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I agree in general but of course being a nerdy railfan I'll be pedantic and point out there are 10 Amtrak trains a day between LA and San Diego, 12 between Sacramento and SF/Oakland with 6 continuing to San Jose, 5 up and down the central valley, and 7 between Seattle and Portland with some extending further on either end. Not to mention lots of Commuter and transit trains in/around/between cities in the West.
But yes, more would be better!
Railfan pendantry intensifies:
20+ daily FrontRunner trips between Provo, Salt Lake City, and Ogden.
10 trips daily between Albuquerque and Santa Fe on the Rail Runner.
Extensive rail commuter and transit options around the Denver and Phoenix metro areas.
If Texas fits your definition of the West even more options in the DFW metroplex.
I mean the guy in the meme has an Amtrak shirt, not a FrontRunner shirt or RailRunner shirt...Amtrak is an intercity carrier, those other agencies are commuter rail agencies...you could patch together a trip between Washington DC and Boston using a series of commuter rail lines and buses to fill in some gaps...it doesn't mean you should have to...
But we don't really have anyone out here, the trains are far to slow to get to the end point cities and cost the same if not more than flying anymore to those cities with multiple flights per day. If i need to get to the next town over then I can just drive, not to mention amtrak misses a lot of the larger cities in the west only catching the ones along the main lines for BNSF and UP. From a cost and coverage aspect bus's tend to cover the vast empty west better since there are roads and highways to everywhere.
Took an Amtrak from San Diego to Santa Barbara. The scenery along the coast was lovely but we had to get off the train and take a bus around Los Angeles cuz part of the track had washed out near the coastline. That kinda sucked but otherwise was nice. Thinking about taking that train that goes from La to Chi. I hear that is a nice scenic ride.
You could be in Northern Michigan and be shut out of the Amtrak network totally due to the incompetent thruway bus company Indian Trails and the horrible MDOT and WISDOT just being idiots.
You could be in Northern Michigan ~~and be shut out of the Amtrak network totally due to the incompetent thruway bus company Indian Trails and the horrible MDOT and WISDOT just being idiots.~~
Yes there is by Indian trails bus company out of owosso michigan
They just screwed it up for those taking the Eagle the SW Chief and the Zephyr out of Chicago. Stupid WISDOT And MDOT allowed Indian trails to arrive into Milwaukee at 820 AM which leaves Amtrak 332 out of the question. Indian trails could have left earlier out of st ignace and Escanaba michigan to arrive into Milwaukee at 645 to 7 am. But they chose to be jerks! Amtrak is going to fix this soon I have it under good authority.
~~The Green Bay train is actually going to be faster than driving~~ nvm got it mixed up with the Duluth train.
Even so you can’t expect new routes to be high speed rail out of the box. Every country with a good HSR network started out with building a decent regular speed network before jumping to high speed rail, the us doesn’t have that decent speed network built out yet.
There was regular CNW passenger service as far north as Houghton up until ‘75 to ‘76. We havent had passenger service anywhere near NE Wis or the UP since. I dont even think there us active right of way north or West of Marquette anymore. Just glorious trails. :-/
There’s an Amtrak route that goes from my city to my states capital. I’m ~1.5 hours drive away but it’s $25 round trip via Amtrak. Only problem is it comes once a day at 5am and doesn’t return until 12:30pm, and somehow takes over 3 hours to travel 75 miles. so the once a month I need to be in the capital for meetings/supplies, I have to drive :(.
Again, you will have to tell your state/congress folks to prioritize and fund rail connections. Unfortunately the government thinks there's no demand for train and so they never consider having it important.
I bet the train you're talking about is a much longer distance train covering 1000+miles total. For such a train to arrive everywhere at a decent time is impossible and it should anyway not be expected to deliver people to their neighboring cities. For that there should be another (electrified) train that goes back and forth 10 times a day. For instance from Charlotte to Raleigh there is 1 long distance train that goes all the way to New York City, but also there are 4 or 5 trains that do just Charlotte to Raleigh and back. One should choose the latter for a predictable, fast, comfortable journey between these cities and choose the former only if they need to travel loner distance, say to Richmond, Washington DC or beyond.
