Everywhere except the eastern seaboard from roughly DC north, we really don't - we have a freight rail system that occasionally hosts passenger trains, too.
It's super annoying. I hate to fly - well, that's not true; I hate the pervasive unpleasantness and inconvenience of US commercial air travel - and find trains much more congenial, but e.g. two days to get from where I live to where I grew up, plus two more days to get back, is more travel time than I can afford.
Unfortunately, while we have an activist billionaire interested in trying to improve this situation, he appears to prefer vacuum-tube moonshots, starting in the country's best-served and most infrastructurally complex transit market, to doing anything useful right now. So it goes.
There are a couple of routes across the country, stopping roughly once per state if that. As you mentioned, it's freight with a few passenger trains sharing the tracks.
In addition to the northeast region (DC, Philly, NYC, Boston) you can do pretty well in Chicago. It's the hub of all of those routes except for the one on the US/Mexico border.
Someone in the comments mentioned that Amtrak's sleeper train travels daytime on the SF to LA stint and the terminals are some way away from the city. So the travel by night advantage is gone.
Amtrak's sleeper cars are also quite expensive when I last looked at it as an option for getting from Colorado to San Francisco. The price compared to a seat on the train was 2..3x or more (but it includes food).
In the case of San Francisco it's a bit unfair to knock Amtrak for the location of the terminal, because it's not their fault, it's the fault of geography. San Francisco sits at the tip of a peninsula; for a train to stop in SF -- actually in SF and not Oakland or San Jose -- and also continue on to other locations would require the train to come up the peninsula, make its San Francisco stop, then turn around and go back down the peninsula in order to continue north (up the east side of the Bay) or south to other destinations.
Since that would be wasteful, Amtrak doesn't do it; instead they stop in San Jose (where you can switch to Caltrain to run up the peninsula into SF) and Oakland (where you can hop on BART or a ferry to cross the Bay into SF).
Engineering can easily trump Geography in this case: you could just tunnel under the Golden Gate and keep going north. This would be a utterly trivial compared to something like the Seikan Tunnel[1].
Just to be clear: not knocking Amtrak here. They're virtually budget-less, for the most part disallowed from owning or even maintaining their own infrastructure, so building new infrastructure would be completely beyond the Pale. Not knocking Amtrak at all -- it's America's collective ability to get its infrastructure act together that is just sad.
I've done that trip (from Denver) after I couldn't bear the thought of another flight on the US air system. It was amazing. Definitely something to think about in winter.
Amtrak is also notorious for being way off on arrival times. Sometimes on the order of a day or longer. That's what happens when you share rails with the freight lines.
I can anecdotally confirm. My wife used to ride the Coast Starlight occasionally. About the fifth time she did, the train was delayed 18 hours. She missed a day of work, and has never ridden it since.
First the Cumberland Valley Railroad in 1839, then George Pullman's more luxurious version in 1865 that was very successful (and from there, it spread to Europe).
That's a very expensive sleeper bus. I took an 8 hour sleeper bus here in New Zealand, including free wifi (which you don't even need, you're sleeping), and it cost me NZ$30 (US$22), including luggage. The same thing in Vietnam cost me about $10, but had the problem that the beds were Vietnamese sized, which for a European wasn't super comfortable.
Sure, they weren't quite as fancy, but it really doesn't matter if you're sleeping, you're asleep. I guess that's the SV markup on everything that's been common in the rest of the world for a long time.
They are super convenient though, pick up and drop off in the middle of the city, and accommodation included. Go to sleep, and you wake up at your destination.
Not sure I'd really want to get where I was going with bed-head and no access to a shower. Other than that, seems like a great idea. Maybe they could work out a cross-promotion or voucher or something that would let people use the showers/locker room at a gym at the destination?
Actually, you wouldn't need any of that at the destination which is Santa Monica pier. You get out in the LA sunshine, walk down the steps to the beach and take a dip in the Pacific. When you're done, rinse off in one of the public beach showers and you'll be dry in a jiffy.
Trying to think if this would work for me. I don't live there and haven't commuted that type of distance regular enough to warrant this type of expense. But, on trips, I tend to stay alert enough to know what's going on regardless of how hard to try to sleep. I tend to try to drive on trips because I don't trust other people driving. They mention wanting autonomous buses to run that route, but I just got my class B CDL and could see myself making this run every weekend as a job which would be cool.
I can't wait until we get autonomous driving and can convert our cars into sleep pods. When you're going across the country at a slow pace, the MPG (or MPGe for electric cars) is also going to be fantastic. You'd still need autonomous recharging for an electric car but apparently that's a solved problem as well.
I haven't used Cabin but a lot of other bus companies (Megabus, Greyhound, Flixbux,...) and trains with sleeping compartments and I imagine the bus to be a lot harder to sleep on (vibrations, breaking, highway noise,...) than a train on fixed tracks.
I've done sleeper buses/trains in south east asia/China and my impression was you actually get used to it fairly easily. The trains were generally better simply because the beds were bigger, but I'd definitely take a "sleeper" bus over a regular sit down bus any time, lying down even if it's a bit cramped is always more comfortable than sitting up.
