[mkempe]

Great to have access to that information.

- Empire Builder near Minneapolis: 10h late.

- Empire Builder near Kalispell: 6h late.

Passenger train service in America needs to be returned to the private sector, without any interference by Congress. [added] Or you can watch the government fuck-up and quickly cast blame on the private sector. Private passenger services would have different, satisfying contracts with the rail owners; this is what companies do in the private sector some people apparently hate so much. There was a time when privately operated railroads were reliable in this country.

Freight currently has deleterious right of way because this is what bureaucrats have agreed to. Imagine these bureaucrats did something similar on the highways you all love so much, making passenger vehicles wait on the side to let trucks move a little faster.

[michaelleslie]

Ahh, the classic, "We've defunded and gutted this government program. Look! Government doesn't work!" that the American right traffics in.

The private sector is the reason for these delays.

http://blog.amtrak.com/2015/02/message-amtrak-regarding-time...

[kevin_thibedeau]

Except that Amtrack is consistently late on the NEC and other regional lines that they have priority on. Really annoying when you are on a train waiting to pull out of a station and can't go because a late Amtrack has priority.

[michaelleslie]

That's a good point.

I know Penn is a major bottleneck (we have Christie to thank for that after killing ARC), and there's the added problem of delays conflicting with Metro North/NJT schedules.

We need infrastructure investment in dense corridors if we're to get anywhere remotely near European or Asian standards.

[rayiner]

It's not clear to me we even have "dense corridors" like in Europe. I was in Munich, and driving in from the airport what struck me is that the city just ends. The city is 1.5 million people. Then there is another million or so people in the metro area, and 30 minutes outside of downtown its farms. Contrast Philadelphia, which is at the center of the U.S. "northeast megalopolis." It's also 1.5 million people, but there are another 4.5 million people in the surrounding sprawl. You can go an hour outside Philly in almost any direction and still be in suburban sprawl. That totally changes the transit equation. You build high-speed rail to Munich, and you're serving more than half the population of the metro area. You build high-speed rail to Philly, and you serve just a quarter of the population (while the other three quarters is stuck paying for something they have to drive to get to anyway).

This is true at multiple levels of scale. Compare Ulm, Germany to Richmond, VA. Both are about 100-200k people. Aside from a few appendages, you hit farms 2-3 miles outside Ulm in most directions. Richmond, by contrast, is surrounded for 8-10 miles in all directions by suburbs, which have another million people. When it comes to voting for things like transit or train service, the people in the city that might benefit from it are totally outnumbered by all the people in the suburbs who can't.

[bobthepanda]

Acela already exists. It's not very high speed at all, it's consistently higher priced than other competing options like planes or buses, yet it manages to fill seats to the brim. Even at its slower speed, it manages to be preferable to slogging it to an airport, dealing with the security theater, either the mad rush to the plane or the endless waiting, and then doing the whole process in reverse once you land at your destination.

In fact, high speed rail could also be transformative for international travel; airlines could bundle a high speed rail ticket with a much cheaper transatlantic flight from Philly, as opposed to paying out the nose for a flight out of EWR or JFK.

[rayiner]

Acela is a great example of why high speed rail in the U.S. is a stupid idea. It's primarily used by business travelers between Boston and DC (and points in-between). Even if Amtrak didn't have to support money-losing long distance routes, Amtrak could not operate Acela without Congress footing the bill for capital expenditures. (Acela runs an operating profit, but that's ignoring the fact that Congress pays for the tracks and trains.) Why the heck should the other 80% of the country pay tax money for a service that's only useful to well-off travelers in the northeast?

[alexhutcheson]

Richmond is a great example of the problem. I actually took an Amtrak train to Richmond last weekend, and I was struck by how annoying it is to be there for even a short period of time without a car. I stayed in a hotel downtown that had a couple restaurants within walking distance, but for everything else I ended up taking Ubers. Amenities like gyms, shops, and even pharmacies are spread out enough that almost everyone drives everywhere, even in the neighborhoods within the urban core.

This is probably a major factor that makes Amtrak less preferable than driving even when it’s available - once you get to almost any place in the US, you’d prefer to have your car. Amtrak stations also don’t generally have convenient car rental locations with extended hours like airports do, so that’s not even an option to deal with it.

[harryh]

I think your observation is correct but there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem here.

Does Europe have more and better trains because it has denser cities or does it have denser cities because it has more and better trains?

Probably a little bit of both.

[samatman]

A tiny amount of both and a whole heaping scoop of most places being older than both cars and trains.

[ams6110]

I think this is a good observation. The USA is just too spread out for rail travel to really work well. Most European countries are no bigger than a medium sized US state, and the cities are denser and smaller than American cities. It's easier to run a rail route between two European cities and realistically serve most of the people in those cities. And the cities aren't so far apart that flying becomes a really time-saving option.

[pm24601]

> The USA is just too spread out for rail travel to really work well

Not true.

Chicago to Detroit: 282 miles (4.5h via car) 5hours via train TODAY. (It should really be 2 hours with a train going ~180mph)

Chicago to St. Louis 311 miles (5h via car) 5.5 hours via train (With proper investment: 2.2 hours via HSR train)

Sure end to end may be long; but even then not as long as most people realize.

