[tptacek]

1) Totally fair: average speed from DC to BOS is half of Berlin-Hamburg.

2) That's not my Acela experience at all; last time I took it (a few years ago) it was no more involved than boarding a Metra train in Chicago.

3) Totally fair.

I guess this is just knee-jerkism on my part. The topic comes up on HN every once in awhile about how backwards the US is w/r/t/ rail transport, and while you could still make a lot of strides on DC-BOS, there are good reasons why most of the country doesn't have rail connectivity. But that wasn't what was being argued here.

[idlewords]

I wonder if my experience with 2) was somehow special to Penn Station and Boston.