I live a few blocks from that train, so I wind up taking it all the time to get to the mall or downtown. The novelty wears off, and you wind up mostly worried about having to share your ride with packs of unruly teenagers, or sports fans heading downtown who can't resist saying racist things about our various African immigrant neighbors. It's a pleasure or a drag, depending on the manners of those who share the ride.

One Iowan to another: you didn't ride a train in Minneapolis. You rode a streetcar (tram in British). And yes, only the southeast corner of Iowa is served at all by passenger rail. Would be nice if they extended the Hawkeye Express to CR, or better yet, Amtrak service from Davenport to IC to DSM. Alas, not enough $$$ to make it worth doing.

The Northstar line north of Minneapolis is a "real" train that run on normal tracks:

https://www.metrotransit.org/northstar-line

The lines that goes between the Mall of America, downtown Minneapolis, and St Paul are light rail, and are faster than what would normally be considered a "tram" or "streetcar".

I'd think it still counts as being a train. Obviously it's short-distance light rail, but it's still got all the main feature's of a train.

I mainly mentioned it since the parent comment was about a group of girls getting on the train purely for the experience of being on the train, and my experience seemed pretty similar.

Don't know that it terribly matters one way or the other though I guess.

If you really want to get technical, the key defining characteristic of a train is that it consists of multiple connected railway vehicles that move together. A railway vehicle is of course a vehicle that runs on tracks.

So there are some tram/streetcar/light rail systems out there (like the one in New Orleans) that consist of individual railway vehicles, and are thus not trains.

Amtrak is heavy rail - that's light rail, which is kinda different.