How prevalent is train use in the U.S.?

Factual Questions
1

I ask because one of the things associated with U.S. culture is the road trip; it’s in films, books, TV. But the country is massive enough that driving from place to place could take days or weeks. It seems (to me, anyway) that there should be a lot of train use for long journeys in the U.S., but it doesn’t seem like it’s that widespread outside of metro systems.

Obviously air travel lets people fly relatively easily now, but even before it was widespread it just seems like train travel wasn’t all that popular. Freight trains, yes, passenger trains, no.

Am I way off here, or is train travel not that popular there? If not, why not?

2

The last time I thought about taking a train to a destination the cost was more than flying, and it would take two days instead of four hours. It’s my impression that train travel is more popular back east. I’ve heard that one can catch a train in Blaine (and certainly in Bellingham), and when I return home I may use it to go to Seattle just to see how it is. Except for when I was in Europe, the last time I travelled by train was when I was about five years old and went from San Diego to Anaheim.

3

I agree. The cost is a huge factor. I live in Maryland and took a train to NYC to see Spamalot in 2005. We booked the tickets 3-4 months in advance, took a direct route up the eastern corridor - about 170 miles. The cost? $145 round trip for each passenger! Basically $500 for me, wife and kidlet once you buy a couple of coffees and a danish in the buffet car.

You can fly to LaGuardia (sorta kinda NYC) for $99 and sometimes $49 from Baltimore. I could drive to NYC and back for about 16 gallons of gas - $40 but parking would be a big factor with flying and driving.

It was the first time I have ever used Amtrak and was frankly blown away by the cost.

4

AFAIK Amtrak has two major markets; commuters who don’t travel far enough to fly but don’t want to drive, and senior citizens who can take the time to travel the country.

5

If you just want a broad generalization, it is exceedingly unpopular and non-existent for the vast majority of the U.S. by land area. Most people will have never taken a train to any destination other than novelty trains that give us a feel for what it used to be like. There are trains on the upper Eastern seaboard and the West Coast as well as a few lines in places like Chicago but that is about it. Am-Track is the name of our federally subsidized passenger train outfit and it tends to bleed money.

Here is Boston, we have one of the vanishingly few high-speed train systems from New York all the way down to Washington D.C. but most people find that an airline shuttle system is a better fit for them. The sheer land area between our cities puts us at a large disadvantage when it comes to rail lines and our population as a whole isn’t used to them so the airlines usually win out based on both cost and speed. For most routes, air travel (or bus if you feel like looking experiencing what it feels like to be truly poor) is the only available mode of transportation.

It would take 60+ hours to travel coast to coast by train so most people don’t consider it at all.

6

For comparison, I just ran a fare search from London to Manchester (about the same as Baltimore to NYC) on National Rail and got a fare of 25 quid each way - $80.

And that wasn’t the cheapest!

7

No cite handy, but I believe that since its formation around 1971, Amtak, the national intercity carrier, has only had about 1-2% of the intercity travel market. Commuter operations, most of which are managed by local metro transit authorities, have a higher share.

The reasons for the low numbers are legion, but mostly derive from the fact that until Amtrak was formed, rail passenger carriage was the responsibility of private railroads, rather than of a nationalized system, and theoretically run as a for-profit operation. Thing is, when people began abandoning rail for air (faster) or automobile (more conveniient) travel in the '40s and '50s, most railroads lost interest in money-losing passenger traffic. Passenger trains began to be seen by them as impediments to getting freight over the road, and most railroads began to eliminate passengers trains as fast as they could get permission from the government.

Amtrak came about mostly because if it hadn’t, there likely would be no, or very little, national long-distance passenger rail service. For all its life it has been a) dependent on government subsidy for its a large proportion of its capital; b) a political football with its year-to-year funding subject to the whims of Congress, and c) dependant on the freight carriers for access to most of its right of way outside of the Boston-New York-Washington corridor, which it owns.