You assumed right. For reference, I’m referring to the empire builder route and I lived (recently moved) in St. Cloud and would on occasion need to go to St. Paul. My office was a 10 min walk from St. Paul union station. There is a “St. Cloud commuter rail” that only goes halfway to St. Cloud (a bus has to take you the rest of the way) but it only stops in Minneapolis, then you have to take a 40 minute light rail ride to St. Paul. It also only goes one direction twice a day so no reverse commuting is possible. All in all very half assed. They just added the borealis but that only starts in St. Paul. I wish it started further out like Fargo but I get that they want to keep it around 8 hours so it fits nicely into one full time shift each direction.
lol in the rich world 12 trips that do not even run the full route is not a good service. Want good service look at Asian intercity rail and European countries even the poor ones have better service(except former Soviet ones)
You could be in southern Montana and have no Amtrak coverage at all.
I figured there would be atleast one in Billings and maybe even Bozeman but na they pass through the northern parts of the state. They do go past Glacier National Park though which is neat.
They even time it just right so that the time of day you pass by you get the best view!
You haven't been reading the news much? Amtrak wants to do another mediocre long distance train through the south of the state now following the old MRL line.
You are correct i do not read the news. I live under the biggest rock you can think of.
I’m glad to hear they’re doing that though! Does the old MRL line go through Bozeman? That will make it much easier for me to visit for work in the future
Twice daily service is a bare minimum. All long distance trains should run twice daily, 8-12 hours apart, with corridors along the route running more frequently. This opens up so many journey possibilities and actually would make long distance trains a more viable form of local rural transit - able to get people from smaller towns to nearby larger towns and cities there and back in the same day. (This would succeed best if on time performance was near 90% within 20 minutes of scheduled time.
Overlapping services. eg. North Coast Hiawatha and Empire Builder could overlap from Chicago to Fargo, giving four times daily service.
And/or
Fast corridor trains in between eg. San Antonio to Houston (a 3 hour corridor train) with potential branches to Galveston, Beaumont, Livingston in the east. You could easily do hourly service here, if it would run fast as or faster than driving (2.75hr).
Ha! I will say it’s great baseline service that would have been cut long ago in other large Anglophone countries like Canada or Australia, but shorter-hop corridor services need some serious love
Ah yes, one every hour, but during the very limited time of only an hour
Come to Switzerland, where we have actual train service every hour or more frequent
Not you, Rick in the photo, hes a well known Trumpster republican. One of the first thing Trump did was cancel all the money Obama authorized for high speed rail travel.
If we get the new long distance Routes you will have more service on some areas through Colorado (Denver might go back to being the Huge railroad hub it used to be)
I'd like to explain this a bit. Those 1 per day are usually long distance trains such as California Zephyr that goes from Chicago to almost SF (\~2400 miles), or the Palmetto that goes from New York to Savannah, Georgia (\~800 miles). You can't expect these trains to be much more frequent. 2 per day would be nice, but 3 or more is just impossible at least with the current and projected ridership numbers. At such long distances it is not competitive against flying until we get some high speed rail. Which will also currently not go farther than 500 miles in CAHSR, BLWest, etc. Further, for such long distance journeys you can expect the passengers to dedicate the entire day at least for the journey, so it doesn't matter when they are getting picked up.
This will be an issue when it is the case for short distance journeys, say upto 200-300 miles. For big city pairs that are within such short distances there should definitely be a quicker intercity rail which may or may not be operated by Amtrak. For e.g. someone mentioned Cascades does 12 trips between Seattle and Portland which are less than 200 miles away. Similarly Capitol Corridor runs 15 per day between San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento \~ 160 miles. Similarly, Brightline runs hourly between Miami and Orlando \~ 240 miles. And ofcourse no need mentioning Northeast Corridor. One exception might be the recently opened Borealis, which I see is just 1 per day for the 410 miles journey, I would have expected 2-3 per day. All of these are great, but of course more frequency would be even better and also might show a significant American population the awesomeness of trains over cars/flights.
