I’ve taken two long trips, a round-trip from Denver to Albany, N.Y., and a one-way from Denver to Miami. I got a sleeper both times. It wa$ expen$ive. Meals were included with the room, and were quite good. The trains were all pretty close to on time.
I enjoyed it, very much. But the cost is prohibitive for regular use, so I mostly drive now.
The simple answer is there is hardly any train service in the U.S. and, where it exists, it almost always makes economic sense to drive because gas is $2.00/gal. The exception is for people who feel that their time behind the wheel is wasted while their time aboard a train – meeting people, reading, seeing billboardless scenery, snoozing, drinking, whatever – is not wasted.
Can you be more specific — which airline, when?
Indeed. We see the same thing in the Windsor-Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal corridor of southern Ontario and into Quebec. Reliable downtown-to-downtown service over standard tracks, reasonable prices, and no airport transfers. Train stations connect to subway stations in both Toronto and Montreal; Ottawa city centre is a ten minute cab ride from the station.
Compare that to the Calgary-Red Deer-Edmonton (Alberta) corridor that has no rail service. Two hundred miles of highway that closes occasionally due to winter weather, making road travel between the cities unreliable in winter. And air prices on these short routes are outrageous, the air travel is time-consuming owing to security checkpoints and other lineups, and Edmonton’s main airport is a half-hour away from Edmonton itself meaning you’re going to have to rent a car or take an expensive cab. It is silly to fly between these places. If anywhere was calling out for train service, this Alberta corridor is it.
But Edmonton (or Calgary) to Toronto? Roughly four hours by air, but two days and two nights by rail. Guess what is preferred for travelling such a distance? I like trains myself, and have been a passenger on some longhauls, but air does tend to work out to be cheaper and faster over the long distances between places that exist in North America.
In some areas, maybe, but this is no longer true in the U.S.
In every major metro area, more people live in the suburbs than in the urbanized center. Getting from a random point in the suburbs to the airport is easier, faster, and cheaper than from that point to downtown. That’s because cities are built for cars and so are airports. It’s easy to park thousands, even tens of thousands of cars around a flat open space. Getting cars into downtowns and finding parking space for sufficient cars to take an appreciable piece of business away from the airports is in and of itself cost prohibitive. The alternatives - massive rental car availability or new rail/bus lines into downtown - are also unfeasible.
Central downtown train stations made sense when the city was essentially the entire populated area. Taxi, bus, and train could handle movement around the city; hotels could be built up around the stations; an entire infrastructure could be built without massive disruption. And an overwhelming percentage of the population lived in the northeast, with cities every 100 miles. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington made a corridor along which rail travel was sensible.
This is unimaginable today. The population and the business is shifting to the faraway west, where cities are 400-600 miles apart. These cities don’t have downtowns in the older sense, and certainly don’t have concentrations of populations and public transportation the way the older northeastern cities did. Point to point travel does not exist in the U.S. for the vast majority of travelers. Trains are not door-to-door. They are nowhere to nowhere with nothing on either end but annoyances and inconvenience. Outside of a very few already existing corridors in the U.S. rail is not a solution; it is not even an improvement over what exists today.
Forget rail. Make better buses. 
About 25million people rode on Amtrak in 2005
About 38% of those trips (9.3Million) were in the so-called North East Corridor - Washington-Philly-NY-Boston. In answer to the OP don’t think it is “uncommon” for someone in DC, going to NYC to consider Amtrak as a viable option (driving, special Buses and Air are others - but Amtrak would almost certainly be in the mix for most folks - subject to time, ultimate destination and price).
The other 62% of the Amtrak trips are spread over the ~90% of the country not in that narrow corridor and the numbers show regular Train travel is obviously much more uncommon outside of that corridor- for all the reasons listed here already.
To give you an example of how different the northeast is compared to the rest of the country, New York City is the terminus of not one, but two of the busiest commuter railroads on the continent. In fact, they’re the top two.
Nah, you can do it in 32 hours and 51 minutes.
To answer the OP anecdotally, I live in the Baltimore/Washington area and once or twice a year I take the train to NYC. I often come back home on the same day. Although it costs more than driving or flying (sometimes), it’s much more convenient than either of those options, since a having car is a liability in the city. It’s a little faster than driving, since delayed trains, while not unheard of, are rarer than traffic jams. You can also sleep on the train, which is generally not recommended while driving.
As far as flying between Baltimore and NYC, while it was relatively quick, easy, and cheap 10+ years ago, with security these days I just wouldn’t consider it anymore. Door-to-door it would probably take about as long as the train and be much more of a PITA. A small saving in time or money wouldn’t be worth the hassle of putting up with airport security, IMO.
