Everywhere except the eastern seaboard from roughly DC north, we really don't - we have a freight rail system that occasionally hosts passenger trains, too.

It's super annoying. I hate to fly - well, that's not true; I hate the pervasive unpleasantness and inconvenience of US commercial air travel - and find trains much more congenial, but e.g. two days to get from where I live to where I grew up, plus two more days to get back, is more travel time than I can afford.

Unfortunately, while we have an activist billionaire interested in trying to improve this situation, he appears to prefer vacuum-tube moonshots, starting in the country's best-served and most infrastructurally complex transit market, to doing anything useful right now. So it goes.

Found a map of the system on Amtraks' site: http://blog.amtrak.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/RTTL-Map-I...

There are a couple of routes across the country, stopping roughly once per state if that. As you mentioned, it's freight with a few passenger trains sharing the tracks.

In addition to the northeast region (DC, Philly, NYC, Boston) you can do pretty well in Chicago. It's the hub of all of those routes except for the one on the US/Mexico border.

"Why Trains Suck in America" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbEfzuCLoAQ

There is a sleeper train up the coast from Los Angeles to San Francisco:

https://www.amtrak.com/coast-starlight-train

Someone in the comments mentioned that Amtrak's sleeper train travels daytime on the SF to LA stint and the terminals are some way away from the city. So the travel by night advantage is gone.

Amtrak's sleeper cars are also quite expensive when I last looked at it as an option for getting from Colorado to San Francisco. The price compared to a seat on the train was 2..3x or more (but it includes food).

In the case of San Francisco it's a bit unfair to knock Amtrak for the location of the terminal, because it's not their fault, it's the fault of geography. San Francisco sits at the tip of a peninsula; for a train to stop in SF -- actually in SF and not Oakland or San Jose -- and also continue on to other locations would require the train to come up the peninsula, make its San Francisco stop, then turn around and go back down the peninsula in order to continue north (up the east side of the Bay) or south to other destinations.

Since that would be wasteful, Amtrak doesn't do it; instead they stop in San Jose (where you can switch to Caltrain to run up the peninsula into SF) and Oakland (where you can hop on BART or a ferry to cross the Bay into SF).

Engineering can easily trump Geography in this case: you could just tunnel under the Golden Gate and keep going north. This would be a utterly trivial compared to something like the Seikan Tunnel[1].

Just to be clear: not knocking Amtrak here. They're virtually budget-less, for the most part disallowed from owning or even maintaining their own infrastructure, so building new infrastructure would be completely beyond the Pale. Not knocking Amtrak at all -- it's America's collective ability to get its infrastructure act together that is just sad.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seikan_Tunnel

You could also just use the bridge itself. My country has a copy of the Golden Gate (built by the same company) and we've retrofitted it to run trains underneath the deck: https://www.google.com/search?q=ponte+25+de+abril+comboio&tb...

Never heard of this bridge until today. However, according to Wikipedia:

> Because it is a suspension bridge and has similar coloring, it is often compared to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, US. It was built by the American Bridge Company which constructed the San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, but not the Golden Gate.

Oh. My life is a lie :| Thanks, I don't even know where I've heard that. Still, same style of bridge.

Other countries have solved this issue. I once took a train by ferry.

I've done that trip (from Denver) after I couldn't bear the thought of another flight on the US air system. It was amazing. Definitely something to think about in winter.

Amtrak is also notorious for being way off on arrival times. Sometimes on the order of a day or longer. That's what happens when you share rails with the freight lines.

I can anecdotally confirm. My wife used to ride the Coast Starlight occasionally. About the fifth time she did, the train was delayed 18 hours. She missed a day of work, and has never ridden it since.

Americans, I do believe, pioneered the sleeping car for trains: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_car

First the Cumberland Valley Railroad in 1839, then George Pullman's more luxurious version in 1865 that was very successful (and from there, it spread to Europe).

They have trains but all track is owned by freight train providers.

Here's a good overview why.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mbEfzuCLoAQ