“Trains wouldn’t work in the US, we’re too spread out”
Meanwhile, we did have a near-ubiquitous rail network a century ago and destroyed it.
Meanwhile, the US road network is the single most economically expensive undertaking in human history and has achieved complete ubiquity in almost every lived location in the country, all of it costing more per mile than your average rail line, much of it literally poured over old rail line.
Meanwhile, Europe is the size of the US and achieves equivalent rail density with far less investment.
Meanwhile, China is larger than the US, has an order of magnitude more people, an even more dispersed population, and achieved high speed rail ubiquity in less than two decades.
Anyone who tells you ubiquitous rail cannot work in the US because of our size and density is either disingenuous, misled, or ignorant.
edit - Or they’re doing a bit!
Reminds me of my home city where people argued that there was no way to incorporate urban rail into the city, but luckily the town is crisscrossed by bike trails. The bike trails were literally the rail bed from our urban train system that got torn out in the 50s.
I love and use rails-to-trails myself, but I can’t shake the feeling that they’re essentially motornormative culture scapegoating cyclists to bury any possible hope of reviving rail networks. The carbrained planner says “No you can’t put the rails back in, you’d displace the cyclists!” While displacing cyclists every time they refuse to include cycling infrastructure on streets.
I have similar feelings but I tell myself this: If nothing else rails to trails maintains the right of way. The carbrained city planner says you’ll displace the cyclists, but in 30 years that planner will be retired or dead. What would kill railroads forever would be carving up the ROW and selling it off.
Occasionally, in my most cynical moments, I have the same thought.
They also feel like something designed by someone who hasn’t ridden a bike since they were 16.
I get it. “Might was well” use land where the right-of-way is already clear, etc. But a miles of straightaways followed by gentle curves designed for a train don’t make for a very engaging bike ride. I’m sure this could exist, but I haven’t been on any that would actually be useful as bicycle infrastructure. They mostly go from nowhere to nowhere and there are few options to get on or off the ‘trail’.
While I agree with the guilt of enjoying rail trails
- I no longer cycle on them: it’s not enjoyable because they’re so crowded
- we have some that are very useful for getting places, usually train stations
- the one across my town goes through neighborhoods, so I’m sure they’re happy it’s not trains
- there’s a plan to build my towns third train station, and one of the requirements is connecting the rail trails
- I realized just last summer that my favorite diner is only 1 mile walk if I take the new rail trail!
Straight cycling routes with gentle curves and low grades and few intersections are great, what are you talking about? So much better than bike paths crammed next to a road or river with random twists and turns to get around car infrastructure, or worse, winding and convoluted neighborhood routes with lots of stop signs that make it take forever to get anywhere. If a trail goes from nowhere to nowhere, it would probably not have gotten frequent rail service anyway and is still useful to some people as a bike path.
I suppose it helps I’m on a fast ebike though and want to make my 11 mile commute in a reasonable amount of time.
The bad ones I’ve been on are:
- between old small town stations, so now it’s suburb to suburb and you can’t access anything in between so they’re useless for commuting. If the rail-to-trail revamp continued on it would go on through the former rail hub of the local large town, but that part hasn’t been built out yet, and may never be because at some point they’ll have to deal with crossing (hopefully over / under) highways and stroads that have been built up since.
I have a proper bike trail in my home city that goes along a river and it’s amazing that it winds along for dozens of miles with stuff to look at and breezes. You’re not confined to a corridor with overgrowth on both sides causing stifling heat that’s trying to imitate a highway. It’s a pleasant commute if you happen to live along it and a relaxing recreational ride if you’re not.
- long gradual grade. Coast one way, which is nice, Sisyphean bike ride with no rest for miles the other way.
I might’ve come off harsh, I do generally like rails-to-trails. They’re better than nothing, and you’re right that having an ebike takes the arduousness out of it, but they’re very much a hand-me-down version of proper infrastructure. I would rather have the passenger light rail service.
In the 1900s the small MS town I’m thinking of had a few hundred people and a rail station. You could pay the inflation adjusted ~$15 for all the transfers to go back and forth to the coast ~100 miles away. We didn’t discard passenger rail in the US because it wasn’t useful, but because it was hard to extract profit out of the public service.
