1. "Nationalized" doesn't necessarily get you "modernized". It gets your money supply controlled by Congress.

2. "Much of it transformed into commuter railways"? You seem to have no idea of how much of the US is rural. Commuter railways don't make sense in rural areas.

You seem to have no idea why those places are rural.

You seem to have no idea how many square miles of empty land exist in the US

You think that land would be inhabited if it had commuter trains? You think the large cities which require a dense population for tax collection and often act as the hub for these transportation networks, perhaps have an incentive to fight nationalization and expansion of publicly held lands into housing developments?

Roosevelt set aside hundred of millions of acres of land not for eternal preservation, but for future development by generations that would otherwise not had land considering the industrial barons of his time would have completely demolished it.

>You think that land would be inhabited if it had commuter trains?

Yes, considering the distributed nature of the US's population pre-dates the car. Go look at a population density map from 1900. Tons of primarily agricultural small towns spread out over an enormous area. Back then most small-ish towns in the middle of nowhere probably did actually have commercial rail because there were no other options. It's just that when the other options did appear, rail went into terminal decline because it was simply a terrible way of serving those kinds of areas when cars and trucks exist. Even today when the spread is less driven by agriculture, people still prefer lower density housing because being stuck in an apartment building sharing walls with god knows who else stops being fun really quick. People like having a bit of space of their own.This results in lower population densities as a result of people's preferences about how they would like to live. Rail is a good means of transporting high volumes from one node to another. It is good at that and it should be used in that context. It is not good if you try to shoehorn it in as a replacement for all other means of transportation as some groups seem to be inclined to do.

The large cities you're referring to are usually large because there was a train connecting to a port.

Complaining about inefficiency and suggesting transforming most of the US's very efficient private freight rail system into nationalized passenger rail in the same comment is certainly an interesting position.

The nationalized systems seen in the EU seem to be associated in dramatically higher cost for freight transportation, not lower[1]. The reason the rail companies stopped offering passenger rail services in the US was that nearly every one of them was absolutely hemorrhaging money by the end and the only reason they'd kept them that long is because the government made them do it. Transporting people by train in most of the US is laughably inefficient and inconvenient next to the car due to the low population densities across most of the country. There's a reason nearly the entire country switched to using cars for transportation almost the instant that it became possible for them to do so.

[1]https://etrr.springeropen.com/articles/10.1007/s12544-013-00...

I think the article addresses most of these points: the collapse of passenger rail in the US is largely attributable to inefficient line division and competition (the "Alphabet Route" between Chicago and Baltimore, for example[1]) as well as domestic policy shifts around subsidized transit (in favor of larger subsidies for automotive manufacturers, highway construction, etc. in correspondence with subsidies for suburbanization).

Low population densities can be misleading; much of the US is highly urbanized, and dense urban centers would be very efficiently connected by rail service were we to improve it. I for one would almost certainly make more trips to cities in Ohio, Illinois, etc. if it was a < 6 hour high speed trip rather than an overnight one.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alphabet_Route

> Low population densities can be misleading; much of the US is highly urbanized, and dense urban centers would be very efficiently connected by rail service were we to improve it. I for one would almost certainly make more trips to cities in Ohio, Illinois, etc. if it was a < 6 hour high speed trip rather than an overnight one.

The contours of a successful HSR system in the US and Canada are roughly as follows:

The core linear corridors of DC-Boston (densest US population) and Detroit-Quebec City (that's 10/15 largest cities in Canada). Combine these with an east-west Boston-Toronto and north-south Montreal-NYC spine (timed interchange at Albany makes too much sense), as well as several other small feeder routes I'm not mentioning.

A Midwestern knot centered on Chicago with lines to (in ccw order) Minneapolis, St. Louis (maybe to Kansas City), Louisville (and thence to Nashville I think), Cleveland, and Detroit (not sure how to squeeze in Cincinnati and Columbus). At this point, you might consider connecting the tendrils to the northeast system as well.

CAHSR, with connections to Las Vegas and Phoenix. Texas Triangle. Maybe Portland-Vancouver.

Nashville-Miami via Atlanta, and Atlanta-DC via Research Triangle in NC.

Wow so the entire Rocky Mtn. west is just left out in the cold. What about Denver and SLC? Guess no one needs to go to AZ either?

