> The train is still longer, and time is money, we are taught. But certainty has value, too, even if it means at 11:29 p.m. departure.
Unfortunately this is misleading. Outside of the Northeast Acela corridor, there is no certainty in train travel in the U.S..
Although legally passenger trains are now supposed to have right of way over freight trains, in practice that’s just not the case. So a 14.5 hr train journey can easily be delayed by several hours.
So I took a consulting job in a small town in Illinois called Quincy. I couldn't fly there without connecting in St. Louis, but I could take the train from Chicago. It was billed at 6 hours.
It absolutely left on time but had to wait for three freight trains on the way. 9 hours later we got to the "station". One of the other passengers said that their previous trip was cancelled and Amtrak bought everyone bus tickets.
In the Midwest, there are no guarantees with trains other than you'll get there. Eventually.
From talking to people there, it seems like Quincy itself was less destroyed by politics and more just sort of left to rot by families with "important names" in the area who are resistant to change.
No idea which is accurate, that's just a consistent theme from almost every conversation when I was consulting there.
Common pattern in small-ish towns, where there is a core of older wealthy people who are stereotypical NIMBYs running everything, and who want to keep their quaint little town as it is. Problem is that forces all the young people to move away to find opportunity, and then 50 years later the town is dying.
Yeah if I can add. The lack of anything for someone 18-24 years old there was kind of startling. There is zero incentive for youth to stay in that town other than family, I suppose. But the weird thing was, it was kind of a joke. Nobody took it seriously. They just kind of laughed and rolled their eyes.
>So I took a consulting job in a small town in Illinois called Quincy.
Adams Internet/Telco/Fiber? Same. It always impressed me how early they were to fiber to the home down there in southwestern IL. ~15 years ago I made that same trip: Chicago down to Quincy then over to Steeleville and then to St Louis to drop off the rental car and fly back home. They really make the Coop system work out there.
Not them but I was legit impressed by the fiber coverage. They have towns of like 30 people with gig access, and all the roads between access points as well. It's kind of astonishing.
Seeing their setup is actually what spurred me to put together a coop at home to run fiber for the county.
Adams definitely knows what they're doing when it comes to managing resources in a rural area
The even more impressive thing is that they've had gig fiber for at least a decade, 15+ years. My town (nowhere near as rural) got us gig to the home municipal fiber 3-4 years ago, so 15 years was really impressive. I used to do sys admin consulting for them, they had really great people.
Freight is all you have in some places in the midwest. Ohio, for example, used to have some very cool passenger railway stations. Unfortunately now there is basically zero passenger rail in the entire state.
Haha hours. There is no upper bound. The average Amtrak delay on Norfolk Southern is 19 minutes per 100 miles. And the worst cases are all horror stories. A freight operator sidetracks Amtrak while a miles-long coal train rolls through at a jogging pace. The coal train breaks down. The Amtrak crew can't legally operate any more because of federal time limits. You are 1000 miles from a city in the middle of nowhere and by the time they dispatch another crew to your train you've been surviving on Fritos for days.
> Although legally passenger trains are now supposed to have right of way over freight trains, in practice that’s just not the case
Amtrak has right-of-way over freight trains if they are claiming their pre-allocated rail time slot. If a freight train is already on the track at its own scheduled time, it's going to take it, regardless of scheduling priority.
Unfortunately, Amtrak is independently dysfunctional (I'm sorry, it's true, it's led by people who don't know anything about trains) and is rarely on time even independent of rail congestion, so they show up at times they weren't scheduled, and the lateness compounds as they get further delayed by congestion.
I was looking at Tucson to Seattle trip on a relatively short notice - all sleeping tickets were sold out multiple weeks in advance. And due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat.
For fun, I just got prices for taking my family to Tucson from Portland, a trip we took last week by airplane. It was relatively expensive from what I'm used to for a trip between two cities on the same end of the country, about $2500 total. Nonstop, just under 3 hours flight time. Amtrak would be about half that for a coach ticket. But as you point out, a coach ticket for a 40-45 hour trip is impractical. So I picked a family room (when possible, which was not on every segment). $7000. HAHAHAHAHAHA. I could waste money on first class plane tickets and still pay less than half that.
My fever dream for the past two decades has been an interstate "road train" roll-on/roll-offstation network where cars are towed at moderate speed for comfort (45-55 mph) on extremely long flat bed trailers between cities so people don't have to pay attention to the road between cities and can sleep or relax.
due to the length of the trip it’s not practical with non-sleeping seat
I don't know what this anti-train propaganda is going on in this post, but this is laughable. All of the seats are sleepers on Amtrak at least. I went from Cincinnati to San Diego without a sleeper.
Different people have different standards. I've done many sleeper trips and several coach trips across the country over the years. Coach was fine when I was a teenager, now that I'm approaching 40, I'll pass.
Round-trip coach on Amtrak from Indianapolis to Las Vegas* in my early 20s is definitely a fun thing I'll never do again.
One of the friends I was with threw in the towel and bought a plane ticket home, though to be fair she was traveling with her 18-month-old daughter at the time and it's honestly a testament to youthful indiscretions that she even went along with the plan in the first place!
Personally, I find driving to be a much better way to see the US than trains, especially if you avoid interstate highways.
Living in Indiana with much of my family on the east and west coasts, I actually prefer driving
Like Amtrak, driving is rarely cheaper than flying, especially when traveling alone on a multi-day trip if you're not willing to sleep at rest areas and don't have friends to stay with at convenient points along the way.
For reference, from Indy, on the interstate, NYC is an easy one-day trip (~12 hours), and LA is a long but viable two-day trip with a stop in Denver (~15 hours/day), but SF and the Pacific Northwest are pushing it even in two days. Taking non-interstate routes can take much longer, especially when traveling through the mountains or major metro areas.
* Actually from Chicago to Needles, CA, with a bus between Indy and Chicago and a van between Needles and Vegas, because Amtrak didn't even offer service to Indy or Vegas at the time.
We should nationalize the rail lines, ensure Positive Train Control is mandatory, invest in the rails and sidetracks to allow for faster trains and less traffic jams.
It could be structured so the current owners don't lose money on the deal but America gets a faster, better utilized train system. So much winning!
America has the best fright system in the world. The other countries you are looking at have a great humans on train system, but freight is much worse because of it. Humans and freight generally want very difference things from transportation and so they should not be mixed at all.
I am in no way suggesting that the freight traffic be diminished, in fact it should be increased. We can have both but the rail owners only care about their immediate profits and have shown to be reckless with their management via deferring maintenance, improper staffing, and not investing in improving it.
It does not, but it has a sane scheduling agreement with the railroad which the railroad actually respects.
This is a common misconception because Brightline’s parent company Florida East Coast Industries shares heritage with Florida East Coast Railway, but the companies were split in 2007.
Unfortunately this is misleading. Outside of the Northeast Acela corridor, there is no certainty in train travel in the U.S..
Although legally passenger trains are now supposed to have right of way over freight trains, in practice that’s just not the case. So a 14.5 hr train journey can easily be delayed by several hours.