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Comment by JumpCrisscross | Hacker News Reader

I can't wait for the return of private train cars. Imagine the casinos hitching up private cars to the Brightline, thereby improving their experience while subsidising everyone else.

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That's highly unlikely. High speed rail doesn't work like old school rail used to - you have full electric trainsets where all the cars are tightly coupled together (often even sharing bogies) so coupling/decoupling is only possible in a maintenance yard. Also, depending on the model, often all or at least many of the cars are also powered and provide distributed traction.

Having branded luxury cars would be he fairly easy and could easily be a hit; private cars are unlikely to be feasible with your regular high speed electric multiple units.

most EMUs have standard couplers at the end of the trainset, the problem is more so that the rail-wheel and bogie suspension dynamics of high speed cars are highly engineered and derailments at 300km/h are catastrophic

The next thing i heard of are deutsche nahns concept of two person cabins.

A train set with a remodelable VIP car could be built.

Private train cars never went away, as far as I'm aware. Amtrak has (always?) allowed folks to couple private cars to the end of their trains (for an eye-watering price, of course).

My understanding is that while they generally have, and there may be some form of legal requirement that they provide service to private cars, in the last six years or so Amtrak has been increasingly restrictive, with some suggesting that they are trying to make private cars practically infeasible to use. There seems to have been a battle between Amtrak and private car owners that started in 2018 [1], and it's unclear if there has been any resolution to that.

[1]: https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews/news-wire/28-amtrak-...

A private train car to vegas would be amazing actually. Especially if on the inside they went with an old-fashioned interior design with lots of oak paneling.

Reminds me of Atlas Shrugged.

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