Further I don't think you understand the cost, lot's of people out east think throwing a rail line together isn't more difficult than throw a couple of logs on the ground and some metal tracks. Let me tell you about what it is like trying to build a rail line through the west. There are mountains that make the Appalachins look mighty tiny that you've got to dynamite straight through, because you can't go up them, with the alternative being massive detours. If you want to go through the south you'll have hundreds of miles of tractless desert with temperatures being over 100 degrees on the regular, without water for miles.

> Wow so the entire Rocky Mtn. west is just left out in the cold. What about Denver and SLC? Guess no one needs to go to AZ either?

Connecting the 19th and the 46th largest city over ~400mi of mountainous terrain with no intermediate cities of note to pick up along the way is not a recipe for success.

> Further I don't think you understand the cost, lot's of people out east think throwing a rail line together isn't more difficult than throw a couple of logs on the ground and some metal tracks. Let me tell you about what it is like trying to build a rail line through the west.

That's why I didn't suggest any routes like that. The closest you get is Portland-Vancouver, which is questionable in large part because of the mountainous region (and Portland, OR is quite frankly not a large city). CAHSR does have to cross two or three mountain regions (depending on how you count), but you're connecting 40 million people in several large metropolitan areas with it, so it's actually worth it. And outside of those, I'm not connecting anything else--you're the one complaining that I'm leaving out Denver-SLC after all--so how do you think I'm ignoring the expensive costs of what I'm not proposing to connect?

Are you complaining that the west was left out of their list of viable starter routes _and_ saying that the west isn’t viable due to high construction costs caused by the mountains/environment?

> Transporting people by train in most of the US is laughably inefficient and inconvenient next to the car due to the low population densities across most of the country.

I get so tired of hearing this flawed argument, which places the cause and effect backwards. Ohio has the population of of Sweden, Indiana has the population of Denmark. Texas is almost twice as populous as The Netherlands, and its population is mostly confined to a triangle of urban areas that are within commuter rail distance. The Northeast Corridor is an uninterrupted urban development from Washington DC to Boston. The USA has numerous large population centers, many of which are completely unconnected by usable passenger rail despite close proximity. Over 80% of Americans live in urban areas, and most of the populations is confined to the coasts and the Midwest.

If you think trains are too inefficient, all you have to do is observe the ridiculously huge short hop flight network in the USA. There are at least 6 daily non-stop flights from Charlotte, NC to Washington, DC, which is a 6 hour drive. There are at least 30 nonstop flights from San Francisco to Los Angeles, which is also a 6 hour drive. There are 3 non-stop flights from LA to San Diego, which is less than 3 hours away. There are at least 10 non-stop flights form Chicago to Columbus per day, a route that has no passenger train service and under 6 hour drive time.

These short flights, which save effectively no time over high-speed train travel, exist because there is demand for non-car travel that is being unmet by the the trains that do not exist.

Switching to cars was not an inevitability, it was a not an obvious choice, we actually went out of our way to destroy existing, functional rail infrastructure and neighborhoods to replace it with interstate highways, and a lot of it was motivated by a massive automotive manufacturing lobby exerting government influence.

In the US, the automobile is also massively underpriced and subsidized as a policy choice, which pushes citizens toward choosing personal vehicles instead of alternatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbEuaCCV-zg

>Switching to cars was not an inevitability, it was a not an obvious choice, we actually went out of our way to destroy existing, functional rail infrastructure and neighborhoods to replace it with interstate highways, and a lot of it was motivated by a massive automotive manufacturing lobby exerting government influence.

That is the often missed point of the movie Roger the Rabbit.

I'm not going to comment on your broader point as I largely agree passenger trains being unsuccessful is a policy choice.

But Indiana particularly is a bad example. 1/3 of the population you mention is in Indianapolis that has tried many times to have commuter trains, the population does not want them! Even modern/modest attempts have failed[0]. If commuter trains aren't popular with the people there why would longer haul passenger rail be? Even if you could magic an Acela route between Chicago and Indianapolis into existence it would not be faster than a car or the many private bus routes that go there and you'd have to deal with the inconvenience of getting to the start and end locations in a city that has rejected public transportation.

The northern population centers which account for another 6th of the population of Indiana are already serviced by regular electric inter urban trains into Chicago, the nearest big population center. That line is seeing about 50% less usage compared to pre-Covid numbers.

So beyond just the policy choices, in Indiana at least there is strong evidence for a lack of desire for inter-urban rail.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_University_Health_Peop...

All that means is that voters don’t want it, not that they wouldn’t benefit from it.

You may have gotten the impression that I hate trains from my comment. I don't hate trains. I hate when people try to propose trains as a solution to transit situations they are completely unsuited for.

