Posted on 02/16/2023 9:49:16 AM PST by Jeff Chandler
My grandson and I took the Amtrak sleeper from Washington DC to Chicago - and then the local down to Peoria last summer. It was nice, and the crew were very pleasant. However, if we do it again this year I’m upgrading to the larger sleeper.
In contrast, I took the Amtrak coach back home one winter when my daughter was stationed at Fort Riley Kansas. The train left from Kansas City’s Union Station, and went to Chicago. I arrived in Chicago on Super Bowl XLI, the Bears / Colts game. Spent the layover in a Union Station bar watching the game. As we were boarding the Amtrak for the trip to DC, I told the lady taking the tickets “Sorry about the Bears”. She smiled and shrugged her shoulders.
The trip from Chicago to DC was nice. At the time they had an observation car.
The high speed trains for short trips in Europe are great. London-Paris, Paris-Cologne or Brussels, etc. 200 mph and 3-4 hrs on a train is fine and they’re much more comfortable than an airplane, plus you don’t have the security and check in hassles. We don’t have major cities located that close together though unless it’s in the Northeast and they’re amply served by trains already. Nobody is going to take a train from New York to Chicago, it would take too long, they’re always going to fly. Likewise nobody takes a train from Madrid to Stockholm either, that would be silly because you’d spend a couple of days on a train. Europeans will fly that also.
Afaik, America and Europe both primarily use standard gauge, so I don’t know what this is about.
The heyday of American passenger rail travel would be the era between the wagon train and the jet&interstates, around 1870-1960. There was much less travel in general among the working and farmer classes, but the middle-class and above took trains to anywhere too far for a carriage, and continued to do so until jet planes shortened the time for cross country travel, and interstates made car travel take about the same time as train travel.
Measuring the superiority of the European vs. the North American rail system is a highly subjective opinion, but what I do know is that when I discuss railroad engineering and operations with European counterparts one of the things I often hear from them is that they're staggered by the size and weight of the freight trains we operate here in North America.
Those (private) freight trains are loaded to the hilt and don't run until they can tack on as many cars as possible, and given barely enough power to make it over inclines. Speed is not a concern for them, only profit.
“The only downside of this wider gauge is that it isn’t compatible with Europe’s smaller standard gauge, so American trains cannot run on European tracks and vice versa.”
Well there goes the planned railroad bridge across the Atlantic!
Seriously, this is both poorly considered writing and poor editing.
“American trains vs. European trains, there are six main factors that help make each one stand apart: their freight-to-passenger ratio, funding, rail infrastructure, train designs, operating procedures, and government regulations.”
IN otherwords... a 60% - 70% income tax to pay for the rail system.
-PJ
“Most railways in Europe use the standard gauge of 1,435 mm (4 ft 8+1⁄2 in). “
This article lacks cred.
“Afaik, America and Europe both primarily use standard gauge, so I don’t know what this is about.”
One meter narrow gauge is MUCH more extensive in Europe than in the USA where narrow gauge is almost exclusively used for excursion routes.
> > > Freight always takes precedence. There are long delays for passengers while their train waits for a freight to use the tracks ahead of them. < < <
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Passenger trains ostensibly take precedence, but the long length and slow speed of freight trains makes it moot.
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https://freerepublic.com/focus/chat/4131509/posts?page=26#26
“American trains cannot run on European tracks and vice versa.”
I guess I missed all those tracks laid across the Atlantic...
Form follows function....................
... amen to that! we recently got back from a 17 hour flight from Sydney, Australia, and I felt like I just got out of surgery and needed rehab. OTOH, when we take the 17 hour Amtrak Auto Train to Florida, we buy a sleeper cabin, have a great dinner and breakfast, enjoy the ride, and arrive refreshed.
State of Mich./Amtrak own much of the rail between Detroit and Chicago.
“...second class status that they assign to passenger rail. Freight always takes precedence. There are long delays for passengers while their train waits for a freight to use the tracks ahead of them.”
The freight railroads own the track. AMTRAK only owns the Northeast corridor.
Probably written by the company's PR person.
The Federal government didn't "allow" this consolidation as much as it just let history run its inevitable course. The consolidation of the railroad industry in the post-WW2 era was driven by the industry's desperation to stay solvent in a heavily regulated environment where competition from the trucking industry was growing exponentially.
This consolidation reached its zenith in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the successive bankruptcies of the six major Northeastern U.S. railroads, starting with the Central Railroad of New Jersey in 1967. The collapse of the Penn Central in 1970 (which had just been created out of the merged Pennsylvania and New York Central Railroads in 1968) sealed the fate of the railroad industry. By 1973-76 the Federal government had intervened and created two government-run railroads -- Amtrak (passenger) and CONRAIL (freight) out of the wreckage.
The industry was more or less back on its feet when CONRAIL became profitable by the early 1980s and privatized. The rapid consolidation in the industry since the 1980s has been done in a way that keeps competition in place as much as possible. The four major Class I railroads in the U.S. operate on two overlapping networks (CSX and Norfolk Southern in the east; Union Pacific and Burlington Northern Santa Fe in the west), and the industry is far more efficient today than it has been at any time in its history.
The advantage of the trains in Europe is that they run on time. The stations are free of drug addict homeless loonies. The stations are in the middle of the cities. You get off the train and walk to your hotel. Plus there are POLICE everywhere. So, you feel safe.
I hear Penn Station and Union Station are great places IF you want to score some smack.
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