My Uncle Jimmy assembles tires at the plant downtown. Why do you want to put him out of a job?!?!
Not saying I disagree, but I can already hear the response: “well population density is far less in the US” What’s the response to that? That they can then just connect the more populated areas? Or point to the past, where there was rail all over the US?
Of course the response is to just start of with high speed rail connecting major cities in high mobility demand, high population areas. You got plenty of those. Looking at population density of the entire country to decide on the feasibility of better passenger rail in the most densely populated regions is dumb.
Europe and China are both bigger than the contiguous 48 states. The US is only “bigger” because of Alaska. Alaska is like 1/4th of Europe or something.
Wanna be even more upset, fellow Americans? Take a look at what we used to have:
It was so widespread that I’ve never been to a small town, in the region I grew up in, that didn’t have an old passenger rail station that was repurposed into something else. Your map starts well into the 1900s, my area started being built up hundreds of years before that. Shit my house is almost 100 years older, alone.
My current small town has THREE, ffs, but no, this rail can only be used for freight, because reasons
Metro Atlanta’s only passenger rail station that still exists, a tiny thing on Peachtree Road in Brookwood (just north of Midtown), was originally a commuter stop on the way to the big, beautiful stations downtown. They were all torn down decades ago.
I’ve just realized I don’t even know how many traditional train stations (including ancillary commuter ones, but not including streetcars or the modern subway system) the city/metro area even had. It’s gotta be dozens, at least.
Phoenix Arizona literally doesnt have a train station at all. You have to go 30 miles / 48km south to a suburb to catch a train and even then your destinations are heavily limited as you can only board a train from there 3 times a week.
Its a massive building downtown that just doesnt, supposedly because of failed union negotiations 3+ decades ago. Yeah we just let corporations get rid of everything for “efficiency” of cheap roads.
Freight Trains in USA, for comparison.
You’ve got plenty of trains and train lines, but your government, unlike most of the world, refuses to subsidise public transit, so they all go for the option that’s most profits-per-km, Freight
Another one I found:
Apparently this is a weak point for Europe, and even other rail systems like China’s. The US has a relatively efficient cargo rail network, while more stuff is shipped across the EU in trucks than it probably should be.
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Well, Electric Trucks are prevalent now, so still pretty efficient
Eh. I wasn’t specifically thinking of emissions, but overall cost, manpower, and road congestion.
Diesel cargo trains dramatically reduce all that vs an electric 18 wheeler, even if EV trucks are prevalent. Though I suspect they’re still pretty rare.
Electric Trucks are prevalent now,
That would be nice, but only ~4% of the new trucks in the EU where electric in 2025. And there are a lot of old trucks which are almost exclusively ice-vehicles.
edit: source
Yeah, UK is the worst train service in Europe, that’s nothing new.
That’s cause the UK privatised 90% of rail in the 1980s
Try Barcelona suburban rail service (aka ‘Rodalies RENFE’).
Here in Canada we have more former abandoned rail then active rail lines. And around where I am people are fighting to stop the old rail lines being used as biking and walking trails. YAY
I feel like many people oppose rails to trails because then there’s much less of a chance it will become rails again, so you have to let go of the hope of any sort of trains coming back. Though becoming a trail is certainly a lot better than the track land being split up and sold off to developers, since then there’s no chance.
Yeah, that is not at all the case here. There is no new passenger rail even as a dream and these rails used to be everywhere. We are talking about at least 40 years since a train was ever down these lines, and they have sat there doing nothing this whole time.
I live in Jersey, and we have tons of them. And fortunately they are turning some into pedestrian paths, rails-to-trails style, but we have literal (albeit old) infrastructure for rail lines between places that are only accessible via rail by going to Newark, changing, and hopping on a different line. We’re talking hours for a 30 mile ride.
I need me some eminent domain. There’s some major hubs west of Newark that you can only drive between.
But yeah, seeing them turned into trails is at least better than nothing. But I want moooorrreee.
There are some trail networks in the eastern provances that allow people to go snowmobiling for weeks at a time on groomed trails (former rail lines) and I have known people that is what they did for their vacation each year, stopping in at all the small towns on the way.
