run essential 3km+ long distance services. These often serve rural areas without parallel Interstate routes
And has never been given the appropriate amount of money to do both at the same time.
On almost every city map in the US you can see a railway crossing it, usually in the downtown behind a large mall that should also double as a rail station if you ask me.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:High_Speed_Railroad_...
https://www.aar.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/US-Freight-Ra...
Check https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ for a complete overview.
I love Amtrak. I love trains. People say the US has bad public transit, and they're not wrong, but I love that I can get from my front door in the Netherlands to downtown Sac via SFO without setting foot in a car. Ironically I think it's more convenient to get to Oakland Airport from Sacramento than SMF.
The Netherlands has great trains but the beer is better on this one.
Edit: the Vermonter and Ethan Allen express have even less ridership but are shorter, I wonder how much money those lose.
The Northeast Corridor has at least hourly service through out the day, 'high-speed' (for america) trains, and lots of newish comfortable equipment, it's arguably the most civil way to get between NYC/DC/Boston.
A lot of the rest of the lines have once-per-day service, that runs on old equipment along freight lines. If you want to ride the Empire Builder from Fargo to Minneapolis, your only option is to get up at 2 o'clock in the morning to catch the one train of the day, and if that train had to wait for a freight train (which has priority) along it's previous 2 day journey from Seattle, it wouldn't be unusual for it be delayed until 3 or 5am.
Since the US doesn't invest in passenger rail outside the NEC, it becomes less and less viable for anyone to actually use it.
Anecdotally, I've used the Empire Builder for two trips this year, and both times every train was completely booked (on a weekday, no less). There is demand for these trains, which I suspect would be even higher if Amtrak ran faster, more frequent, and more consistently.
The fact that it is serving both these purposes is kind of a determent to both. It runs to infrequently (and at weird hours) to serve as a nice interurban, and it gets too overbooked to serve a tourist route. To fix this the state of Washington (and Minnesota) need to operate more frequent interurbans that only services the end portions of the route (like 4 trains a day at least), and then Amtrak could operate the whole Empire builder in a more sane manner.
This also means that there are very cheap fares on those trains within Vermont, and I've sometimes noticed that it's actually cheaper to buy a ticket from DC to a station in Vermont than to buy one to New Haven.
The largest cities not served by Amtrak are Phoenix (although it is indirectly served via Maricopa), San Francisco (though indirectly served via Oakland), Las Vegas, Columbus, Tulsa, Honolulu, and oh look we're out of 1M+ MSAs.
LA is pretty well covered overall though, at least by West Coast standards. The biggest hole in the train network is long beach, but there's a lot of transit development happening in that area nowadays.
Most employees behave as if they never sleep: extremely confused and depressed, unable to form complete sentences. That’s not an exaggeration. I sympathize deeply but it also ruined my trip.
P.s. for the Bay Area crowd, I do recommend the Tahoe route (zephyr) bc it’s more scenic than the purported most scenic parts of Amtrak. And close enough for a day trip.
Not making any judgements, but just for comparison, here is a Japan train explorer: https://roote.ekispert.net/rmap/fullscreen.
For context, Japan is roughly the size of California.
Pretty straightforward route. 11 hours of travel and 172$ per seat in couch vagon. Considering that I wanted to take my whole family to this trip it just doesn't make sense to go by train. Car is going to be faster and cheaper even considering parking fees in Boston.
Sometimes going by train is just more pleasant. Kids don't need to be strapped into carseats, repeatedly asking "are we there yet?" You can go to the bathroom or stretch your legs any time. You can do other things, such as enjoy the scenery or read a book. Also, last time I checked, trains are lot safer than cars. There is no traffic. Finally, you don't have to drive!
If you like, you might consider soft factors in addition to the fare :)
I think the part that's missing is good urban transit systems. A long distance train loses most of its advantages if you have to hire a car at the end of it.
China also has a massive construction bubble that the government keeps propping up in order to delay the inevitable correction. As a result they overbuild a lot of infrastructure, including passenger rail, well beyond the point of diminishing returns.
But they have high speed rail across the sparsely populated interior as well - not as dense as the network on the coast, but it's there and it successfully competes with flying. So the sort of network that the west half of China has should be possible in the US.
> they overbuild a lot of infrastructure, including passenger rail, well beyond the point of diminishing returns.
Maybe. Or maybe they sensibly plan ahead and build infrastructure that will be needed in the near future. Time will tell.
If they were making sensible plans for future population growth in Xinjiang, they wouldn’t be committing genocide there.
Even so, a flight from Chicago to San Francisco is a little over 4 hours in the air. A train takes 2 days. There is no comparison.
Curious to hear about thoughts from other young families. I feel like it would be such a nice adventure to have together.
17 hour train ride.
Having done that drive a few times, it's closer to 14 hours in practice, taking into account pit stops.
While on the train you can travel in basically first class comfort. Read a book. Get WiFi via a hotspot or just pre-download content. Bring cards or something to play games with a travel companion or a portable gaming device like a Switch. The train sounds p great honestly.
17 hours of napping and relaxing, don't have to deal with parking at your destination, and can hit the ground running.
It is all a question of perspective.
https://neo-trans.blog/2022/08/05/campaign-arrives-to-expand...
There was a comfortably scheduled night Helsinki to Moscow train which covered 950km, made possible by the fact that Moscow-SPb rail line was built almost a straight line and also quite quick. The terrain between NYC and Chicago is rugged so no such path to be expected. Maybe the Chinese would be able to build a 1000 km elevated track between those two cities and make it all work, though they will prefer to make it an 5h daytime ride and not a nighttrain...
The train isn't too rugged for them to run 3 trains per day instead of 1, running at different times, so you can choose the time you leave a given station.
My last one from Rochester to NYC (on the Chicago-NYC Lake Shore Limited) was 19 hours late. They're often delayed by freight trains they share the rails with.