Step inside the sprawling factory in California where the largest fleet replacement in Amtrak’s 55-year history is coming together piece by piece.
Maybe I missed it but some of the longest routes don’t have internet. A number of people would take trains if they could work while on the trip.
I didn’t see that in the article, though they did talk about electric outlets at every seat
Amtrak’s Coast Starlight line on the west coast has wifi, but it’s unusably glitchy. The trips I’ve taken haven’t been crowded, so I doubt it was an overuse issue. My guess is either the upstream connection is junk or the trains aren’t kitted out with hardware capable of meaningful QoS (either from misconfiguration or inability).
You would think they would drop a starlink and some wifi APs on every route for an easy win.
I remember looking at US train ticket prices once, and finding that they cost nearly as much as plane tickets for the same journey. Is that still true?
An airplane trip across Canada is $200 (almost - yvr-yhz) , and you’re pressed in like cattle for 8 hours.
A rail trip across Canada is $18,000, and you’re lucky if you’re in a little stateroom for 7 days of a 14-day trip because the bulk seating is torture.
Yes, like the post office majority republican fascists have worked diligently to kill it. One result of that is the high price.
Depends on where you are. There are areas on the northeast corridor that (if bought in advance enough) are a pretty good deal. The other major thing is that in some instances you’re going from center city to center city, meaning no transportation to/from the airports.
That being said, it’s no guarantee the train will be cheaper.
The cost problem for medium or long distance trains is the cost of human labor.
In a given 10 hour work day (apparently common for airline flight attendant) how many flights can that worker work? Let say New York to Los Angeles flights. So the answer is about 2 flights per day. Compare that to the time it takes by train for the same distance, which is about 77 hours. Because of this length this means you also have to have more than one set of crew available to the train passengers.
The staff have to be paid significantly longer on the train to transport far fewer people simply because of more elapsed time. It may be worth it for a nation to subsidize long distance train travel, but understand that that is the problem with profitability vs airplanes that can simply move more people in less time, requiring few paid human hours of labor.
The staff have to be paid significantly longer on the train to transport far fewer people simply because of more elapsed time.
I haven’t run the numbers, but I feel like that discrepancy is made up for by the number of passengers trains can carry, considering trains can carry way more people than a plane.
A single Boeing 777-9 can hold 426 passengers.
So yes, a passenger train can carry more, but only about half again as many. So because of how much slower it is, the plane can carry more in the same amount of time.
Amtrak works best on two routes: the Northeast Corridor between Richmond, Virginia, and Boston, Massachusetts, and the car train between DC and Florida, where they’ll bring your automobile so that you have it at your destination.
I just looked at ticket prices on the Northeast Corridor. The very popular DC to NYC route is between $25 and $55 per way if purchased at least 2 months in advance, depending on the popularity of a particular time. A plane ticket would be probably $150-$350.
Plus the actual seat experience is akin to business class on an airplane, so maybe the better comparison is $400-$1000 for the equivalent airplane.
But that’s basically the only route where downtown to downtown is faster than airplanes (because both DC’s and NYC’s train stations are in a much more convenient walkable/transit friendly location than their airports).
Oh, and children under 12 can travel at 50% fare and still take a full seat. So for families, the train might be much cheaper.
Then again, passenger rail is a disaster for the other 85% of U.S. residents who don’t live in the Northeast.
Much to my surprise, the daily Amtrak Floridian (Chicago-DC-Miami, a recently combined version of Capitol Limited and Silver Star routes) is like $18 between Tampa and Orlando. That’s 1h45m by train or by car. Cheapest car rental I found was $62/day. Must be a popular route… or they already made their money in the first 40 hours and feel generous.
That matches the last time I checked as well. A cross country basic ticket was the same cost as a plane ticket, but if I wanted anything more than a basic chair then the price quickly skyrocketed.
Huh, surprised the Trump admin and Senate didn’t cut funding for these. Hopefully it sparks new interest and we can get the next generation to vote out the NIMBYs and get us some real high speed rail. US air travel is a fucking joke, it’s getting to where I’d rather take a train. I mean If I’m gonna be stuck in Denver because I missed a connection I’d rather be at the train station able to go to a hotel and see the town, instead of stuck in the airport, with a 2 hour gated wait because of TSA and the dangling rotten carrot airilines call standby.
All someone has to do is tell Trump that Biden likes Amtrak and these will all disappear
Hence my surprise. But you wouldn’t care would you Archer? It’s your privilege to ride as a rail baron in the Tunt Family private rail cars.
Actually, I do remember you having some trouble with Canadian separatists while you were doing it. Do you still have contact with the Nova Scotia Liberation Front? We could use their help in the upcoming border wars the Trump administration is sabre rattling about.
US air travel is a fucking joke[;] it’s getting to where I’d rather take a train.
yeah. Can you imagine a rolling capsule hotel? Go to bed in Bakersfield and wake up outside of Newark as the train slows for your stop? “bing-bong… your stop,
SEC-AU-CUS, is in30 minutes. Please …bzzt…check your bags and ensure you have everything with you when you leave. pchkt!”
Yeah maybe fix the prices first. I’d rather fly for the same cost.
who cares about trains if there’s no track to run them on.
Amtrak is a joke, and Biden should have done more about it when he had the chance. It’s shameful we don’t have a modern high speed rail network in the US.
Amtrak is a joke,
Yes.
It’s shameful we don’t have a modern high speed rail network in the US.
Again, true.
and Biden should have done more about it when he had the chance.
Yeah, I’m in agreement with @NOT_RICK in that Biden was stymied by popular opinion and richbitch protest to not spend on things like infrastructure because he was too busy dumping money into the disaster-du-jour caused by chronic insufficient investment in infrastructure and healthcare … again, prevented by richbitch politicos reframing everything as "taking money out of the hands of the middle class for some boondoggle like heathcare. “Who in Louisiana or North Dakota even USES I-5, anyway?” and similar bad-faith arguments.
Wouldn’t the president need congress to appropriate money for that? What would you have liked him to do?
He claimed to be some big champion of Amtrak. Presidents often push for “moonshots” but he barely did anything about it while in office. That’s why I specifically mentioned him.
Crap it seems like all the archive sites are gone. Anyone have a full version of this article?