Rail is the highest volume mass transit solution. The layout of population centers in the US at a macro and micro level leads to this level of throughput rarely being necessary when all other factors are considered.

There are indeed several locations in the US where high speed rail lines which do not exist would be a very good idea and would obviously supplant short-haul flights which currently serve those routes.

There are also many cases where commuter rail systems which don't, or barely exist would make excellent additions to the metropolitan areas around major cities.

However, this is the exception, not the rule. It is not relevant to the vast majority of origin destination pairs when traveling in the US.

Passenger rail in the US needs to answer the question "How is this tangibly better than the alternatives?". To which the answer is usually "Its not". For shorter distance trips the inconvenience of not having a car once you get to your destination usually ends up outweighing the benefits of not having to drive yourself. For longer distance trips, flying is usually going to be dramatically faster. As mentioned, there certainly are examples which fall into that sweet spot in the middle but in the US they are relatively few and far between.

My argument is that the sweet spot in the middle is incredibly common, and almost every sweet spot in the middle market is vastly underserved.

Texas triangle, Northeast Corridor (needs more speed and service frequency), Florida, California and Pacific Northwest, all need high speed service.

The problem of needing a car once you arrive locally is another correctable piece of policy failure, and that problem doesn’t stop a huge number of people from making a huge number of short hop flights in the United States.

In 2019, 44.5 million cars were rented in the US, so I think people very frequently jump on a medium to short distance flight and renting a car at their destination. Plus, we have ride sharing apps.

> However, this is the exception, not the rule. It is not relevant to the vast majority of origin destination pairs when traveling in the US.

This is I think something where I think you're in agreement with the substance, but not the wording.

If you look at a list of the MSAs in the US, the MSAs in the top 50 that aren't practically serviceable by HSR in some fashion are Seattle, Denver, Portland, Oklahoma City, Memphis, Salt Lake, New Orleans, and Birmingham. And five of those aren't entirely implausible.

So most people actually live somewhere where some form of HSR is plausible. In the Northeast and California, the problem is more that it hasn't been built yet; for the Midwest, Chicago is strong enough that it can drive HSR traffic without concomitant (and probably unlikely) planning changes in other Midwestern cities; Texas probably needs unlikely planning changes to be viable. For the Southeast, Florida would need unlikely planning changes to be viable on its own, but connecting to a strong Midwest and Northeast system via Atlanta could also be viable. Connections past that probably aren't viable (sorry, Memphis and New Orleans).

And I think you recognize that there are several strong areas in the US--I doubt your list of viable HSR routes are much different from them. I just think you're underestimating how much of the intercity traffic in the US that actually entails.

Among "the alternatives" that rail has to be better than: Busses using the existing highways. They won't be as fast as high speed rail, but they will be (in most cases) faster than non-high-speed rail, and the infrastructure costs will be massively less. Also, we can implement the plan this year, not a decade or three from now.

Busses have a bad reputation, as being ugly, uncomfortable, and smelly. So do trains, but with high speed rail, you buy some really nice trainsets. Well, for much less than the cost of rail right of way, you could buy some really nice busses.

Take San Francisco to Los Angeles, for example. Let's say you're flying. It takes an hour to get to the airport, and you have to be there two hours before your flight. The flight takes an hour. Then it takes half an hour for your baggage to arrive, then another half an hour to get your rental car, then an hour to drive to your destination (if you're lucky). That's six hours, which is the same as driving. High speed rail (real high speed rail) would be faster than flying (or driving).

But let's say you're going on vacation. Let's say you've got a wife and two kids. If you fly, you need four tickets. Same with rail. If you drive, you only drive one car. That shifts the economics massively.

> Indiana has the population of Denmark. Texas is almost twice as populous as The Netherlands

Indiana is 36,000 square miles; Denmark is 16,000 square miles. Texas is 268,000 square miles; The Netherlands is 42,000 square miles. The populations may be similar; the densities are not. That matters a great deal for this discussion.

> The nationalized systems seen in the EU seem to be associated in dramatically higher cost for freight transportation, not lower

The EU also has a dramatically lower accident rate.. https://imgur.com/CrzErQx

From: https://d-rail-project.eu/IMG/pdf/DR-D1-1-F1-Summary_Report_...

They could just be more regulated like the power grid - which isn't perfect, but it's also fine.

This is a horrible idea, for several reasons.

