They had some wild motive power, like this 0-3-0:
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This summer, I’m using Amtrak as part of our vacation to travel down the west coast on the Coast Starlight, and again to Salt Lake City on the California Zephyr. We’re anticipating a leisurely few days of comfortable seats and scenic window views while we unwind. Accommodations and meals en route are included if you get the sleeper option, so consider that you would still have to pay for hotels and food if you flew directly to your destination. If the journey can be included as part of your vacation down time, a train is an excellent option. Unfortunately, long distance passenger train service is on Trump’s cutting block along with many other useful and pleasant things.
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I guess that answers this commercial:
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Also subsidizing rail is Socialism. The Free Market solution is government subsidies for cars, roads, carmakers, and gas, because liberty.
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Love the starlight. Those big chairs with the crazy nice view.
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The flipside of that is that the US’s freight rail system is significantly better, and moves a lot more stuff, than the European freight rail system.
In the US, more freight is carried by railroads than by trucks (about 40% compared to 33% by ton-mile). In Europe, the vast majority of freight is carried by trucks.
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I would much rather take a train than fly, but in the U.S. the passenger train stations are way too few and far between to make that sensible (even if the prices were reasonable). To take a train to visit where I used to live, I’d first need to travel 50 miles to the nearest passenger train station, take the train to the ‘destination’ train station, then find a way almost 250 miles from there to my actual destination. That’s about a 300 mile detour via cab, bus, and/or airline out of a 900 mile trip.
Meanwhile, both my city and the destination city (along with almost every town in between) have rails running through them, train stations, and a fair amount of train traffic - but it’s for cargo only. Wonder what the cost would be to pack the family into a crate with some airholes and ship ourselves freight…
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American problems. I used to travel between Vienna and Magdeburg a bit, that’s about 600 km, usually with stops in Dresden and Prague. Price 65 €.
I’ll never understand the US hangup with public transport. And now everyone is talking about the Hyperloop, while the base system is still crap.
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And here I thought I had a shitty commute when I lived in Richmond and drove to Mountain View every day. I eventually moved to Alameda and had a much better less shitty commute.
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Nope. Sounds like you won’t.
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Nope. Like, why did you get rid of all your trams? When I sometimes see historic pictures of the US, they were ubiquitous. Trams are awesome.
San Francisco still has some. Other areas as well. Those are small spaces, compared to the country as a whole.
I made a comment up thread about how the rail system in the US is geared towards moving freight over people. There’s a whole area of economic and political thought that goes into that too, right or wrong. You already said you weren’t going to understand though, and I believe you.
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I think what a few other folks have said up thread may be the case here;
if one is traveling to and from SFO (which is even farther away than the city) then the fare increases, drastically.
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Both of those are horrifying commutes.
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Business Class Boston-NYC is $117 or $118, but it’s 3.5 hours at best on the Acela.
However, I save time at both ends in travel, security hassles, and “please arrive early”, and can avoid variable delays from traffic.
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Acela is okay from Boston to NYC, but the Acela shines when it’s time to go to DC or Philly. It is nicer to be in town at the end of the trip. Most other places I’d want to be at the airport, where the car rentals are, but those 4 cities I’d rather be downtown when I get there.
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now that’s a proper monorail.
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I realize that many here on BB think that Republican lawmakers all are hatched from alien spores laid under their desks, but let me clue you in, the voters had something to do with it!
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Pffft. Everbody knows the lizard people are a native species. Jeez. Aliens. 
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Yes, voters chose those lawmakers.
Those lawmakers chose to support the blockage of progress towards improving our infrastructure against the wishes of most voters.
So I blame them, not the voters.
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