Just to give you more idea on what it’s like in the US (and outside the Northeast): I live in a small city in the South, population 160,000 (Huntsville, Alabama to be exact.) The railroad goes through the city, but it’s for freight trains only. There isn’t a single train station here.
The nearest train station is in Birmingham, Alabama, which is about 100 miles away. Exactly 2 trains stop at this station each day, one in each direction. Taking one of those trains, it takes 5 hours to get to Atlanta. Driving there usually takes about 2 hours.
Where I live, lots of people take the train to work (NJ-NYC). Sure beats driving.
In NJ there’s a new small commuter 34-mile passenger light rail line that runs along the river and makes about 20 stops and costs $1.25. Might not be a bad idea to have more city to suburb commuter trains. The parking at the stations is free and it saves people from having to park when they get to work.
When people say nobody takes the trains any more, they are not counting commuters. Huge numbers of people commute in and out of NYC from NJ daily by train. During peak hours the trains are packed. It’s the only thing that makes sense; driving would take longer and cost the same, if not more, given that you’d have to pay a toll to cross the Hudson River, plus the small fortune you’d have to pay to park, and with gas prices being what they are. I don’t know if it’s that way in or near other major cities.
It’s not uncommon to hear on the radio of half hour or hour-long delays at the river crossings during either morning or evening rush hours, so you have to add in the wasted gas and time sitting in traffic when you could be reading the paper or just closing your eyes and resting on the train.
It’s also possible now to get a train to Newark Airport, where a shuttle will take you to the gate.
In any time comparisons between flying and other means of transportation, including trains, you must also factor in that you now need an extra 2 hours at the major airports for security and check in procedures. In the time it took someone to get to the airport, wait to board, fly to Washington DC, retrieve baggage, get a taxi or rental car, and get anywhere, I could drive there. I’d never want to fly anyplace that was less than a six-hour drive.
As people keep saying, the rest of the country is nothing like the New York metro area (with the possible exceptions of Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago in lesser ways).
People here are not talking about commuter trains, and if they were trains would not work in the same way in western cities with no concentrated downtowns like those in now atypical older eastern cities.
A six-hour drive is nothing, except in that crowded northeastern corridor. I can’t get to NYC in a six-hour-drive and I live in New York State.
Unless you’re going from one city to an adjacent city in the northeast, there are extremely few six-hour drives anywhere in the country between major metro areas. The overwhelming majority of airplane passenger-miles are flown between destinations more than a six-hour-drive apart.
Trains are not a general solution. Living in or around NYC tends to blind you to that reality.
As far as I can tell, road trips are made for one of two reasons- either to drive from point A to point B and stop at whatever looks interesting along the way or a theme road trip. I know a group of people who took a road trip visiting baseball stadiums from Boston to Baltimore. Neither flying nor the train is very practical for those sorts of trips.
Some trips by train are fairly common- I know people who travel NYC-Albany by Amtrack. Without exception, they are people who don’t have use of a car to make the trip- on a trip that short, Amtrack doesn’t really save any time for a lot of people once you factor in travel to the station. It would save me at most half an hour- the drive takes 3-4 hours , the train is 2 1/2 hours plus about another hour from home to the station. Then when I get to Albany, I have to either rent a car ( which makes it more expensive than driving) or otherwise arrange transportation for while I’m there. It’s just not worth taking the train
How about southern California? I’m pretty sure the population density is closer to what is typical for western Europe (that of the whole state is similar to Spain’s). LA to San Francisco is a similar distance as London to Glasgow, which manages travel times well below what you could hope to drive it in, without a modern dedicatted high-speed line (see TheLoadedDog above)
I think you’re on the right lines here, in the way American and European infrastructures diverged - and the main reason is simple: World War 2. Mass car ownership came about later here, as did the infrastructure to go with it. Rebuilding railways was easier, in the short term (note that British railways were nationalised after the war, following on from necessary direct government control during the 40s). Although rail use has fallen massively since then, it hasn’t collapsed in the way it did in America.
The consequence has been an infrastructure in newer parts of America that is built around roads and air travel, not railways, making the growth of cities such as Las Vegas and Houston possible. Hence the explanations in this thread of how rail travel is not suited to these parts of the country. It’s not something you can change overnight, any more than you can make Rome into a car-friendly place!
Oh, forgot to add the protectionist ‘flag carrier’ approach of European governments towards air travel for some of that time, too.