First, much of the country is never going to be capable of having efficient passenger service. There is no way you can make a viable passenger route between Chicago and LA; the distance is just way too large.

Second, passenger and freight rail just doesn't mix. A lot of European countries look at the US rail market and ask themselves "how can we move that much freight by rail?"

Third, nationalized rail has not worked out well in the US. The article here already talks about Conrail (the nationalized corpse of Penn Central) a little. But Amtrak's stewardship of the Northeast Corridor has been abysmal--here is a linear corridor about 500 miles long connecting 4 of the top 11 largest cities in the US, entirely in public hands, with no freight traffic running along it, and yet we still lack a proper 220mph high speed rail with frequent service along the corridor. US commuter rail systems generally suck even harder than that, and again, they are already all publicly owned anyways (and many of them can't even use the excuse that they rely on track owned by other people).

Finally, if you read the article and particularly some of the comments closely, you'll notice that the problem here can be boiled down in simple terms to "cost minimization in one domain creates secondary consequences that have problems elsewhere"--given the size of the US, even a nationalized system is going to have internal business unit divisions that will keep the same underlying problems. The comments give some examples of such intra-service turf wars causing solutions to not work out.

As an addendum, I assume by "entirely created by the US government," you're referring to the land grants to railroads. Well, land grants to western railroads--the eastern half was built out before they started giving out land grants. And the land grants were only given out during a short ~30 year window. I don't have the exact number on me right now, but I think it was about 40% of the US railroad mileage that was awarded land grants. Hell, one of the transcontinental lines received no land grants whatsoever.

> The article here already talks about Conrail (the nationalized corpse of Penn Central) a little

We're still spending a lot of time and money recovering from Conrail's stewardship of the rail network. Lines closed or single-tracked, etc.

The speed on the northeast corridor probably has a lot to do with the sort of track available, no? Making high speed rail grade tracking in the US is totally unprecedented. Grade separations. Smoother and larger curves. All of this demands eminent domain. We’ve seen how expensive this land acquisition process can be in rural California. I imagine in the much more urbanized east coast such high speed rail building would be even more costly and time consuming than its been in the middle of California.

You can probably squeeze about a half an hour out of the current DC-Boston train time without spending a dime on infrastructure, simply by running trains more efficiently (especially in western Connecticut where I'd swear they're dispatching intercity trains behind the local commuter train given how pokey it goes).

Outside of that, there's probably about 100 miles of track that can support 220mph speed limits in current right-of-way (large sections in MA, MD, and RI). Adopting better trainsets (switch to EMUs from locomotive-hauled) and rebuilding track to higher speed limit standards would help there. The track from about Kingston, RI to New Rochelle, NY basically needs dedicated HSR. You can, for the most part, use the existing I-95 ROW for this, and east of New Haven, there's basically no takings you have to consider; west of New Haven, you need to do a lot more takings for curve straightening, and that is going to be an eminent domain disaster.

> There is no way you can make a viable passenger route between Chicago and LA; the distance is just way too large.

This is like arguing that the Trans-Siberian Railway is not viable because the distance is just way too large: the Trans-Siberian Railway is not even a high-speed railway.

It’s not viable. The United States is too wealthy for passengers to waste days on a train. They’ll simply fly in 4 hours. Furthermore, that Chicago to Los Angeles train already exists and runs daily.

This is the perspective of someone who doesn't understand how most people in the US live. Air travel is not affordable for many people.

Air travel is usually cheaper than Amtrak though.

To travel from NYC to Chicago on Aug. 21st:

Flight: $124 nonstop (2hr 40 min) or $85 with layover (7 hours)

Greyhound (bus): $170 (23.5 hours)

Amtrak: $144 (19.5 hours)

If you value your time and/or your money the flights usually win

The Trans-Siberian railway is about being able to move things from the Asian ports in the far east to the population centers in the far west. It has everything to do with a strategic defense decision by Russia, and was commissioned in an effort to allow imperialist Russia to wage war. To compare the Trans-Siberian Railway that is primarily used for freight to a passenger line from Chicago to LA is comparing apples and oranges.

> There is no way you can make a viable passenger route between Chicago and LA

Not sure what you mean by this. There is already a passenger route between Chicago and LA. Has been for a long long time. It's called the Southwest Chief it runs from Union Station LA to Union Station Chicago multiple times a day.

The crux of it is "viable" though. It's viable in the same way taking a cruise ship from LA to Miami is a viable form of transportation. You can do it, it does work, but it's more something you take because of the journey than as an effective way to travel itself. I'd also be shocked if it wasn't running at a pretty substantial subsidy.

