A big problem with the DC to Boston Amtrak run is that it subsidizes the entire rest of the Amtrak network, which loses money hand over fist. The DC/Boston line is profitable. But it's neglected and starved.

If instead that money could used to revitalize that stretch, it could be much more useful. America rail went through each small town as it already existed and the track is too twisty to go very fast over a lot of the stretch.

And it's all so we can have trains that go from DC to Chicago in like 12 hours + 0-3 hours of delays. That route is unnecessary. A DC to Chicago flight is 1:45 hours and is cheap as fuck. Plus we have buses that use the highways.

Our rail sucks because we propping up useless routes.

Maybe I should take the Empire Builder and/or the California Zephyr while there's still time. To be sure, there are a lot of subsidies built into a lot of transportation options and, if you eliminate Amtrak outside of the Northeast, a lot of those passengers need to get from A to B somehow (which may well be sub-segments of the long haul routes).

But, yeah, from a utilitarian perspective I've never found inter-city Amtrak travel to make a lot of sense in the US outside of the Northeast (nor, in many cases, Europe for that matter).

If you ever take one of the long Amtrak routes, be sure you have an extra 48 hour buffer in your schedule to allow for delays. I'm not kidding at all.

To be clear, these trains aren't empty. The Lake Shore Limited (Chicago <-> New York) goes sold out for days when winter storms take a shit on the Northeast air corridor and everyone's trying to get home from Christmas break. It's also $100 regardless of season.

Boston has hilarious amounts of single-family-building suburbia:

https://www.google.de/maps/place/Boston,+MA,+USA/@42.2970681...

Germany simply doesn't have that. The infrastructural implications are massive.