I had some vacation time and I’ve never ridden a train before, so I thought I’d look it up. I’d seen a few YouTube videos and it looked like something I’d like. I’m not a fan of air travel at all.
I went to look up tickets and was shocked at the price. I could drive for cheaper and faster including my own stops. I could fly for cheaper and faster and wouldn’t have to pay for a sleeper car or hotel. It seems like there’s no benefit to taking a train at all. Even the hassle of flying is worth the time and money saved.
Ps and why does a sleeper car (the thing that had me curious from YouTube) $1000/night?!
In China, your populations are mainly confined to a few large, major cities. With farms and farming communities nearby those same cities.
I live in an unincorporated area about 30 miles outside of the nearest city, which has a population of about 250k people: Mobile, AL
It’s about 150 miles in the other direction to a fairly large city, named New Orleans, LA.
Thing is, there’s not any real “country side” between those cities. It’s all houses and neighborhoods. All of it. It’s not quite heavy enough population density to be a city, but still higher than farmland.
That said there is a passenger train service that runs from New Orleans to Mobile, with two trains, one leaves New Orleans and the other Leaves Mobile at pretty much the same time. 2 engines, 4 cars on the Mobile-based train, and 2 engines 3 cars on the New Orleans based train.
Thing is, they each have multiple stops along the way, too.
It’s a 4 hour ride in the train from end to end, and another 4 hour ride back. Each train ends up where they started at the end of the day.
So to use that train, I must drive 30miles into town, find parking, leave my car there for 8 to 10 hours, and spend maybe an hour or two in New Orleans,
Or, I could just drive for 2 hours, and spend however long I want to, in New Orleans, and not have a set schedule.
There’s absolutely not enough demand for more than the two trains in either direction for that to make any sort of sense, either.
Ok but high speed rail isn’t for connecting you to New Orleans, it’s more for connecting New Orleans to Chicago.
We’re unlikely to wind up as train connected as Japan, but let’s look at the shinkansen. It goes between major population centers and sometimes stops at decent sized cities on the way. When I had to go to a smaller town in Japan I took high speed rail from Tokyo to the nearest major city, then I took their local rail to a town, then another line to the place I was going.
For comparison this is the equivalent of flying into New York from Europe, taking high speed rail to Chicago, taking an Illinois rail network to Peoria, then taking it again to say Lincoln. Northeastern states have the rail network to do that last mile stuff. But even just having the ability to drive into your nearest city and take a high speed rail to a city your friends live in or that you want to vacation or do business in would be huge. That’s why the main proposals for high speed rail are to connect New York to Chicago or San Diego to Seattle. The latter would make it convenient to go from any major city on the west coast to any other one, even if you have to take BART or a bus or whatever first and last mile transit you need to get there