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Comment by farialima | Hacker News Reader

- it’s 3 days not 5 (e.g leaving NYC Wednesday morning arriving SF Saturday evening)

- the internet connection is excellent (even in most tunnels) so you can work, have video meetings, etc, not to mention play chess online

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That's 4 days traveling. Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday. Arriving in the evening doesn't mean you didn't spend that day traveling.

Let’s be realistic. I love long distance train journeys, but mainly for recreation. Being on a train for 3-5 days is pretty exhausting no matter how comfortable. I’ve done the 30 day Amtrak pass before and it was fantastic but I wouldn’t be looking forward to that if it was a work trip where I want to fly in and then get back to my family as fast as possible. There’s no way that can compare to a 5-6 hour flight+2 hours at the airport.

I did this once from Seattle. It was a good experience, but the internet connection was nonexistent along large parts of the route.

Also one way cost like $1,200.

If you're not traveling between those specific destinations it can take far, far longer. Amtrak is a joke.

Amtrak is decent on very specific routes and still an absolute joke to anyone who has used trains in Europe, Japan, Taiwan, etc, and no personal experience but I'd imagine China too. My friend takes the Amtrak route up and down the Pacific coast precisely because she's stuck on a train for days and can't be disturbed while doing boring paperwork as an anti-procrastination strategy. Although the observation cars do have great views.

People who have used trains in Japan or Taiwan - islands have never used a train that is anything like Amtrak does and so have no comparison. Even in Europe long distance cross border rail is in most cases pretty bad as well.

However if you only compare the shorter distance rail in those places to what the US has some of the other trains are actually pretty good. Even then though Chicago's trains are a better comparison than anything Amtrak offers

I mean what do you consider long-distance? Inter-railing is a time honoured tradition for European Youth, and many of my generation alone would be very familiar with economy sleepers from e.g. Krakow to Prague or Budapest.

The ICE trains in particular are magnificent, and a worthy alternative to air travel.

https://int.bahn.de/en/trains/long-distance-trains

In Europe you need to cross a country line.

Yes people do it all the time in Europe. It mostly works. However if you follow the space at all you will see a lot of stories about things going wrong - far more than there should be. Amtrak is mostly fine in the US, but there are still far more problems than there should be.

- the internet connection is excellent

I mean, maybe you had a different experience. In my experience in the northeast , the internet service is about as reliable and consistent as the trains themselves (ie not consistent, garbage fire)

I was rather disappointed by the internet connection on the Cascades line (going Seattle --> Portland and back). As far as I could tell, they use T-Mobile for backhaul. Who are headquartered in Seattle. Yet the connection barely seemed to work for about half of the journey

boo, it's in the middle of no where along part of the route. Tmobile coverage is mainly in urban areas and along free ways no matter what slingblade tells you on the tv commercial. I don't know if you'd get any coverage on parts of that route other than wired.

Just like how sometimes when you're flying over the rockies or into canada you just don't get internets. There's still middles of no where out there. Often not very far from the freeway.

Even tooling through places like Olympia it seemed to fizzle out

Railroads are a great place to run fiber lines, so it wouldn't be hard to set up some towers.

Also starlink.

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