[bane]

It's hard to describe to the rest of the world how uncomfortable passenger rail in the US is to people not from the US. It's not "European levels but less availability". I've thought a lot about it and the best analogy I can come to is that if "German Autobahn" is the pinnacle of road engineering...and "zero roads whatsoever" is the bottom of road engineering...US passenger rail is closer to "unpaved and maybe gravel road" level of road engineering.

I've personally spent hundreds of hours on U.S. Amtrak trains in my youth. Truly, there is no equivalent in the US to the Shinkansen or even the Korean KTX or the French TGV. The Accela is a shadow of it's global peers. At it's absolute best, the American passenger rail system is the difference between being show via cannon to your destination and....maybe cargo train elsewhere. If the Shinkansen is something that fell out of a future alternate reality, the American rail system is a big box road truck, with a flat tire driving on an unpaved mountain pass with regular rock falls.

We once took a train from Rome to Florence, we sat across from a lovely elderly Scottish couple who thought the entire ride was entirely normal. We thought (this is before experiencing the magic future that is the Shinkanesen), that it was the most civilized travel experience we had ever encountered. We had a nice chat, a brief snack, and then were off to see the glories of the Renaissance.

My wife is Korean, but immigrated to the US before the KTX was a well known system. I dream of a future world where the entire planet has at least some level of passenger dedicated rail.

The cargo-first ownership policy is among the stupidest passenger rail policies I've ever encountered anywhere on the planet outside of heavy coal mining regions.