If I lived in South Dakota, I’d be p****d.
Outside the Northeast Corridor, trains are simply not competitive on speed or convenience. Or price. They ARE a comfortable way to travel and appeal to people with time to burn and who are interested in watching the scenery. I’ve taken a very few long train trips (never across the country) and enjoyed them. I’d take more except that trains are so danged expensive. So would a lot of older folks who are not pressed for time. I wonder if the geniuses who misgovern us are attacking the wrong end of the problem. Could train travel be made a lot cheaper if trains didn’t try to compete on speed, which is a battle they can never win? How about going back to the future?
Attach a passenger car or two or three to freight trains. I suppose one would need at least one attendant in case someone had a heart attack or some key equipment malfunctioned and a troubleshooter needed to be summoned, but one could dispense with dining and sleeper cars. Have plush recliner seats well appointed with high speed internet connections and the kind of entertainment options that are routine on business and first class trans-Pacific flights. Automate the food services; it can still be reasonably high quality and, given current train and airline fare, the bar is pretty low. Really nice recliner seats would eliminate the need for sleepers. Do a double decker car with a lounge or game room on top, so people can stretch their legs. Figure out some spartan bathing/showering arrangement. People could get off at stations along the way, spend a day or two, and hop the next train. Turn it into a retiree oriented, travel tourism oriented service. The main thing is that you couldn’t leave a passenger car stranded on a siding for a week, but that should be manageable. It might take a week to cross the country, but that might be ok for a lot of people, especially if they broke the trip a couple of times.
If it caught on, support services would spring up rapidly. It wouldn’t matter if you pulled into some obscure station at 3:00 a.m.; you would have reserved a ride online and your car will be there to meet you. Long layover? The local vendors will be ready with options. There will be local restaurants at the stations ready to vary your dining options, if you have a reasonable time window. The old-fashioned railway hotels might even make a comeback. Might be worth a try. It would require a mental shift to get freight railroads back into the passenger service mindset for what would be an incidental sideline business, but I’ll bet they could hire someone from Marriott who could get them rolling. You could even have an online concierge to keep people from falling through the cracks.
Assuming Biden doesn’t blow it all to smithereens, I hope one day to do the Trans-Siberian Railroad trip.
Outside the Amtrak-owned Northeast Corridor, the private railroads are economically restricted by regulation; most of them have a top speed of 79 mph for passenger trains due to regulations relating to signaling, track classes and suchlike. Certainly a long way away from what’s possible with actual high-speed rail, which does not have to be electrified—back in 1972, France’s SNCF ran the gas-turbine-electric TGV 001 faster than 190 mph several times, hitting a top speed of 198 mph in December of that year.
Most high-speed trains run at an average speed of 145 mph, presuming a number of intermediate stops. That could get a train from New York to Chicago in 5½ hours if a high-speed railroad were built along the shortest distance between the two cities; if non-stop, the average speed would be yet faster. That should have been a matter for the private sector, with federal and state governments firmly out of the sphere with respect to funding, building and operation.
I’d be pissed if I lived outside the NEC. That seems to be where a great chuck of all AMTRAK money is going. Those states served by the NEC should pay a LOT more for that HS rail and service!!! So more money could go elsewhere... But, you know, if there’s ANY “Federal” money, that NY and Boston will find a way to get more than their share!!