> It is about 1000 mountainous kilometers from Portland to Oakland.

If you drive along I-5 from Portland to Oakland, there is one mountain pass (Siskiyou summit[1]). Most of the trip is very flat, as you're traveling through Oregon's Willamette valley and California's central valley.

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

Amtrak veers east from Eugene through Chemult and Kalmath Falls. It does not go over Siskiyou Summit. https://www.amtrak.com/coast-starlight-train

The question is...why does a major inter-city railroad lead through such a strange route?

> 18 hours reflects a rail speed comparable to what Google returns for a train trip from Zagreb to Tirana

Ehm...I don't believe there's been railway connection from anywhere to Tirana since 2013. Albanian railway infrastructure is largely non-existent at this point. And the only international railway connection to Albania is freight-only. Not quite sure what Google told you there.

The route is determined by plate tectonics. Subduction of the Pacific Plate beneath the North American Plate generates substantial orogenic forces. The rail route runs between the coastal ranges to the west and the spine of the Americas that extends from the Arctic to the Patagonia...aka, "the American Cordillera."

Quite simply it runs along the best available route. Down the Willamette Valley to Eugene and then...well it has to make do past Mount Shasta until near Sacramento.

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I'm not going to express faux outrage at the shortcomings of European rail based on the lack of service to Triana. Rather it is to point out that in this sort of discussion of US passenger rail, Europeans tend to ignore a great deal of Europe. More understandable is the misunderstanding of US geography, even in the US people presume similar political geography implies similar physical geography.

Finally, Oakland to Portland is not a major passenger route. Not really even a major rail route since the sea is a viable alternative for freight along the coast and most freight in the US travels east-west.

In that case I don't understand what are those plans for that major high-speed rail on the west coast about. If this is "the best available route" for a major north-south railway along the US west coast, then those high-speed rail plans are a pipe dream, surely?

As for Albania, you know how to pick the one part of Europe where train service is crap - anything from Bosnia southeastwards in http://emptypipes.org/supp/isochrone_zagreb/. Pretty much any other direction is perfectly serviceable and vastly better connected. Apparently you can get sooner to Paris from Zagreb by train that to any of Albania. Is the US west coast due to its geography a similar uniquely bad place?

The sane passenger rail plans in the US West are regional. Connecting Portland, the Puget Sound and Vancouver on the one hand. Serving the cities of California’s Central Valley on the other. The California route makes some sense as a high speed route. Less so as a connection of LA and San Francisco because it is roundabout. The more direct route follows the old Camino Real up the Salinas River Valley and then the San Andreas Rift toward San Jose where the 101 runs today.

The US west is mostly empty. When you look at the article’s map even the named places are tiny. La Junta is tiny. Flagstaff is less than 100,000 as a metro. Reno is about half a million. Cheyenne is in Wyoming. The entire state has fewer than a million people.

In terms of European rail travel, I avoided the low hanging fruit like Dublin to Lisbon, Reykjavík to London, or Oslo to Paris.