Rail Travel Is Booming in America

Yeah, that covers a significant portion of the population, leaving the roads less congested for those who can't use both that and e.g. a bus.

While we're on that subject, there is a special place in hell for whoever decided to put stairs with the only backup option being the smallest, slowest lift known to man in St Pancras station. Such idiocy.

I agree standard bikes are a poor fit for luggage. There are cargo (e)bikes that can comfortably hold large bags (e.g. https://larryvsharry.com/products/ebullitt). They may make sense at major rail stations, but the logistics of keeping them in stock at the station would be hard, and of course this doesn't solve the infrastructure or physical disabilities/age problem.

Well, not super dense; it's available at least in the towns and cities that most people either live in or visit. And it obviously only works for people who can cycle.

But with those two restrictions you would still serve a very significant chunk of the population of pretty much any country. It's really the bike infrastructure that's the limiting factor elsewhere.

Was that an OV-fiets (which I was talking about)? (Also asking because they're not by the municipality.)

The main restriction is that you should bring it back to the place where you rented it, or pay €10 extra. I don't know how they'd even know that you took it out of the city?

Hm, strange. That has been allowed for many years now, you do pay a fee of 10 euros though. There are no restrictions on where you can ride the bikes either.

https://www.ns.nl/klantenservice/deur-tot-deur-diensten/ov-f...

>Kan ik een OV-fiets op een andere locatie inleveren?

>Je kunt een OV-fiets ook op een andere locatie inleveren. Je betaalt dan wel € 10 extra. Deze extra kosten zijn voor het verplaatsen van de fiets.

>Lever je de fiets in bij een andere locatie op hetzelfde station? Dan betaal je niks extra.

> Why would this be an issue with the driver?

Drivers are the dominant operating cost of a bus system, and they’re typically paid regardless of ridership. That means you have a minimum ridership per driver required to offset their cost.

Bus systems thus size the bus and route to ensure that minimum ridership. That, in turn, requires aggregating demand, i.e. forcing people to change the places and times of their transit to line up with the bus’s. Analogous to lift and drag, the more you force people to change their schedules, the more you lose potential demand to alternatives.

If you don’t have a driver, you can make your transports as big or small as you’d like. In rare cases, they’ll be bus sized. But most busses either aren’t consistently full or lose a lot of potential riders because their schedules and stops are inconvenient. A fleet of smaller vehicles sops up that demand without hauling around a bunch of dead mass off rush hour.

> Even with multiple excursions, busses are optimal for getting people around because the 100s of people on the ship are ultimately going to the same places

Cruises are one of the rare cases where our buses are correctly sized and competitive against rail, in large part because you’l continuing the social experience of being on a cruise ship.

When you consider what makes a bus-sized bus perfect for tour groups and the like, it quickly becomes apparent why they’re not optimally sized for transit outside the constraints imposed by driver economics.

Nice!

You'd need to do it to get to the train too. To someone who lives 45 min+ away that would be a lot.

Sure - at $100/day. This cost adds up fast. Bringing my own minivan would have been a similar cost, and had a lot more space than the small car we were able to rent. Plus we could have left most of our baggage in the car since we didn't need it on the train.

Sorry, I meant long distance train. DC metro and especially NYC are also both faster than driving.

Yep. Federal law requires passenger trains to get priority.

But for some reason the government basically stopped enforcing it like 40 years ago.

So in practice it tends to work the other way.

My understanding is that as part of the Amtrak Improvement Act[1] Amtrak is given preference over freight rail, even on private track. However only the Department of Justice may enforce this, which it has done only once.

Fair warning I haven't read the text of the law in full, only heard this second hand.

https://www.congress.gov/bill/93rd-congress/house-bill/15427

Due to the history of Amtrak this is actually true. The railroads in America (while privately owned and operated) were built with much government subsidy. The railroad companies originally provided passenger service. Eventually, to ensure this service continued a law was passed that prohibited railroads from dropping passe nger service. After the rise of personal cars coinciding with the massive federal investment in car infrastructure in the 1950s with the interstate hughway system, passenger rail travel was in free fall in the late 60s and the railroad companies begged to be allowed to end passenger service. Congress stepped in and nationalized the passenger service exempting the railroad companies from their mandate to provide passenger service while requiring them to give passenger trains priority in scheduling. So, TL;DR passenger trains have legally mandated priority over the freight trains of the host railroad.

Yes [1].

[1] https://www.planetizen.com/news/2025/09/135986-amtrak-trains...

Amtrak says this but the freight disagree. At this point I assume both sides are lieing.

Classic America. Laws favor industry and commerce over individuals. Because lower prices benefits everybody. Uh huh.