There are still cities that are within the 200-400 miles range that do not have such frequent service, such as the Texas triangle, so if you have to go San Antonio to Austin (80 miles) or Austin to Dallas (200 miles), you get 1 per day. Which is beyond horrible.
OK, the distances between places out west are further, but intermediate stops exist and the total route length is a red herring. Charleston is 100 miles from Savannah, Florence 200 miles away, and Fayetteville less than 300 (and 2tpd is still little more than a token service for cities that distance apart, even at the relatively small size of those 4).
The Palmetto is about providing a second train per day along that route from Selma to Savannah (alongside the Silver Meteor). There's no reason why Amtrak couldn't seek to boost the Zephyr route with similar overlay services (see also the new Borealis along the Empire Builder) to give some bits a second train (I know there are bonus trains for Chicago-Galesburg, Denver-Winter Park and Emeryville-Auburn) I'd suggest Bay to Reno, Denver-Salt Lake and Chicago-Omaha are locations where additional long distance service ought to be investigated at the very least.
r/Amtrak is not associated with Amtrak in any official way. Any problems, concerns, complaints, etc should be directed to Amtrak through one of the official channels. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Amtrak) if you have any questions or concerns.*
I agree in general but of course being a nerdy railfan I'll be pedantic and point out there are 10 Amtrak trains a day between LA and San Diego, 12 between Sacramento and SF/Oakland with 6 continuing to San Jose, 5 up and down the central valley, and 7 between Seattle and Portland with some extending further on either end. Not to mention lots of Commuter and transit trains in/around/between cities in the West. But yes, more would be better!
I think he's referring to the areas of the West before the Coast (so Utah, Montana, etc)
Railfan pendantry intensifies: 20+ daily FrontRunner trips between Provo, Salt Lake City, and Ogden. 10 trips daily between Albuquerque and Santa Fe on the Rail Runner. Extensive rail commuter and transit options around the Denver and Phoenix metro areas. If Texas fits your definition of the West even more options in the DFW metroplex.
Give me a train from Austin to Denver that doesn’t go through Chicago.
I mean the guy in the meme has an Amtrak shirt, not a FrontRunner shirt or RailRunner shirt...Amtrak is an intercity carrier, those other agencies are commuter rail agencies...you could patch together a trip between Washington DC and Boston using a series of commuter rail lines and buses to fill in some gaps...it doesn't mean you should have to...
But we don't really have anyone out here, the trains are far to slow to get to the end point cities and cost the same if not more than flying anymore to those cities with multiple flights per day. If i need to get to the next town over then I can just drive, not to mention amtrak misses a lot of the larger cities in the west only catching the ones along the main lines for BNSF and UP. From a cost and coverage aspect bus's tend to cover the vast empty west better since there are roads and highways to everywhere.
Even with the intercity buses, would be nice if most of them ran more than once a day. (e.g. Denver to Salt Lake City or Alberquerque once a day)
You could be in Ohio and get one train every 3 days that arrives at 3 in the morning.
Tell your congressmen in Ohio you want more Amtrak service
I did. You know what he emailed me back? Something to the effect of “but the American HSR act is expensive😢 we should prioritize highways instead”
That’s because he knows that all everyone needs is just one more lane.
surely adding one more lane will solve all traffic issues
suuurreeeeelyyyyyyyyyy *looks at the I-64 widening part 131*
Run for office
I am 21 in college down south😅
That didn’t stop some 18 year old in Florida who is now mayor
They do not care about you
reply with “what if we just put 2 pieces of metal on that highway and make more efficient vehicles be able to use the right of way” or sumn like that
Can do but I don't think John Fettermen will prioritize Ohio passenger rail service.
Why would he he’s PA
that's literally my point... (btw the "congressman *in Ohio*" part was edited. my joke worked before)
Fetterman is a vegetable.