Have you ever taken a Greyhound? Granted I have a n=1 experience, however a Bus leaving Denver (with a final destination of Dallas) leaved much to be desired.
The route-through method means that you'll stop about once every hour for 15~20 minutes for on-off and snacks/restroom. If you're still somewhat wakeful these stops are just at the twilight phase and you don't get truly restful sleep.
Have you ridden trains in America? I've travelled almost every Amtrak route across the country. In a country that properly maintains its rail infrastructure, Cabin will definitely lose much of its competitive advantage. In America, however...
If only we'd had similar capsules on transcontinental flights — now, that would be something. Otherwise, it is just a bus serving two points, no more exciting than a sleeping car in a train.
Properly sleeping on a flight, on the other hand, feels like luxury.
They do, if you fly first class. You just have to spend several thousand dollars on a ticket. Air New Zealand also offers skycouch (https://www.airnewzealand.co.nz/economy-skycouch), which is similar and cheaper, but really is only worth it if you're traveling with your partner or someone else you feel comfortable spooning for an entire flight.
I've thought about exactly this. Take a cue from Japanese honeycomb hotels and stack them three high in the place of the current seats - you could get equivalent passenger numbers on the plane, while giving people a safe way to stretch out on a long flight. Correctly designed, they would be safe, possibly safer than seats, during an emergency landing, although I can see getting out in a hurry being a major setback for implementation.
The major thing about beds on planes is international safety regulations. Two that I can remember when working for an airline which were introducing beds:
1) The aisle has to be a set width, so you cant stack cabins across the plane.
2) Passengers need to seated and have a seat belt on upon take off and landing.
I think theres another about being able to be belted in if turbulence happens, and be inspectable by attendants. In short, its not as easy as one may think, and its these regulations which complicate things.
In a sleeping capsule, passenger's ranges of movement up/down and forward/backward would inherently be more restricted than in a seat. If necessary, a belt could be provided, although it might not be as comfortable because there's no guarantee on where the person's waist will be when lying down.
The way I picture it is replacing seats as they are currently laid out in e.g. a 747 - 3 seats become stacked capsules -> aisle -> 3/4 seats become stacked capsules -> aisle -> 3 seats become stacked capsule. I don't deny that getting into these capsules would be awkward for people with limited mobility, but I do imagine it is within the realms of possibility while meeting safety regulations.
You're describing something not wholly unakin to sleeping racks aboard a naval vessel, although no doubt much more comfortable. They are more space-efficient than beds, but less so than seats.
In order to stack hammocks or racks three-high, transversely to the fuselage axis, as I suspect you intend, you need both a large amount of vertical space - eight or nine feet, minimum - and roughly a second row's worth of space between racks, in order for people to get into and out of them. The former requirement can be reduced at the cost of squeezing people unpleasantly together and potentially dismaying claustrophobes; the latter requirement can be eliminated at the same cost, plus that of exclusively end-on entry to and exit from the rack, two-thirds of the time via a ladder.
At this point the only customers you've got left are those fit enough to be physically able to use your service, and also unconcerned about being cheek by jowl with at least two strangers - or, if the racks have sidewalls, unconcerned about spending however many hours in a box too small to sit up in. A lounge might alleviate that concern, but what about the others? And where will people put their shoes? (Do you wear yours into bed?)
The alternative is to compromise space efficiency for comfort, and a lot of airlines already do substantially that with A380s and individual sleeper pods.
Why not? And hammocks themselves can be anchored with teared energy absorber like used in via ferrata mountain climbing — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via_ferrata#Energy_absorber . This will make the construction much safer than a single two-point seatbelt.
Going to the restroom might prove to be somewhat challenging, though...
If they're anchored correctly, you'd probably be quite safe in a hammock during an emergency landing, in a relative sense - being suspended would absorb a lot of the energy. But agreed, it does seem pretty silly and probably wouldn't feel very safe!!
This is intended to replace flying + hotel, which does not take less time or money.
Let's say you're in San Francisco and want to be in Santa Monica the whole of the next day. Your options are:
1. Wake up at 3:30am, leave the house at 4, arrive SFO by 5, flight at 6:30, at LAX at 8, get to Santa Monica at 9. You are now completely shattered for the day.
2. Fly at a reasonable hour he night before, and rent a hotel in Santa Monica. You have now spent more money than Cabin.
3. Go to sleep on a bus at a reasonable hour in San Francisco; wake up at a reasonable hour in Santa Monica. You've used less of your waking-time to travel, and have spent less money than getting a hotel.
Convenience, and comfort factor. If I can take a bus, and sleep 10-12h uninterrupted, it's worth the premium.
The alternative is broken travel, lines, TSA harassment, and arriving at your destination a hollow shell of your former self having had the live and soul sucked out of you by incompetence, harmful lighting design and oppressive neon tubes and the brown noise of an aircraft engine sapping your very will to exist.
Not exactly the ritz, but does the job: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=sleeping+train