This is correct but needs more explanation. What the commenter is alluding to is Precision Scheduled Railraoding ("PSR") [1]. Basically this means having really long trains with half the crew and cutting down on safety inspections to increase profits by spending more time delivering freight. It also gets around the Amtrak priority. Why fewer staff? Because you only need one engine crew for a train twice as long.

Increasing train length on tracks not designed for it is a safety issue. Think about it, you have a whole bunch of separate carriages. Some are turning because that's wher they are on the track. Others are going uphills, yet others downhill. All of these forces become a problem that arguably increases the likelihood of derailment, the kind of which we had in East Palestine, Ohio a few years ago.

The labor situation is so bad that there was the threat of a strike in the Biden administration. For what? Paid sick leave, mainly. Biden got Congress to use their powers to end a strike by "essential" workers and then quietly later went and partially conceded to their demands.

Retiring crews haven't been replaced so the labor is at dire levels, all to slightly increase profits. It was estimated that if UP conceded toa ll the union's demands it would reduce their profit by 6%. Not revenue, profit.

[1]: https://www.fractracker.org/2024/06/exploring-the-fallout-of...

> ...not to mention the absurd amount of energy wasted in braking and then re-accelerating that 3 mile freight monster.

> Fixing this would be possible - either by limiting the maximum length of a train...

It can't be both. Splitting a freight train and then stopping and starting the smaller trains would take the same amount of energy as stopping and starting the single long freight train.

Unless they're deliberately moving empty freight cars to make it artificially long.

> I recently saw that Canadian passenger railways have security checks and bag check-in just like airlines :-))

It's probably harder to drive a train into something than it is to fly a plane into something, but a bomb on a train could do a lot of damage even if it wasn't as cinematic as a bomb on a plane. And, having traveled on Amtrak and seen what people try to cram in to the limited space available, it's not clear to me that some sort of baggage control is automatically a bad thing.

(Don't get me wrong, I like not having to go through those airport-style controls, but it's a tragedy of the commons sort of thing, where abuse of it by a few renders it unpleasant for everyone.)

Nothing at all like the TSA Experience

> No one takes a train for business.

I mean surely that's a big part of what the Acela one is used for?

Though, also, the trouble with park and ride stations is that there's a very specific utilisation at which they work well. If they get too popular, that is also a problem.

> the continent you need to get off the train

I can only say your understanding of Amtrak offerings are very inaccurate.

Amtrak offers plenty of trips with kind of features you are asking for https://www.amtrakvacations.com/travel-styles/cross-country-...

For example the NYC to SF is an itinerary goes like this https://www.amtrakvacations.com/trips/great-american-majesti....

It is a 12 day one way trip that includes plenty of overnight non train stays(i.e. hotels), full day sight seeing stops etc .

You can mix local car rentals to take extended side trips add much longer breaks with hop-on/hop off if you plan to do so.

There are national park themed trips specifically, or number of great regional options or other cross country journeys like LA to NOLA etc.

It will be never be perfect exact fit to your specific tastes and needs, no public transit can ever be,. However that doesn't mean it is not a great option for a traveling family vacation with sight seeing and breaks, where you can actually spend quality time with the family rather than just looking straight at the road all day, while everyone else is on the phone.

I disagree. The US should focus on those routes that there is ample reason to believe there would be high demand for true high speed rail (280km/h average speed including stops). DC to Boston Via NYC for example: there is every reason to believe this could pay for itself running 8 trains per hour all day. Once we have that there are lots of other cities that can be connected and as the network grows the whole becomes more useful. East of the Mississippi the US is about as densely populated as Europe.

If you already have a route in place using that is cheaper, but often you are stuck with decisions that made sense in 1850 when trains didn't go very fast. Where you are building new track is should always be build to 350km/h standards (you run at 300km/h, but build to a higher standard just in case you need to run fast to make up time at the cost of efficiency). There are many towns with populations of 50,000 or so people that you wouldn't build new track too, but if there is existing track running slower trains make sense.

The US is physically big enough that coast to coast would probably always be a fairly niche pursuit. New York to SF, say, is about 4700km. At 300km/h, assuming no stops, that is 15 hours. Most people won't want to do that.

Seattle to SF, however, is only about 1300km, so a bit over 4 hours under ideal conditions. At that point, it's probably quicker than a plane (no need for the whole getting to and from the airport thing, or the security, or the inevitable delays).

Oh, don't get me wrong, during the day it's the most comfortable way to travel. But the ability to lie flat, even in fare classes that aren't too fancy, like they have in India, counts for a lot when you're traveling overnight.