Funny thing, the UK we had the opposite problem, people fighting to stop the reopening of lines that have become walking and biking trails (usually for freight train profit)
We also converted many of our local innercity lines into into ELR, which is slower but it’s also cheaper and they’re all loop lines with a schedule of 1 every 5-10 minutes
Why ? that can’t be dangerous if no trains are running
Land owners have gotten used to just using the land for free, and they don’t want people near their land and other self serving things.
oh, ok. Landowner things I guess
Asshole landowner things yes.
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Situation in Europe is far from ideal. In most cases it’s cheaper to fly than to travel by rail across multiple country borders – which I’ve always found odd, considering the journey takes much longer and each connection brings some degree of uncertainty.
18 min delays aren’t uncommon. Or your train being outright cancelled, announced only in the local language (fair enough).
The whole system is chronically underfunded, probably in part thanks to the car lobby
I once heard of someone who had to go from somewhere in the south of England to London, and took a plane to Berlin and another to London because it was cheaper than the train.
I don’t understand why plane tickets are so cheap compared to plane tickets. Part of it is that plane fuel isn’t allowed to be taxed while other forms of energy are, but there’s got to be more. The situation is insane.
Anyway, let’s at least tax plane fuel.
That’s insane, especially considering Berlin is pretty deep into Germany. If it were Brussels or Schiphol – just a hop across the channel – I’d kind of get it.
Plane tickets have been getting more expensive. Recent (EU?) legislation places an extra tax on short-haul flights that would be 2h or less by train. The days of 30 EUR Ryanair flights seem to be a thing of the past. And the Epstein War has driven up prices for the foreseeable future.
Still cheaper to fly in most cases though.
Anyway, I’ve never been able to make up my mind about the right way forward. Make flying punishingly expensive so as to force travelers toward already expensive, but environmentally better alternatives? Or coordinate to reduce train ticket prices, e.g. through a system of subsidies? The latter is probably a lot harder to realize
Why not a balance between both? Use additional plane revenue to improve rail travel in the short- and middle-term?
The most ridiculous situation I came across was getting the train from Biarritz in France to Bilbao in Spain and back. I heard the phrase “It’s another country” uttered in both French and Spanish - turns out they really hate each other! We had to walk a few minutes from France across the border to another station in Spain.
Yup, I live in Warsaw, its hard to book sleeping train to Vienna. There are maybe 15-25 beds available everyday. In the meantime for the same prive or lower you can fly to Vienna. And probably more than 2000 people fly there
It’s cheaper to fly because of all the subsidies for flights
Cities in the US are simply too far apart. Do you really think you can maintain a train route that runs from the suburb of Houston to the suburb of Houston to the suburb of Houston to the suburb of Houston to the suburb of Austin to the suburb of Austin to the suburb of Austin to the suburb of Fort Worth to the suburb of Fort Worth to the suburb of Fort Worth to the suburb of Dallas to the suburb of Dallas to the suburb of Dallas to the suburb of Dallas?
It would never work.
Have you seen how empty Texas is? And how flat it is? It’s kinda ideal train territory. If Norway and Switzerland can set up train routes, the Great Plains certainly can.
Have you seen how empty Texas is?
I live in Texas and I can assure you it is anything but empty. The major metroplexes are so sprawled that they’ve started banging into one another. Austin and San Antonio are functionally one super-city at this point. Ft Worth and Dallas started mingling decades ago. Houston has fully consumed six other neighboring cities over the last 40 years and is - itself - surrounded by suburban echoes of itself in the Woodlands, Sugar Land, Clear Lake, and Katy. You can drive dozens of miles in any direction and never leave “the city”.
It’s kinda ideal train territory.
Absolutely. Or, at least, supplementing/replacing the big metro arteries (I-10, I-45, the various mega-loops) with rail would make a lot more sense than just stacking overpasses on top of one another.
