If I could travel by train domestically in the USA as is common in Europe, I would prefer it.
It's a real shame that the USA has yet to develop decent passenger trains.
It's a real shame that the USA has yet to develop decent passenger trains.
European rail travel is mostly small-town-to-city (for commuting) and city-to-city, mostly when the cities aren't that far apart (a few hours at most).
International travel in Europe is much less common than interstate travel in the US, mostly because of the language and culture barriers, so most trips people take are in the same country. Our countries are far smaller, and the major cities of each country are far close to each other than the major cities in the US, so trains make sense.
Trains in Europe mostly replace cars, NOT planes. It's just that a lot more travel here can be done by car/train in a reasonable time.
To an average European, SFO to LAX by train would be just about bearable, depending on country and train speed. Anything much farther than that would probably be a flight.
Train travel works well within some countries (a decade ago, I took a train from Rome to Venice and back for a 1 day conference - driving would have been around 6 hours each way), but for international travel it's usually not worth it. You are also dealing with different ticketing and scheduling systems, not to mention theres a bunch of big mountains in the middle of Europe meaning it's geographically hard to cross.
Europe is a large place, but my experience in Western Europe is that people absolutely travel by inter-city train between countries when the journey time is 3 hours. More than that and flying starts to be favoured.
Driving isn’t really an option for these journeys because the trains are so much faster than cars. A 2 hour train journey would take 4+ hours by car.
I took a first class trip in Italy recently. Food was fine and it's Italy, but those seats were very comfortable!
Perhaps both regions should look into doubling their rail networks.
The US prioritizes freight on its rail network, the EU prioritizes passenger service.
There is no "rail network" about which the US (through some political process) makes decisions about prioritization.
There is a freight rail network, and there is Amtrak's rails between Boston and DC. That's it. We're not prioritizing freight, the network is owned by freight companies.
Also, with regards to percentages, this is the wrong comparison. The numbers you need (which I could not find) are what percentage of cargo travels to within Nkm of its destination by trail in the USA, where N is the typical value for Europe. We have substantial freight hauling in the US because of long distance journeys. The last Nkm is generally done by truck. In Europe, there is much less long distance freight hauling, and much more hauling that takes place under the Nkm "limit", ergo more is done by truck.
The Biden administration did begin to take steps to enforce the law in this area, but I think it did not get very far and will almost certainly cease in the new administration.
Every train journey is planned in advance, so that each block of rail is reserved for a specific train and only that train. When those reservations are made, Amtrak trains get priority over freight trains. However, in recent decades the average length of the freight trains has increased greatly. This results in trains that are too long to fit on any of the sidings. This means that it is possible for a freight train to be in a place where it cannot pull into a siding and allow an Amtrak train to pass or overtake it. The law simply does not anticipate this scenario, and it cannot force the freight companies (who own most of the track) to extend their sidings to accommodate the larger trains or to change the length of their trains. I believe that the FRA has tried to resolve this for some time, but unsuccessfully. At this point it will take either a big lawsuit or an act of Congress to fix the problem.
It should also be noted that if an Amtrak train is forced to stop and wait on some other train, that this does not delay the Amtrak train. The stop is part of the train’s schedule so while it makes the trip longer it doesn’t make the train late.
On the other hand, an Amtrak train that is _already_ late loses its reservations and therefore could get delayed even more by freight trains. No guarantees though; sometimes they make up time simply because there are no freight trains in the way.
Most of the midwest is empty, same with other states.
You have very dense areas in the east coast, which already leverage a large train network. In the west coast, Oregon and WA already have trains connecting their largest cities (Portland/Seattle/Vancouver).
California has caltrain, and internal city trains. In the USA, for passengers, it makes much more sense to fly than trains, the infrastructure costs and time costs of trains vs planes don't make sense.
>In the USA, for passengers, it makes much more sense to fly than trains
You don't live in the midwest I take it. It makes more sense to drive than to take a flight that passes you through one of the airline hubs for most every trip that is less than 400 miles.
Rail at home:
> Boston to Buffalo: 11h32m
Most of the Midwest has the same functional density as Europe. Indeed, if you overlay a map of France on the Midwest, with Paris centered on Chicago, you'll find that there are cities of comparable sizes at comparable distances.
The Great Empty largely exists only on the plains and the mountainous west, where all but the most ardent fantasists concede that no passenger system is viable. But most of the population in the US lives in or near a city that would have viable high-speed rail destinations!
"You're going to have to rent a car" is a statement about historical US development patterns and political/economic decisions, not any sort of inevitable or immutable state of nature. As such, it is subject to change. It hasn't even been a century since flying around the country was an option (and for many, not even a half century), if you need a reminder that things can and do change ...
There is a separate problem that bus transit in the US is almost invariably horribly laid out, but that has more to do with the US being culturally incapable of planning transit well, and especially the US being incurious about how transit works in places where it does work. Essentially, there's a blind spot (even among transit enthusiasts, annoyingly) that assumes that transit on anything less in scale than Manhattan is infeasible, so transit planning is equated with Manhattanization where it doesn't need to be.
We already did this at least twice during the 20th century, first with invention and production of automobiles, and then again with the combined hit of the interstates and aviation.
There certainly are stretches in the US that aren't worth covering by train, but as you say most people don't live there, and the proportion who do live there is really tiny.
A lot of the time people seem to think the end to end travel need to be viable, and ignore that if the service is regular enough, plenty of pairs of towns along the route will contribute to demand.
The rectangle defined by Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Cleveland and Des Moines is about as densely populated as most of Europe. Ditto for a triangle like that in TX, and another polygon with one vertex in Atlanta.
The east coast train network is not "large" given the population size. It consists of a primary line (Amtrak), and very little else given the population living with (say) 200 miles of that line.
Ditto Caltrain, which compared to European service for similarly populated areas is incredibly limited. The line between Portland and Vancouver may yet see the sort of service you'd expect on that route if you were European, but it does not have it yet. The trains are relatively infrequent, and not very fast. Let's not talk about the customs/border situation either.