The (UK) Independent takes a slow train to South Bend

...and gets a sense of the state of Amtrak.

Long-distance rail travel in America today is for romantics. Taking this old train between Washington DC and Chicago isn’t the fastest, the cheapest, or even the most comfortable way to get between the two cities. To travel this way, you have to love these sounds, or at least have plenty of time to kill.

Pete Buttigieg, the new transport secretary, is one of those romantics. But he has nonetheless expressed a desire to drag this country’s rail system into the 21st century. Americans, he says, “have been asked to settle for less” when it comes to rail travel. He advocates massive investment to build high-speed rail and upgrade existing regional lines, and he has the full support of ‘Amtrak Joe’ Biden, perhaps the most train-friendly president in US history.

But this is a country of monster highways, cheap air travel, and a generation of young people who have never known trains to be anything but uncomfortable and inconvenient. Buttigieg’s only governing experience was two terms as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, population 100,000 – now he heads a department with a staff half the size of the city and a budget of $87bn.

I wanted to get a sense of the challenges he’ll face and experience long-distance rail travel in America in 2021. What needs to be done to fix them? Could this 39-year-old former mayor really make Americans fall in love with trains again?

A bit of a good read, actually. It looks like there's several take-aways here (although some more I've added), in priority order:

1. Remove all unnecessary regulation that slows down procurement of materiel (land/rail cars/equipment) and building of new rail lines
2. Allow Amtrak to independently enforce on-time train rules against freight operators.
3. Replace existing train equipment older than 25 years.
4. Build more track to work around freight train interference and go faster.

Mr. Wolf, this reporter (apparently an American "stringer" residing in South Bend) is "not exactly" writing a "puff piece" for LD travel.

It seems quite "negative" to me.

The Independent newspaper started in the 1980's , an attempt to provide bipartisan news , when all the British papers and tabloids were either left or right leaning. You wouldn't expect a puff piece from them.

Call me, when "The Independent" questions why in the entirety of Great Britain there are exactly TWO overnight sleeper trains, given the supposedly love affair the U.K. has with trains and not cars; notwithstanding the nearly 24 hour traffic jam known as the M25.

The real question is why America lingers to overnight trains out of tradition, rather than looking at how successful passenger rail services elsewhere else (very few to none of them following the Amtrak model.) And the U.K. isn't exactly known for their high speed services yet rail service thrives, suggesting the answer isn't the extreme opposite either.

wigwagfan wrote: ↑Sat Mar 06, 2021 12:23 am Call me, when "The Independent" questions why in the entirety of Great Britain there are exactly TWO overnight sleeper trains, given the supposedly love affair the U.K. has with trains and not cars; notwithstanding the nearly 24 hour traffic jam known as the M25.

The real question is why America lingers to overnight trains out of tradition, rather than looking at how successful passenger rail services elsewhere else (very few to none of them following the Amtrak model.) And the U.K. isn't exactly known for their high speed services yet rail service thrives, suggesting the answer isn't the extreme opposite either.

If more than half your population can be reached by trains using around 350 miles of railroad corridor, you would love trains as much as England. In the USA, 453 miles of the NEC single corridor only reaches around 17% of the total US population. 50 miles to the east the trains would be swimming with the fishes, and 50 miles to the west the trains would be climbing and descending steep hills and twisty curves in the Appalachians.

Per https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... t-2019.pdf
In England, 54% of those traveling by rail in 2019 were not commuting for work, and a whopping 449 million passengers rode trains on the national network, therefore 242 million rode trains to go where they wanted to go on their own time.

Per https://www.trains.com/trn/news-reviews ... ridership/
In America, Amtrak has around 32.5 million passengers in 2019. Less than 10% of the total in the UK. Amtrak does not see many ridership in the same metro market, but it does so mainly in California, so it is not nil. Never-the-less, the Amtrak ridership numbers do not include any local transit agency ridership statistics.

For a local rail comparison, lets look at NYC's subway vs London's Underground ridership numbers.
Per Wiki, the Underground's ridership is reported as 1.357 billion per year, the Subway's ridership is reported as 1.727 billion per year. Both numbers provided by Wiki was for the year 2017.

I do not believe it is wrong to state that the US rail ridership is or can be as high as the UK when similar distances and population density occur. While the USA has a population of 328 million and the UK has 68 million, the USA's is spread out over 9,833 million square miles vs the UK's 93.6 thousand square miles. The area of the USA is over 100 times larger than the UK, but the USA population is just 4.8 times larger. That's a 20 to 1 ratio difference. Even with the higher population, the USA has much lower population density.

Almost half of the UK's population (47.%) is amongst it's 10 largest cities, the 10 largest cities in the US reaches slightly over a quarter (26%). The distances between the two furthest apart top 10 metros in the UK is less than 320 miles. The distance between the two furthest apart top 10 metros in the USA is 2445 miles, about 7 times further apart.

How many UK rail passengers will ride their longest train for a period 7 times longer?
Would they ride the train between London and Glasgow if it took the train 38.5 hours instead of the present 5.5 hours?
The time it takes to ride Amtrak trains between New York City and Los Angeles is 85.5 hours, including the layover in Chicago.

Distances have a huge affect on suppressing train travel in the USA.

Plus they have frequent trains, from early in the morning, to late at night. the hat 125 did away with the sleepers. You could leave at 4 am, be in london before 9. Leave london at 8pm , be home at 2am.it always amazed me there were no Amtrak trains leaving boston after 6pm, apart from the overnight train.

Take a strip running from the coast to the Appalachians , running North/South from Portland ME to Richmond VA and you have an area about 5x the size of the Netherlands (Europes most crowded non city state country) with about 5x the population. The ‘not as crowded’ argument really falls down on the East coast

electricron wrote: ↑Sat Mar 06, 2021 3:07 am Distances have a huge affect on suppressing train travel in the USA.

With all due respect, Duh.

Not everyone in America lives in the NEC or California. I, personally, live in northwestern Oregon. The entire population of Oregon is around half that of New York City. Throw in Washington and Idaho, and you have NYC and a few of its suburbs.

Applying a UK style or NEC style transportation system would fall on its face in about 38 seconds flat here. Likewise, applying NYC's subway system to the entirety of the UK would fail, as would applying Portland's quaint Streetcar or OHSU Tram in NYC or London would fail (don't worry, it fails Portland too, but that's besides the point.)

There's a reason Amtrak is a footnote in much of America - it's a one-size-fits-all approach to transportation with little to no regard to what people want or need. Look at Montana - while the railfans celebrate the Empire Builder, the traffic volumes on U.S. 93 speak volumes - most people in Whitefish need to go north or south; not west or east. Yet thanks to our one-size-fits-all approach we have a west-east overnight sleeping train that serves a dozen or so people a day, while 93 waits to become an Interstate Highway for lack of any other option. In Oregon and Washington, the lust of rail means many cities go completely without any kind of intercity service whatsoever, just so we can have a train or two to other places. That's the reality.

NYC and the UK might have the population density, the travel patterns, and everything else to make rail work. Good for them. But what works there doesn't work here, and forcing the rest of America to pay for a train that one corner of the country uses isn't a sensible or sustainable plan. And the British telling us how to do things...well, they have enough on their plate to worry about having separated from the EU, to be worrying about how America does things. They had their chance at America and screwed it, and the sun has otherwise set on the British Empire. Now, they are struggling to keep their island united. I find little reason to heed their words right now.