Fair enough! Sorry to generalize about the geography of a state I don’t live in. I just drove through Amarillo a couple years back and it was so empty out there that it made a lasting impression 😅
I just drove through Amarillo a couple years back and it was so empty out there
No, that’s fair. Although I think Amarillo is really cursed by the smell of all that livestock. Once you get down out of the Panhandle, population density picks up quite a bit. The Big Three - Houston / Austin / Dallas - are enormous urban smears across the landscape.
So its not empty, but everything is super far apart. Which is it? Cant argue two sides of the same coin
Practically speaking, the problem is low housing density. Ideally, you want a bus stop at the front of a ten story apartment rather than at the end of a half-mile long cul de sac.
Everyone has to own a car, in large part, because everyone has to own a half-acre of turf with a ranch home squatting in the center.
Ehm i beg your pardon but Switzerland is packed with people.
And super inconvenient mountains that you have to route tracks above, around, and through.
Cities in the US are far apart because of car-centric design, not the other way around. If we just invested more in other forms of transit, then our cities would not be so sprawling.
Cities in the US are far apart because of car-centric design
Okay, dropping the act here, that’s not actually true. Cities in the US aren’t far apart when you consider the population-dense coastal areas (where large portions of the historical rail network are concentrated). That was my intended joke. You’ve got numerous large, increasingly dense suburbs all concentrated along highway corridors that run through urban centers. Like, we have everything you need for a successful rail line. In some cases we even have the rail lines. We just don’t have terminals with commuter trains running on a schedule.
Oh, it was a bit. Yikes you had me triggered lol
I’m gonna be honest: you fooled me and I almost removed your initial comment as misinformation.
Well, for context, I come from the Chicago area which does have commuter trains but is still a massive sprawling hellscape because everything - including the train stations - is designed for cars. So it’s true that everything is too far apart there, because the car-centric design itself makes it so.
I guess I should specify - everything in the US is too far apart to be a good environment for people, because we built it that way. It is not too far apart for public transport to be built, though. Building public transport (as well as walking and cycling infrastructure) and specifically building less car infrastructure is the way to make it less far apart and make it better for people.
Cities in the US are spread apart because of car-centric zoning. It’s the laws governing land use that drive the infrastructure design, not the other way around.
(Note that I said “spread apart,” not “far apart,” by the way. I’m talking about travel within cities, not between them. Intercity travel has no excuse to not be rail regardless.)
Zoning and laws like parking minimums are part of it, but it’s also literally the government paying for car infrastructure because that is a routine and unquestioned part of government budgets while any spending on other forms of transit is heavily limited and it’s expected to turn a profit from fares, which roads never do. The spending on roads should be questioned, and spending on other forms of transit should be seen as an important public service.
This thread was started with a post on intercity rail. There are many parts of the US where highways have chronic congestion because they just can’t scale enough, nor could we afford to maintain them, where intercity rail would be a much better choice.
And effing Texas, are you really widening the Katy freeway again rather than consider a train?
There are many parts of the US where highways have chronic congestion because they just can’t scale enough, nor could we afford to maintain them, where intercity rail would be a much better choice.
The examples I can think of chronic congestion are pretty much all intracity (which I consider to include between the central city and its suburbs), not intercity (the long rural stretches between metro areas). Intercity rail is better than freeways (but more importantly, better than airplanes) for efficiency’s sake, but doesn’t necessarily have much to do with reducing congestion. Intracity rail (commuter rail, subways and streetcars) is what’s needed for reducing congestion.
The northeast corridor is an existing example of- both highways and airways are so over congested, you couldn’t get anywhere without train. Ever since Acela stared 20 years ago, I refuse to travel Bos—>nyc any other way. It’s too much hassle
There are compelling arguments for Colorado front range rail, although that’s closer to metro distance, and cascadia - Vancouver—>portland. Even Texas needs more than commuter rail: you have three major cities in. Nice triangle that would do better if you could connect their economies. And of course this where I claim California high speed rail is necessary at any price. Send all mY taxes there. Let’s make it so
Why not, if it’s the same distance?
You just don’t understand civil engineering!
The American physiognomy is incompatible with high speed tubes full of other commuters. You need to be physically separated by a large metal box. Unless, of course, you’re living in NYC, Chicago, Boston, or DC, for obvious reasons.