> I'd also be shocked if it wasn't running at a pretty substantial subsidy.

Like most airports, you mean?

Sure, but most airports are being used. If you're subsidizing it heavily and it's still a novelty instead of a part of regular infrastructure, then it's a different story. I was checking quick, and Amtrak is claiming that the train from LA to Chicago this Friday is 100% booked, but I'm unsure how many travelers that is, and they're only running the one train that day. It also takes nearly 2 days.

I'm not against subsidizing train travel, but you should be getting something for it. You could decide to add a train between any two places and dump money into it until it's cheap enough to fill up. The question is if you're causing people to take the train who would have otherwise driven/flown, or if you're just subsidizing a new market.

I don't live in either city, but the concept of taking one of the other long-haul Amtrak lines from Chicago to Seattle has seemed interesting to me. It's not that expensive and it would be quite scenic. That said, if I took it, I'd be flying to Chicago, then taking the train, and then flying back home from Seattle. That's not replacing a flight/drive, it's creating net new flights. Is that the sort of train line that we should be subsiding the existence of? I can see the value of doing it as a matter of culture and history, but if the goal is to reduce the carbon emissions of flying and driving, it may actually be counterproductive.

It's so strange when people tell you how something is obviously impossible to have that has existed for their entire lives.

Maybe they think that trains are like planes, and that you have to stay on them for the entire Chicago-LA trip, rather than getting off (or on) at one of the 50 other stops?

Not "multiple times a day". Once per day. (That is, one departure per day in each direction. There are multiple trains en route. But if you want to leave Chicago for LA today, there's only one train you can use to do it.)

"There is no way you can make a viable passenger route between Chicago and LA"

The Amtrak Southwest Chief exists. It may be subsidized by more profitable routes in the northeast, but it is nearly always full.

What a terrible idea. Our freight rail system is the envy of the world. Why would we wreck it with government control just to serve a small number of commuters?

I want more passenger rail, but would like to pile on that the US rail network is freight in a way not seen in Europe.

When I looked at the numbers some time back, the US had something like 10x more freight rail than Europe [per capita], and Europe had [at least] 10x more passenger rail.

(I suspect the difference is two-fold: our major river network doesn't connect our hinterlands to our population centers in an efficient way, and our country is big enough to have a continental divide within a single economic zone.)

> (I suspect the difference is two-fold: our major river network doesn't connect our hinterlands to our population centers in an efficient way, and our country is big enough to have a continental divide within a single economic zone.)

My guess is it's scale. Chicago is the third largest city in the US, and yet it's 600 miles from any ocean-going port (the Great Lakes doesn't really count, since it's not practical to navigate for any interoceanic shipping). There's smaller cities in the interior of the US that are even further from the oceans. By contrast, in Europe, it's hard to get more than 400mi or so away from a major port.

Chicago used to ship to the coast through the Great Lakes.

The Erie Canal connected the Great Lakes to the Hudson River, and that trade made both New York and Chicago what they are today. But railroads became a thing and they just built a new one that followed the same route as the canal.

You can also ship down to the Mississippi from Chicago, but again you're dependent on a canal to bridge the gap to the navigable waterways.

Moving freight for long distances is a lot more efficient than moving people for long distances.

So instead of moving all of those good by train you'd prefer they all switch to trucks which emit far more carbon? All for your fervor dream of connecting rural counties with no population to a commuter rails system that no one would use in most of the country. If you disagree, I'd suggest you take Amtrak from St. Louis to Chicago and see how empty it actually is, you'll probably get your own car.

> I'd suggest you take Amtrak from St. Louis to Chicago and see how empty it actually is

I've taken it dozens of times. It's not even vaguely empty. Largely because the train starts in Chicago. It takes a bit to get to less full stretches.

edit: in my head I was thinking Chicago-St. Louis. The answer is actually simpler - the train is relatively empty from St. Louis to Chicago because it is the last leg of the trip. Chicago is the end of the line.

I've taken it multiple times and it's always a full train.

Look at Amtrak if you want to see a nationalized rail service. Outside of a few northeast lines, it's a complete disaster. It's hard to imagine how a national passenger network could be worse.

I must be crazy for enjoying taking the train, I've never even taken them in the northeast. The only disaster I see is that we're not building high speed lines, and that passenger trains take a backseat to anything that the oligarchs who own the lines want to run through.