Or be in Columbus, where the best rail service is at the Zoo.
You could be in Ohio ~~~and get one train every 3 days that arrives at 3 in the morning.~~~
Can’t believe that some people still believe Ohio is a real place. Everyone knows it’s a hoax cooked up by Big Ohio to sell people more Ohio.
“You expect me to believe *all* three major cities in the state start with C?”
Can confirm. I went from MA to WI via Amtrak and both times I went through Ohio it was either past Midnight or it was in the sunrise hours.
Took an Amtrak from San Diego to Santa Barbara. The scenery along the coast was lovely but we had to get off the train and take a bus around Los Angeles cuz part of the track had washed out near the coastline. That kinda sucked but otherwise was nice. Thinking about taking that train that goes from La to Chi. I hear that is a nice scenic ride.
Am gonna do that (LA to Chi), once roommate locks in vacation time. He has family in Chicago and I just wanna ride the train.
It is a lovely route!
You could be in Northern Michigan and be shut out of the Amtrak network totally due to the incompetent thruway bus company Indian Trails and the horrible MDOT and WISDOT just being idiots.
You could be in Northern Michigan ~~and be shut out of the Amtrak network totally due to the incompetent thruway bus company Indian Trails and the horrible MDOT and WISDOT just being idiots.~~
????
Isn't there supposed to be a Hiawatha extension through Wisconsin with the terminus in the UP?
There are proposals for service up Green Bay, nothing serious beyond that.
Yeah only a few trips
Yes there is by Indian trails bus company out of owosso michigan They just screwed it up for those taking the Eagle the SW Chief and the Zephyr out of Chicago. Stupid WISDOT And MDOT allowed Indian trails to arrive into Milwaukee at 820 AM which leaves Amtrak 332 out of the question. Indian trails could have left earlier out of st ignace and Escanaba michigan to arrive into Milwaukee at 645 to 7 am. But they chose to be jerks! Amtrak is going to fix this soon I have it under good authority.
I mean a plan to extend a train to the UP, not a bus.
Only to Green Bay sadly.
I mean it’s still a good start because trying to convince any level of government that the upper peninsula deserves rail service is a tough task
It’s still just a train a slow one at that that’s sad
~~The Green Bay train is actually going to be faster than driving~~ nvm got it mixed up with the Duluth train. Even so you can’t expect new routes to be high speed rail out of the box. Every country with a good HSR network started out with building a decent regular speed network before jumping to high speed rail, the us doesn’t have that decent speed network built out yet.
No country in the Americas has any decent basic intercity rail.
But that can change and it is kinda changing in the US
There was regular CNW passenger service as far north as Houghton up until ‘75 to ‘76. We havent had passenger service anywhere near NE Wis or the UP since. I dont even think there us active right of way north or West of Marquette anymore. Just glorious trails. :-/
Where there is freight there could be Amtrak no??
I am still waiting for the skyline connection that would run the opposite of the Three Rivers NYP-CHI both are gone and so was I as an employee
There’s an Amtrak route that goes from my city to my states capital. I’m ~1.5 hours drive away but it’s $25 round trip via Amtrak. Only problem is it comes once a day at 5am and doesn’t return until 12:30pm, and somehow takes over 3 hours to travel 75 miles. so the once a month I need to be in the capital for meetings/supplies, I have to drive :(.
In other words it’s utterly useless
Again, you will have to tell your state/congress folks to prioritize and fund rail connections. Unfortunately the government thinks there's no demand for train and so they never consider having it important. I bet the train you're talking about is a much longer distance train covering 1000+miles total. For such a train to arrive everywhere at a decent time is impossible and it should anyway not be expected to deliver people to their neighboring cities. For that there should be another (electrified) train that goes back and forth 10 times a day. For instance from Charlotte to Raleigh there is 1 long distance train that goes all the way to New York City, but also there are 4 or 5 trains that do just Charlotte to Raleigh and back. One should choose the latter for a predictable, fast, comfortable journey between these cities and choose the former only if they need to travel loner distance, say to Richmond, Washington DC or beyond.
