There are no useful alternatives to airplanes for crossing a continent, or an ocean.

I agree we should do more trains, but they are limited to around 1500km per trip before flying is enough better that you look like a fool for suggesting it.

It would be slower, yes, but you could still get from London to Beijing in a few days, which seems reasonable when you look at historical travel patterns and the sheer inefficiency of the alternatives.

This is not 1290 when Marco Polo was traveling around. This is 2022 when people have seen much faster and nicer alternatives. Nobody is going to put up with days of travel when they can fly anymore.

I'm not convinced trains are more efficient than planes at that distance either - I don't' know how to analyses it, but planes see much less wind resistance because of altitude.

yes! rail is amazing in term of efficiency, a common high speed train has around a credit card worth of contact area with the rail for the whole train! it's also quite relaxing and socially interesting.

the problem is that rail is "boring" and rarely get sufficient funding.

It also allows for much more productivity while travelling, which is important for business travellers.

Energy efficiency will become radically less important as energy cost continues on down.

Then other things become more important, and drive choices.

Rail is quite a lot less flexible than air travel. If you have a plane you can pretty much go anywhere that has a strip of asfalt of the right length. With rail you need to lay out the track between the two points with all the difficulties involved in that.

It's wired vs wireless ethernet. Which do you have in your home?