At the risk of feeding a troll, they really aren’t. Sweet spot for high speed rail is generally considered two cities 300-500 miles apart. That covers most of the US population
Sweet spot for high speed rail is generally considered two cities 300-500 miles apart.
Sure. But you could improve commute times significantly with intra-urban commuter rail even before you’re looking at big inter-metro HSR. All these mid-sized suburbs strung out along the freeways would benefit enormously from park-and-ride depots that linked to a metro line that doesn’t need to fight traffic to get into downtown.
i can’t tell whether you’re sarcastic
Is that US one real?
At best it’s inaccurate. I see several missing lines that I know exist because I lived near them.
Old map, perhaps?
More likely a new map, and the lines you’re thinking of have been shut down since the last time you checked.
(Or you’re thinking of train tracks in general, not specifically ones carrying passenger service, which is what this is a map of.)
Not that old. Between when Katrina wiped out the New Orleans-Jacksonville route in 2005 and when they partially restored the route in 2025. The only missing line I see is the Atlantic City line, which was out of service for about a week after Hurricane Sandy in 2012 and about 8 months for signal modernization work in 2018-2019, so it is probably an accurate map of the available services in late 2018. It’s worth noting that most of the lines on the map have one train per day per direction or fewer also, so if anything this map undersells the difference between US rail service and European rail service
I see several missing lines that I know exist because I lived near them.
It’s also missing every single rail line north of Copenhagen. The map is apparently a simplification on both continents.
Virginia, by any chance? I’m pretty there are state routes not on this Amtrak map
Or commuter rail? It’s hard to tell but I don’t see anything I recognize as commuter or metro rail. This looks like Amtrak intercity only.
All three state supported VA rail routes are on this map, along with the Cardinal, the Crescent, and the I-95 Amtrak routes. The S-Line isn’t, but it also doesn’t exist yet. Same with the Commonwealth Corridor. VRE shares tracks with Amtrak, so it is there, but does not have any visible effect on this map.
I think it’s only Amtrak, the main Intercity passenger rail service. There’s a ton more freight rail, and hundreds of smaller regional rail services.
It’s not just Amtrak, you can see Metra, LIRR, Metro North, and MBTA routes on the map around their respective cities. And I’m not convinced there are hundreds of regional rail services in America, maybe if you count heritage railroads, but even then I think you won’t be getting too far above 100 and those don’t actually take people from point A to point B generally, so it’s arguable that they count as passenger rail service
It’s worse than that, because it doesn’t show service level. The northeast corridor (Boston—>nyc—>dc) have great train frequency (even then they need to run more trains on holidays).
I believe the long distance routes are like one train per day. You’d have to be really dedicated or really desperate to deal with such slow unreliable trains which such low frequency. I do believe they’re there only to preserve track and collect votes rather than be useful. At this rate maybe in another century ….
For now yes, but the one from Oklahoma city to Fort Worth TX will be ending in 90 days.
The trains anywhere in the US except the Northeast are far too slow, infrequent, and unreliable to plan around. Delays frequently are measured in 10s of hours on Amtrak.
Europe is not a single country. Sadly things are not the same everywhere. South-eastern european countries still lack the infrastructure required for secure transport with trains.
Europe is not a single country.
Workin’ on it
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Please yes
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South Eastern European countries need to become less corrupt and a culture change, for sure. Then they can make headway in so many things.
Americans be like: Chicago
the only cool part is the cool place they all converge.
Chicago?
yesh. sweet home.
Overlaying the freight map over the passenger one is even more depressing
You have trains, a shitton, but “public transport isn’t profitable”
for some reason i always thought that the US is much larger than europe, but no, they’re roughly equal size.
The biggest difference between the United States and Europe is their respective population densities. Trains are less of a convenience and more of necessity. If everyone had a vehicle, it would be nearly impossible just to drive down the road.
Everyone support Murkan Cowboy Capitalism, and get out there and drive big clumsy SUVs!
wait till you see not only passenger trains but all trains lines in brazil, and for reference brazil is bigger than USA if you exclude Alaska and all random island USA owns
Opel corsa?
Yes, the most American of cars, a small German hatch that isn’t sold in the US
