[stoic]

Further anecdata: Amtrak is a joke in Texas.

Amtrak from Dallas to Austin is a 6h22 trip for $29 (value fare), departing only once per day (11:50am) and taking about 2 hours to reach Fort Worth, a 30-minute drive.

By contrast, there are 11 Greyhound buses from Dallas to Austin per day, from $13-19, and the ride is never longer than 3h40 (mostly 3h to 3h10). There are usually 3-4 Megabuses in each direction per day as well, for around $12 for an unreserved seat.

[jccooper]

Heck, they won't even quote you for Houston-Dallas. This is an improvement: they used to show a ridiculous two-day route connecting through San Antonio.

Amtrak in Texas (and most of the rest of the country outside the NW corridor) is set up as a cross-country sightseeing/nostalgia tour service. Sunset Limited (New Orleans to LA) runs three times a week. It's not meant for actual, you know, transportation. Really, they ought to fully embrace that and operate more like a cruise ship with day stops for sightseeing. An American version of a Rhine cruise.

Probably this is because they can't compete on either price or time with busses, planes, or cars. I think there's many city pairs in the country where center-to-center rail service at a price and speed between bus and air would work well, but I doubt that can be achieved on the freight rail network.

[blahedo]

I've done a lot of cross-country train trips, and in addition to NE corridor, travel radiating to/from Chicago and within about 500 miles is generally pretty transport-oriented (not just vacationing). And even in a lot of the other places, there are many of the more rural parts of the country where Amtrak is much more accessible than the nearest airport, and people there use it accordingly.

[ghaff]

>(and most of the rest of the country outside the NW corridor)

I assume you meant NE corridor although I understand that Seattle to Portland by train works reasonably well. Even on the NE corridor it's really segments. Boston-NYC and NYC-Washington DC work well. Boston to DC really takes too long although I've done it.

There are some other segments here and there but even when they seem like a good way to get from A to B (like Raleigh to Charlotte), in my experience it's not heavily utilized.