My wife and her grandfather took the train from Portland to Minnesota in the fall of last year. There were a number of issues with the service on the train that make it bad enough, but the speed of the train is a major problem of why these trains are somewhat worthless for travel. Freight trains get priority on the rail lines so many times the train was stopped for possibly hours waiting for freight trains to pass.

On my wife's trip the refrigeration went out at some point so cold food was no longer available, nor was food that required refrigeration before it was cooked. Fortunately they disembarked soon after that happened. The rest of the train was still a day or so from Chicago and those passengers were stuck with god knows what to eat.

>> The train was disgustingly dirty and the employees were surly and unhelpful.

> On my wife's trip the refrigeration went out at some point so cold food was no longer available, nor was food that required refrigeration before it was cooked. Fortunately they disembarked soon after that happened. The rest of the train was still a day or so from Chicago and those passengers were stuck with god knows what to eat.

Stuff like this makes it feel like the USA is falling apart from being a 1st world nation, crumbling in bits and pieces into a 3rd world one.

And even rich people in the US are satisfied with pretty terrible experiences because US culture is so disconnected from everything else that they don't get that things are a lot nicer elsewhere! Nothing like visiting someone's multi-million dollar home with worse plumbing than cheap 1-room studios elsewhere in the world.

That's exactly the wrong take-away!

Amtrak is totally irrelevant for trans-continental travel. There is a "daily" departure from Seattle to Chicago. I.e. one train per day. Probably a few hundred passengers on a good day.

I just did a quick check and there are 7 non-stop flights tomorrow from Seattle to Chicago. Average air travel time is about 4 hours. Cheapest fare for tomorrow is $262.

So this train exists for a few tourists and for a few people who can't or don't want to fly. Everyone else takes a non-stop plane and gets there in hours not in days.

It's an indication of the USA's wealth and bounty that we are willing to waste billions of dollars a year on useless vanity projects like this. Long distance Amtrak runs at a loss, the US congress provides $1.3 billion a year to make up the difference. In addition there is a $650 million subsidy for passenger trains between Washington DC and Boston. That's arguably something useful, since the route is heavily traveled. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/03/21/amtrak-gets-n...

It's kind of a "nature preserve" of socialism in the US.

In the US, Canada, and Mexico trains are for freight. Even if you’re in the Northeast Corridor a bus is usually a better option if you aren’t driving or flying. Europe uses trucks for freight.

Basically Amtrak has to keep to a specific schedule, if ut misses it's window it loses the priority it had.

For a transcontinental trip: drive a car or a van.

That said, Amtrak engines are also often leased to other freight companies so you can frequently see freight trains being hauled by Amtrak branded engines.

http://utahrails.net/pass/amtrak-mail-express.htm

It stopped in 2004, presumably due to declines in mail volume. (Which I wonder if it would make sense again now, due to more mail-order package shipping.)

Anyway, it's not really "freight" in the sense that most people think of a freight train. It's all Amtrak rolling stock.

They still do offer Express shipping services between some stations. It's a very cheap way to send something between NYC and Washington for same-day arrival, especially if it's a big box. You have to have someone go to the train station on either end to get your stuff, though. They move them around on the passenger trains that have baggage cars (the 'named' trains, typically at least on the East Coast).

This mentality weirds me out. As in: Why are we explicitly valuing the time of companies over the time of actual people? Companies can probably adjust to getting their shit 8 or 12 or 24 hours late (or, if they can't, they can charter a plane). It's a lot harder to deal with for people who need to be somewhere.

I don't know why continental american train service is so stupidly over priced and inconvenient, but I really hope at some point they realize they are currently uncompetitive and could actually make more money offering a better service for a more reasonable fee.

Their continuous response to lower revenues is to raise prices.

This just feeds ever-more innovation in the message and package delivery markets, sabotaging themselves.

Canadian shippers could only dream of US rates for first class mail packages and flat rate boxes with insurance and tracking.

Canada Post did a good job of privatizing outlets, and as you said, leveraging that network for the last mile.

What Vancouver is missing is staffed front-desks like Toronto ;)

Dedicated post offices are incredibly silly, embed them into stores, and offering to reimburse clerks for the time they spend actually dealing with mail is wonderful. It means that instead of having one location in little old New Westminster we've got 6, downtown vancouver (just the penisula up to chinatown-ish) has 14 post offices in 2.3 sq. miles... that's way better than some gigantic greek revival building in the middle of town that absolutely everyone has to spend 30 minutes on a bus to get to.

I assume Canada has a similar history/present.

I've done the Empire Builder back-and-forth between Seattle and Chicago, or Saint Paul about six times in the last six years, and never had anything like that happen. I can only assume that things have improved since your trip.

The worst thing I experienced was a four-hour delay in Milwaukee because of a broken down freight train blocking the line. But we were free to get out and walk around and stretch our legs.

It can be frustrating to experience long delays if you have a tight schedule, but otherwise I think it makes the most sense to just relax and enjoy the view.

I'll be taking the California Zephyr (Chicago to Emeryville; said to be one of the most picturesque routes) this May, which I'm quite looking forward to. It will be my first time riding that line, and my first time in a sleeper.

Very true. Although I've had some awful delays on airlines as well, and given the choice between being stuck on a passenger train and in a plane, I'd take the train every time. (Though admittedly the airlines have gotten slightly better about not leaving passengers on planes to stew in their own juices on the tarmac for hours and hours. But it took some people really slapping them around in court I think.)

Apparently the freight haulers have tried to get them to stop publicly blaming them like this.

To the railroads it gets higher priority. But if a freight train bocks a passenger train the railroad gets fined by the hour (quarter hour?).