Today, Amtrak operates a ridiculously sketchy national service, simply because that’s all it can afford, even with subsidy. Train frequencies are simply not enough to make it a practical travel option in many areas (Houston, with one of the largest metro populations in the country is served by one, train, three days a week!) but the government would likely take a lot of flack if it were to increase subsidies enough to expand service to a useful level. Meanwhile, while the freight railroads are obligated to give Amtrak trains priority by mandate, they often fail to do so; many trains, especially in the west, are routinely hours late more than half the time.

Although the carrier has managed to stagger along for more than thirty years, it has come close to shutting down a couple of times since 2000. Without a steady source of capital, and a commitment to on-time service, its position is prbably untenable, and one is likely to see major changes to the system in the next few years: most likely a shutdown of the national system, with certain routes turned over to state governments to operate if they wish. The Northeast corrider is the most economically viable part of the system and would likely remain Amtrak-operated, were the above to happen.

8

As I said, the last time I looked the train was more expensive for my trip. But I’ve just looked again (different destination from before).

Amtrack round-trip from Los Angeles to Seattle departing June 1st and returning June 14th: $200
Alaska Airlines round-trip from Los Angeles to Seattle, departing June 1st and returning June 14th: $344.60

But the flight is two and a half hours each way. The train is 34 hours each way. I can drive to/from Seattle in half the time comparied to the train!

9

Shagnasty has got it right. It’s a shame, but I guess it’s because of the size of the U.S. When I lived in Switzerland, I had a national rail pass (with photo ID and all) that allowed me to just jump on a train over the weekend simply for the ride itself. One weekend I was going to Salzburg, and I was alone in my compartment. Three really cute Austrian girls were in the compartment upwind, and they wrote a little note that said “Come over” (in German) and tied it to a string and they let the note drift from their window into mine. I promptly followed their order.

On Amtrak, you can’t even open the window.

But my understanding is that only the Eastern seaboard and the LA to San Diego routes are profitable for Amtrak. When possible, I always go to San Diego from LA by train, because it usually is just as fast as driving, and the part of the route in San Diego County is great, because it goes mostly along the coast, and you go through all those protected wetland lagoons, as well as by San Onfre (nuclear reactor site and border patrol stop point). Of course, they don’t stop the train to check for papers, so I’ve always wondered why someone who pays a cayote $1,000 to get from Mexico to LA can’t shell out the extra $29 to take the train instead of the Greyhound.

[SIGH]Trains are enough to make me move back to Europe[/SIGH]

There is still talk of a maglev train from LA to SF. I think it might actually work out.

10

You may be overestimating the size. To drive from Los Angeles to New York, 2900 miles (4670 km), takes only 50 hours of continuous driving.

11

Continuous driving, sure. If you want to stop along the way, spend a few days somewhere (as seems to be common in road trip films) it could take longer. Weeks is a bit too much, though, yeah.

12

If the U.S. had high speed trains, the equation might differ. But tracks in the U.S. are designed for freight train use primarily and passenger train use secondarily. Therefore train travel takes about as long as car travel.

And there’s the answer. With a car and with the interstate highway system, you can go anywhere you want at a speed equaling a train. You can in fact go to many more places much more directly. And when you get there you can just drive to your destination, instead of needing to rent a car.

Trains just don’t make any financial or practical sense over the huge distances in the U.S. People keep talking over and over about trains: high-speed rail between cities; light rail within cities; downtown to downtown travel among cities. When you break down the realities in each of those situations you find huge costs, enormous infrastructure requirements, and a lack of advantages that would persuade sufficient Americans to put aside the cars that they love to death.

Americans love cars and hate trains. It’s hard to see any reason for that to change without an enormous disruption to our current society.

13

$$$.

I enjoy flying. But I love traveling by train. Whenever possible, I’ll choose train over plane every time. But until Amtrak gets a fair share of the subsidies that now go almost exclusively to the airlines, its future will remain in doubt.

14

Airlines aren’t paid direct subsidies by the federal government. The closest thing to a direct subsidy is that airlines are paid for agreeing to make their planes available on demand to the government as part of the “Reserve Air Fleet”. But so are railroads paid for reserve usage. Airports and air traffic controllers are paid for by tax dollars — but so are train stations.