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/12/26/china-opens-worlds-longe...

> China launched services Wednesday on the world’s longest high-speed rail route, linking the nation’s capital in Beijing all the way to the country’s southeastern hub of Guangzhou.

> Averaging speeds of up to 186 m.p.h. (300 km/h), the 1,425-mile (2,293 km) route now takes eight hours to complete;

New York to Los Angeles : 2775 miles. Or double the above line. 16 HOURS via High-Speed train. 16 HOURS.

As a point of reference flight time is 6 hours. (Not counting being at the airport 2 hours early, etc.) - so lets just say ~9 hours for a plane. So a plane is twice as fast; but with significantly less capacity.

[mkempe]

You are deeply wrong and need to look at proper maps.

Europe is 33% larger than the USA (contiguous 48).

[added] Note sure why this fact would be down-voted. We don't include Greenland or e.g. French Polynesian dependencies in the European total. Sweden is slightly larger than California, with 1/4 the population. Et caetera. Really, you should look at maps, population facts, as well as the extent and quality of railroads.

And quit pretending that there is no rail connection across Europe. [1] America is failing when it comes to 21st century pubic transportation. Angrily lagging behind European, Japanese [2], or Chinese [3] railroads is not a healthy path.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_Europe

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-speed_rail_in_China

[kimdotcom]

US cuts through our city-centers with interstate. Other countries do not do this.

[JumpCrisscross]

> We need infrastructure investment

I don’t see why we need to subsidise passenger rail. Autonomous helis and passenger planes seem like a better bet.

[bobthepanda]

Capacity. Rail is pretty much unbeatable in terms of pure people per hour. The Tokaido Shinkansen carried 143M people in 2012; the busiest air route in the world, Seoul-Jeju, carried 11 million people in 2015.

From the (admittedly not great) source of CAHSR:

> Providing the equivalent new capacity on the state’s highways and airports would cost more than double the investment required to develop a high-speed rail system between San Francisco and Los Angeles. If it was even possible, that would mean building 4,300 new highway lane miles, 115 additional airport gates, and four new airport runways at an estimated cost of $158 billion. [...] Caltrans estimates operations and maintenance costs on those new highway lanes at $132.8 billion for over 50 years.

[icebraining]

Planes are terribly polluting, and unlike trains, there's no expectation that can be changed anytime soon. If you properly accounted for that externality, trains might be profitable after all.

[gok]

They not only have priority, they often own the tracks.

[rayiner]

Amtrak continues to require government support to cover its operating expenses, while Deutsche Bahn,[1] manages to turn an operating profit. So how is Amtrak "defunded?"

[1] Deutsche Bahn is owned by the German government, but unlike Amtrak is operated as a private company.

[vertex-four]

The issue isn’t who runs it, it’s that the trains don’t have tracks to reasonably run on. Elsewhere, when passenger trains are delayed, every effort is made to get them back on time again - in America, they’re left for hours in a siding while freight trains go by.

[rayiner]

The northeast regional trains are routinely 30-50 minutes late, and Amtrak owns those tracks and has priority on them.

[mattl]

At least pieces of those lines are MetroNorth. They can slow things down out of NYC towards Boston.

[pm24601]

That is to be expected with underinvestment.

[JKCalhoun]

Yep, freight has right of way.

[jessaustin]

Rightly so. Rail freight is important in USA, while rail travel is not. We already have too many semi trucks on the roads; it would be foolish to force more freight onto the highways to pander to some dream about rail travel.

[ghaff]

I wouldn't worry too much about that. My understanding is that rail freight is about 10% the cost of trucking it.

[gok]

No. Legally, Amtrak always has priority over freight. There are cases where host railroads are badly behaved but more often the problem is that Amtrak is poorly operated.

[kennydude]

Hahaha. Have you seen how it works in England? Yet again the East Coast route has returned to public hands because the private operator felt "it wasn't profitable enough"

[Fukkaudeku]

LNER (the public operator that replaced it) is pretty good, too; my train from King's Cross to Edinburgh was only 6 minutes late to arrive (very little jitter for a 4.5hr service) and the service onboard was great too.

[jccalhoun]

Apparently that track is undergoing work https://www.amtrak.com/alert/empire-builder-track-work-delay... I can't imagine that a private company would bother running a passenger route from chicago to the pacific northwest.

[mercutio2]

Privately operated passenger railroads were (somewhat) more reliable, but not profitable, which is why Amtrak exists.

[mkempe]

Have you inquired into why they became unprofitable? Have you considered the massive government investments into and subsidies for the two other modes of transportation following WW II?

[AnimalMuppet]

I don't think they were ever profitable. I think they became unbearably more unprofitable after WWII, but I think they were unprofitable before that.

And, when you talk about government investments into the two other modes of transportation, I presume you mean air and highways. You forgot waterways - also created/improved with government investment.

[compuguy]

Passenger trains in the US died off in the late 1960s because of automobiles and the Interstate Highway System (don't forget airplanes).