However, the freight railroads often just eat the fine as a cost of doing business. Like delivery companies do with parking tickets.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/04/29/...

Unfortunately, for various political reasons that part of the law has almost no teeth so freight companies openly flout it or treat the meager fines as the cost of doing business. It's a big part of the reason that passenger rail sucks in the US.

That makes you quite lucky, and you eventually got married. Most couples don't know if their future marriage is seaworthy until they hit their first major storm.

Good to be aware longer train rides might not be as nice.

What would work quite well, though, would be something like the Auto Train: you can get an overnight ride that ferries your car and you don't have to drive the thoroughly boring drive of the Great Plains.

I think this was specifically a train for fun and scenery. The destination is part of the point too but this wasn’t marketed or intended as transportation as a means of getting from point a to b.

In short I’m sure your experience is a reliable indicator of at least some of the state of train travel in the us. But it can be better than this, as a niche industry.

All Amtrak lines are operated a little differently, AFAIK. As far as the West Coast is concerned, I find both the Pacific Surfliner and the Coastal Starlight to be pleasant and enjoyable (although not very affordable). The Northeast Regional on the East Coast is pretty affordable, runs often, and makes traveling between cities in the Northeast megalopolis without a car pretty trivial, which is nice.

All that's to say that I wouldn't judge Amtrak by its least-used routes.

Found the problem.

Also, you've posted a lot of these unsubstantive comments. Could you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and take the spirit of this site more to heart? We'd be grateful. These other links also might help:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

If the wrong people get in charge (and very likely if the ideology is widespread) they make little effort to improve things other than to cut costs.

Competition usually improves things, it's true, but natural monopolies are still problematic.

Also, would you then be consistent and argue that the government shouldn’t be spending so much on highways for cars, since it’ll just waste that money too?

The USA has large areas of sparsley populted land where flying for long distance, and car for the the closer area are hard to beat. This is way different from more densly populated Europe and even more densly populated Japan (especially when excluding Japan's motain regions)

If there were drive more more trains this would first require massive investment in infrastructure, to build both: the medium distance lines through populated area (for example along the east and west coast) as well as a network of connecting services fading out in the suburbs of the hub. Hardly anybody wants to go from hub to hub. If they need an car for "the last mile" anyways it's likely they won't take the detour to the train station and then having no way to continue on the other end ... If instead they can drive the complete distance.

Successful railways need a network connecting complete regions providing enough potential for a frequent service.

Building that requires huge support by politics/society.

Private enterprise is great when taxpayers pay for the expensive part.

I have total faith that we could privatize Amtrak and have it be just as execrable in comparison. And then it would be sold off for parts, some assholes would get tremendously wealthy, and we wouldn't have any passenger rail network at all.

This has basically nothing to do with the fact that it is government-run.

I don't know if you noticed, but building massive infrastructure cost a shitload of money for private enterprise as well.

Of course, the people proposing/pushing for the idea and the people implementing the idea did not share a lot of membership, so the implementers put a person deeply opposed to the project in charge. Of course, no projects of use got approved, most of the projects that did get approved were obviously pointless and tedious, and they were constantly thousands of jobs short or what was needed to employ everyone who wanted work anyway.

So yeah, that's why we have the "digging and filling holes" analogy for useless make-work. Ideas are fine and all, but it doesn't matter for shit if you have an antagonist implementing them.

The question I'd ask is, other than preserving the way of operating that amtrak has, is it worth the subsidy - I'd say yes, preserving the knowledge of how to operate LD trains is important, so is offering the rural communities it serves transportation, I'd like to expand rail service even.

This is not a bad model: the public retains the land and tracks, and provides them for private enterprises to run trains on, subject to some sort of coordination so you don't have wrecks.

That's similar to how many airports work, how the Interstate Highway System works, etc.

However, for historical reasons it's not how the US system operates, and it would be very difficult for the government -- absent a lot of spending that I doubt the public has the appetite for -- to acquire the land and rights-of-way.

On routes where Amtrak actually controls the underlying trackage, it operates quite well. Where everything goes to shit is when Amtrak operates on others' track.

If we really wanted a good passenger-rail system, what we would need to do is build dedicated passenger rail lines, totally separate from freight rail. The two types of trains are so different today that it doesn't make sense to run them together. High speed passenger trains do best on banked track, and not having freight trains around for them to run into allows you to use lighter rolling stock. Acela trains have been described as "rolling bank vaults" because of the collision protection they have to have -- simply because they're liable to collide head-on with a fully loaded freight train. There's no good way around it, except to stop mixing the two up.

No it doesn’t. Amtrak owns the lines between Baltimore and DC. I used to commute it every day for two years and it was awful. Amtrak struggles to adequately maintain the northeast corridor, because as a result of government-imposed mandates, its operating profits from there go to subsidizing service on lines nobody uses. Similarly, Amtrak is just shitty at logistics and operations—planning around track work, giving updates about delays, keeping trains in working order, etc. Again, they have no mandate to turn a profit (unlike government owned rail lines in Europe) so they run like the DMV, rather than a rail carrier.

That said, Amtrak came into existence because most of the private rail companies had failed or were failing. Had the federal government not stepped in, we'd arguably have no long distance passenger rail service outside the Northeast Corridor (where Amtrak basically makes the money that it then loses on pretty much every other route in the country).

The US rail network is optimized for freight hauling (and it's largely owned by freight railroads and maintained at private expense, and those railroads turn a consistent profit). It also works well -- for its intended purpose.

If you want to move 3000 miles at 45 MPH remarkably cheaply, and you happen to be (or live in) a cargo container, the US rail network is built just for you!