[sokoloff]

When considering whether to run 4 or 20 round trips per day, it seems like the fundamental economics ought to come into play at some point. Otherwise, you eventually run out of other people’s money.

As a reference, there are only 7 Acela trains per day (or at least on Monday 4/25) from Boston to New York, two cities with substantially higher population and apparent demand (as evidenced by the 59 non-stop flights from BOS to any of the NYC-3 airports on Monday 4/25)

[Macha]

If you can only fill 7 trains per day between cities with metro areas of 5 million and 20 million, there is something else wrong with your network beyond just how much people like to take trains or not.

We manage to do that between a town of 20,000 and a city of 1 million for comparison. Or if you feel commuter routes are different enough to not count, a city of 60,000 and a city of 1 million with similar travel time as google maps quotes me for Boston to New York.

[iso1210]

It's crazy, there's currenlty only 1,000 seats an hour between Lonodn (10m) and Manchester (3m), having dropped from 3tph for covid. My experience recently is those trains are taking at least 600 people per hour now.

In my experience over the last few weeks there's barely been an empty seat.

I took the London-Paris train last week, absolutely rammed, there's 13x 900 seat trains a day at the moment, and that has all the nonsense of eurostar (airport style security, passport checks etc).

[sokoloff]

Note that none of those are “full”. The most crowded of those 7 Acelas is showing ~50% full with the others split between the <20% and ~40% categories.

And this is on the Northeast Acela, the crown jewel of the Amtrak network and between two cities with generally functioning public transit once you arrive. Most US city-pairs would be worse.

[ghaff]

There are a lot of factors.

- There are about double that number of trains if you count the Regional (which you should) so ~hourly trains.

- A lot of people still fly. Especially if you live in Boston proper, flying means you can easily make a morning meeting without flying down the night before (which people with families etc. may prefer not to do)

- Especially if you're south/west of Boston or in New York's Connecticut suburbs, it's probably cheaper/faster to just drive, something I really try to avoid when it comes to NYC but nonetheless for me taking Amtrak actually involves me driving for an hour in the wrong direction/

[bombcar]

I suspect LA-San Diego might be better (Pacific Surfliner is an Amtrak cooperative with the LOSSAN corridor). Those trains end up really full (though off-peak ones are comfortable; the rush hour trains are standing-room only).

The only way to get consistent usage is to commuter rail; commuters travel five times a day in both directions vs "travelers/vacationers" which may travel once a month or less.

[ghaff]

It's also not really correct. That's just the Acela. There are about the same number of regional trains (which are almost as fast; I generally don't even take the Acela unless someone else is paying). For people to the south of the Boston metro, there's also the option of taking Metro North from New Haven.

The Northeast Corridor service is very popular. In fact, I believe Amtrak has plans to expand it given that it's pretty much the only place in the country Amtrak doesn't lose money.

[bombcar]

It can be a lot easier to fill a train if scheduled right between a 20k city and a 1 million one - as the people in the 20k have real reasons to not live in the 1m and still commute there. But if you're looking at 5m vs 20m the "city" experience will be similar so ... why not move to the city you work in?

[Macha]

It's almost like I gave a second example that's not a commuter town for this exact reason.

[iso1210]

People travel for reasons other than commuting.

[bombcar]

Certainly, but if you look at the percentages, the easiest way to get to consistent usage is to use commuter. "Business" can be considered as a superset of commuter, short irregular business trips, but that's harder to build an entire line on (it can certainly be an upgrade to an existing line).

The second easiest is feeder - for example if the line between cities includes the airport, etc.

[saalweachter]

It also becomes tricky because adding more trains (or more train cars) at different times does different things.

A train every hour is convenient for some purposes, but for others you just want a bunch of trains early in the morning and later in the evening.

[bombcar]

For commuter rail inside a city it's nice to know "the trains run every X minutes so I can always get one" - between cities it can be more clumped around commuter times.

You also run into trainset issues where you want to run 5 trains in one direction and 5 back in the evening, which will require 5 trainsets, but if you run them back and forth you could do more trips with less trainsets, but some would be running off-peak (and in the worst case, nearly empty, but getting into position).

[hedora]

Those two stations are 215 miles apart by car, and the trip takes 4 hours by train. The train is only averaging 53mph.

I don't think its popularity is a reasonable predictor of demand for a modern train that would be 3-4 times faster.

I'd wager if all the other competitors were also running with tech typical of the 1920's, the train would be more popular.

[bombcar]

At some point even if your train is infinitely fast, you can't get above a certain average speed, dependent on the distance between stations.

Fun fact: technically the boring large Pacific Surfliner trains could be "high speed rail" since they could get to 120 MPH through Camp Pendleton if the line had PTC and was signaled correctly. As it is hits 80-90 through there, but it soon has to slow down for a stop.

To do high-speed rail right you basically need four tracks - a slower local service that stops at every stop, and a faster high-speed express service that only stops rarely.

[iso1210]

Manchester-London is 180 miles and takes 2h20, which isn't great, certainly not high speed, but that's being rectified. Pre covid it was 3 trains an hour for the majority of the day.