Southern California’s large population growth spurts have occurred in the age of the automobile, and the region is extremely spread-out, with most trips not taking place between defined city centers. The notable intercity rail success in SoCal is Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner service between San Diego and Los Angeles (with some trains through to Santa Barbara), mentioned by guizot above. It’s the second most-used intercity route in the US after the (Boston-Washington) Northeast Corridor, with 2.5 million riders in FY2005. Metrolink (LA-area commuter rail) is also quite successful; although it has nowhere near the ridership of NYC or Chicago systems, it’s still fairly new.
In Northern California, geography and historical settlement patterns have made growth less sprawled than in SoCal, at least until the recent explosion of SF Bay Area housing prices brought the (cheaper, but more distant) Central Valley into the Bay Area’s commuter domain. So, for instance, Amtrak’s Capitol Corridor service between San Jose and Sacramento (some trains continuing to Auburn in the Sierra Nevada foothills) is the third most-used intercity route in the US, with 1.3 million riders in FY2005.
[Personal example: I live in the Silicon Valley, not far from San Jose, and frequently do consulting work at the University of California at Davis, near Sacramento. The distance is about 105 miles each way, which is a minimum of 2 hours and usually more like 3 with traffic. The train does it in about 2hrs 40min, and has a good on-time record. The one-way ticket is $23; the monthly pass for that trip would be $432 (I don’t make the trip anything like frequently enough to make the pass worthwhile, but there are many daily Bay Area <-> Sacramento commuters for whom it is worthwhile). The train cars are modern and bi-level (good because the views are much better than from the freeway), there’s a lounge / snack car (a couple of beers taster mighty good after a hard days’ work), 120V outlets and tables for laptops, and often a WiFi car. Really, taking the train is a no-brainer for me.]
Still in the Bay Area, the route taken by Caltrain between San Francisco and San Jose (and beyond) is old enough – dating back to 1863 – that most of the population of the SF Peninsula grew along the route, so it’s always had a built-in ridership. It’s unusual among US “commuter” lines in that, with the explosive growth of San Jose and Silicon Valley, both ends of the route are now “real” destinations fore both living and working. Thus, although San Francisco was originally the destination for most morning trains and origin for most evening trains, service is now much more symmetrical and it really fits the “intercity” rather than the “commuter” profile. Ridership is down slightly from the Silicon Valley “boom years” around 2000, but it’s a very important component of travel on the SF peninsula.
[There’s also ACE between Stockton and San Jose – at 86 miles, more “intercity” than “commuter”, but there are only 4 trains per weekday in each direction. So, although it’s successful on its own terms and worth it for the passengers (cheaper than – and time-competitive with – driving), it doesn’t make much of a dent in traffic on that commute route.]
As far as high-speed train service between SF and LA is concerned, that’s definitely a possibilty for the future since the air corridor is already heavily overburdened. The California High Speed Rail Authority plan is to run between downtown SF to downtown LA in 2.5 hours, with several suburban stops at either end to satisfy Exapno Mapcase’s objection. A spur to Sacramento in the North, and continuation to San Diego in the South, would link all of California’s main population centers. The trains would be TGV-style (not Maglev or other “exotic”), and total cost (2004 estimate) would be over $30 billion. Expensive, but not impossible.
[Currently, rail between the SF Bay Area and LA is either >12 hours and scenic (but very likely to be late) or >9 hours and boring (including a >2hr bus ride from Bakersfield to LA). Needless to say, neither of the current options take too many people out of their cars or away from airplanes.
I live in a much larger city in the Midwest – Columbus, Ohio – which also has no passenger train services, even though there used to be a passenger train station close to down town, and freight trains still use that. To get to Amtrak, I need to get to Cincinnati, Cleveland, Indianapolis or Toledo: 2 or 3 hours drive. And this is the largest city in Ohio, and the 15th largest city in the US (by incorporated city, not metro area), with a populaton around a million.
This hits at why I never use trains. Shortly after coming here 10 years ago I needed to make a trip to Washington DC (from Atlanta), a distance of 640 miles (and 10hrs 18 minutes to drive, according to MapQuest). I don’t like flying so thought it might be interesting to take the train and get a sleeper. The train takes nearly 14 hours though (avg speed 46mph), which was way too long and wouldn’t allow me to attend a meeting the day of arrival and get back that day. I had expected the trip to be 7 - 8 hours.
The British train system is nothing to write home about, but I regularly used to travel the 170 miles from Crewe to London, which took about 1hr 50 minutes (avg speed 93mph). London to Paris (285 miles) takes 2 hr 45 (avg speed 103mph) despite being hampered by going slowly through England and the tunnel.
Time and money. Oh…and, I’m not sure what the actual statitistics are, but it sure seems like trains crash more often than planes.