15

I am a rail enthusiast, and even I tend to fly.

I caught the train to Melbourne (for the experience), and it took 11 hours and cost A$140. I flew home in 1 hour 20 minutes for A$110.

On the other hand, the train is fun. It wasn’t too uncomfortable, and the train picks you up and drops you off in the city centre, and not some airport out in the sticks. So, actually my plane fare home in the example I gave was slightly more expensive than the train when you include airport transfers, and a LOT more expensive if you allow that the train represented a night’s free accommodation.

There is a rail renaissance underway across the globe. Trains will NEVER recapture their glamorous glory days, but thing will be better (and already are) than the nadir of the 70s/80s. It just needs to be planned well, and not like the wasteful, unprofitable lines that characterised the original spread of rail in the US, Australia, and elsewhere outside of Europe and Asia. Trains are much more door-to-door than aeroplanes, and that’s got to be a key selling point. Like any form of transport, rail has its limitations. IF we know those, and work within them, there is a lot of potential. Americans will start to realise this when they can no longer afford to love their cars.

16

Like Johnny L.A.'s experience, I checked into trains for a trip to NM in which I’d be doing a major renovation on my brother’s house. The train cost alone was double that of a rental car, didn’t include a sleeper, and my tools would be treated as freight, not slated to arrive along with me and my carry on, but several days later. Avis and a corporate discount got me a Grand Am with space for tools at less than half the train fare. Add in fuel and Motel 6, and the only advantage to train is that you aren’t driving.

17

Except for the occasional $15billion bailout for the airlines, compared to the $1.2billion for Amtrak. Not to mention the perennial call for Amtrak to be able to support itself entirely by its own profits, and have its federal subsidies elminated entirely. Which threat is never aimed at the airlines.

18

(Sorry; the above was in response to Walloon.)

19

Regardless of how fast trains you use, segmenting the entire country with a convinient network of high speed rail is not realistic. The distance from me to Atlanta is over 2500 miles (~4000 km, about the distance from Hamburg to Madrid and back, right?). If you built a direct high speed rail line to Atlanta from San Francisco, it would still take at least 24 hours considering you have to cross two mountain ranges. US has a lot of destinations, including some completely inaccessible by rail using current technology even in theory. Connecting them all in some sort of a transfer mesh would be insanely expensive and pointless. Right now the train ride SF -> ATL goes through Chicago, transfer to DC, transfer to Atlanta and takes almost 80 hours. I can drive it in under two days.

Driving to Atlanta for one person is more expensive than a roundtrip airplane ticket, yet people still do it! It’s just simply fun and feels free. We have freeways everywhere but freeways are a lot easier to maintain and are a lot cheaper than high speed railways. To make an efficient high speed rail system you’d need to roughly match all interstate freeways with a railway line of sufficient capacity and speed. I don’t know for sure but I don’t think that’s realistic.

20

It isn’t realistic, and that’s why you don’t do it.

As I said, I’m a rail enthusiast, but I’m not silly. A lot of enthusiasts and apologists for various forms of transport do themselves more harm than good. I would never suggest that you need to be able to get from any US city to any other US city by high speed rail, but you certainly need to look at the proper place for rail alongside air and road. The North East of the US is a classic example of a place crying out for European style high speed rail (beyond the Acela), but I’d not seriously suggest you’d want to do NY-LA that way. If you have two large cities about 100 - 400 miles apart, and you can route trains right into the downtown areas of them both, rail will absolutely shit all over air (to use a technical term).

FTR, I’m not a big fan of maglev and other “weird” technologies beyond anything other than very specialised roles in certain parts of the world. Orthodox standard gauge track should still be used. US track still uses 19th century technology in a lot of places, and that has to change to allow for high speed, but if you can’t have European TGV-style trains in some areas, “tilt train” technology would be ideally suited for the US experience where you need to squeeze better performance out of substandard track.