Wait until you find out how fast passenger jets are.
Used to be, decades ago, just show up and go to the plane like it was a bus. Some dude would take your luggage and throw it into the cargo hold.
You'd be boarded and gone in 15.
When landed, they'd open then cargo hold and hand out luggage.
I had this experience in a transfer to a prop plane in Mexico. Fast, easy, quick.
What's most stupid about security for rail passengers is that the original fear from 9/11 doesn't even apply - you can't hijack a train and crash it into a skyscraper!
London had terrorist attacks from the IRA long before 9/11, including attacks on the transport network. There were 13 in 1991, of which 4 were on trains or at stations.
The new delays are for the passport checks. What used to be ~10 seconds for each EU citizen — is the passport/ID card valid and does the face match? — is now 60+ seconds for British people entering the EU, as the official must check they haven't stayed more than 90 days in the last 180 etc.
Hint when they ran a BART feeder to SFO the first thing the TSA did was start patrolling BART with drug dogs and arresting people for having pot.
To go back to the first example, Seattle to Chicago is a 4 hour (scheduled, which already includes taxi time at both ends and a buffer for late departures) plane ride. Even a TGV running continuously at top speed (320km/h), with no stops, would take 8.5 hours to complete the same journey. Wikipedia tells me that the fastest start-to-end scheduled speed of a TGV is only 280 km/h, which would take over 10 hours.
You can get from London to Paris by train in less time than it takes to go from Manhattan to boarding a plane at JFK.
It's BS. In existing cities, train stations are just as hard to build in the city center as airports -- neither happens. You do not in fact need to get to airports hours in advance, and security theater in airports is still excruciating, but you can get PreCheck or Clear and cut the time way down. There is some time advantage to boarding trains, but it's on the order of 20-40 minutes, not hours.
Paris and London are only 213 miles apart! It's about 2/3rds the distance that SF is from LA, much less say SF to Seattle or NYC to Chicago. Rail travel works great in Europe because distances are small, density is high, and the cities grew up centered around rail infrastructure.
only in countries where they neglected building train stations before the cities grew to todays sizes. but even then it's not true. US cities are less dense, so it should be easier to find space. train stations are also much much smaller than airports and trains don't make as much noise as airplanes. there are many more reasons not to build airports in the middle of a city, none of which apply to trains.
the main problem for trains is finding a route for the track into the city. that can be and is solved with tunnels though. or the chinese approach where the high speed trainstations are sometimes built away from the center of the city and instead the center is connected by a dense network of subway lines. a process that started less than 20 years ago but now puts many chinese cities at the top of the list of the largest subway networks in the world.
If you want to build a transit hub outside the city center and link it via subway, that's no easier or more convenient for a train station than for an airport.
London Bridge, a major station, was rebuilt.
Euston Station has a planned large expansion.
It's impossible to build an airport in a city centre.
Just driving to the airport in Denver is nearly an hour for most of the city. It'll take a half hour to get from Uptown Dallas or Frisco or Saginaw to DFW. It's like a half hour to get from Orlando International to any of the Disney resorts. About 20 minutes from downtown KC to MCI. All of this is without any time parking or going through security and assuming traffic doesn't get bad.
Dallas has a train station downtown. Same with Fort Worth. Kansas City Union Station is downtown. Manhattan has several train stations. A lot of cities have a big train station downtown, as many cities were built around the train station. A decently sized train station uses considerably less space than a busy airport.
Which of these seem easier for the people in the city to actually get to and use?
Dallas Union Station: https://maps.app.goo.gl/aMwyguz98hptWPNo6
DFW Airport: https://maps.app.goo.gl/5iUpUoqvUkhJr1D98
Penn Station: https://maps.app.goo.gl/JysFmwFhc3cwqHLC6
JFK Airport: https://maps.app.goo.gl/MHWe4UM4wCk9iL1F7
Don't get me wrong, I agree even door to door air travel will usually be faster when talking about the kinds of distances a lot of US travelers go at and often people act like a train is 0 minutes of time getting to/from the station, but arguing the whole travel time getting to/from the airport and dealing with more security is only 20 minutes is a massive stretch for a ton of Americans. Most people should budget probably an hour before their scheduled boarding time to deal with the about half hour drive, the time navigating the airport, and the time dealing with security. Plus add another half hour after landing to actually get someplace interesting.
My point is if you have a substantial sized city that does not already have a large train station in its center, you aren't building a train station in its center, in the same way that if your city doesn't have an airport that you've built up around, you aren't going to build it. We're all at the mercy of history here, unless you're going to try to build a new planned community where there currently is only light population.
LAX, sure, it is mostly surrounded by the city on three sides, but the sprawl there means the vast majority of the city sees 30+min traffic. Meanwhile Union Station there is right downtown and far more central.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/iKfLwgvCpapoCA6R8
It's incredible how your first two examples are such massive swings and misses at naming cities which have airports more convenient for their city than their train stations. In both the train station is more central to the actual city with a lot of people having a shorter walk to the station than most would have as a drive to the airport. About the first city in that list where the airport is actually more conveniently located is Las Vegas but largely because Amtrack just doesn't serve Vegas by train at all. Sounds like you didn't bother actually researching the list at all and just put down some cities that came to mind. Did you bother actually looking where the train stations were in comparison to the airport?
Another example, New Orleans. It is a half hour drive to/from the French Quarter. It is like a half hour walk from the train station to the French Quarter. Assuming the train and the plane arrived at the same time one could walk there from the train station before you even left the parking lot of the rental car agency.
> My point is if you have a substantial sized city that does not already have a large train station in its center
Just continuing to ignore most historic US cites (and the vast majority of the large ones) do have train stations in the middle of the city
> in the same way that if your city doesn't have an airport that you've built up around, you aren't going to build it
Just continuing to ignore the massive difference in land use requirements for even a medium airport compared to a train station. Just look at those Maps links I shared earlier. Look at how much space Penn Station in Manhattan uses. Think we can build an airport like JFK or even La Guardia in that same footprint? How would they even take off/land? Its way easier for a city to build a train station in its core than to put a whole airport with multiple runways and taxiways and tons of hangars large enough to hold a 737. It's incredible you think they're on the same level of scale to build in terms of land use.
Like, this is pure fantasy. It's just people who have some kind of weird identity built up out of "liking trains" ignoring the actual world.
I said, "there's about a 20-40 minute advantage to train stations" and you're like trying to go to bat for the idea that an intracity commuter station which is 12 minutes from the airport somehow disproves that.