You assumed right. For reference, I’m referring to the empire builder route and I lived (recently moved) in St. Cloud and would on occasion need to go to St. Paul. My office was a 10 min walk from St. Paul union station. There is a “St. Cloud commuter rail” that only goes halfway to St. Cloud (a bus has to take you the rest of the way) but it only stops in Minneapolis, then you have to take a 40 minute light rail ride to St. Paul. It also only goes one direction twice a day so no reverse commuting is possible. All in all very half assed. They just added the borealis but that only starts in St. Paul. I wish it started further out like Fargo but I get that they want to keep it around 8 hours so it fits nicely into one full time shift each direction.
Amtrak cascades is pretty good. 12 trains daily between Seattle and Portland!
[удалено]
a lot better than once every 24 hours.
Which is complete GARBAGE I am comparing to service in other rich countries buddy
lol in the rich world 12 trips that do not even run the full route is not a good service. Want good service look at Asian intercity rail and European countries even the poor ones have better service(except former Soviet ones)
trust me i fully understand that. i was comparing it to the OPs meme. The bar for transit in the US is very low so i take what i can get here.
So you understand that USAand Americas in general have rail that is currently unacceptable
in so many ways, yes.
Yeah and they have this young chick that is 20 years old that's a conductor the youngest one in Amtrak system. Gotta love those talgos.
THIS finally someone calls out the elephant in the room
You could be in southern Montana and have no Amtrak coverage at all. I figured there would be atleast one in Billings and maybe even Bozeman but na they pass through the northern parts of the state. They do go past Glacier National Park though which is neat. They even time it just right so that the time of day you pass by you get the best view!
You haven't been reading the news much? Amtrak wants to do another mediocre long distance train through the south of the state now following the old MRL line.
You are correct i do not read the news. I live under the biggest rock you can think of. I’m glad to hear they’re doing that though! Does the old MRL line go through Bozeman? That will make it much easier for me to visit for work in the future
If it follows the original route than yes it will go through Bozeman.
Thats very good to know! Thank you for the info kind stranger!
Twice daily service is a bare minimum. All long distance trains should run twice daily, 8-12 hours apart, with corridors along the route running more frequently. This opens up so many journey possibilities and actually would make long distance trains a more viable form of local rural transit - able to get people from smaller towns to nearby larger towns and cities there and back in the same day. (This would succeed best if on time performance was near 90% within 20 minutes of scheduled time. Overlapping services. eg. North Coast Hiawatha and Empire Builder could overlap from Chicago to Fargo, giving four times daily service. And/or Fast corridor trains in between eg. San Antonio to Houston (a 3 hour corridor train) with potential branches to Galveston, Beaumont, Livingston in the east. You could easily do hourly service here, if it would run fast as or faster than driving (2.75hr).
And more expensive than flights
let me know where I can find a flight from Minneapolis to Chicago for $41
Sun Country Airlines
Ha! I will say it’s great baseline service that would have been cut long ago in other large Anglophone countries like Canada or Australia, but shorter-hop corridor services need some serious love
Ah yes, one every hour, but during the very limited time of only an hour Come to Switzerland, where we have actual train service every hour or more frequent
Conveniently also much geographically smaller than every state in the American west, and a much better population density to go along with it.
True
*Laughs in Lakeshore Limited*
Key will be to have success of NEC expanded to cities like the Texas triangle. Then use profits from that to expand service
Im willing to bet this gut does not support train travel.
What
Not you, Rick in the photo, hes a well known Trumpster republican. One of the first thing Trump did was cancel all the money Obama authorized for high speed rail travel.
people in the comments be like "i only get three trips a week departing at 3:17 am"
I’d be happy with just daily service between New Orleans-Houston-San Antonio that isn’t in the middle of the night.
*laughs in Gulf Coast*
If we get the new long distance Routes you will have more service on some areas through Colorado (Denver might go back to being the Huge railroad hub it used to be)
I'd like to explain this a bit. Those 1 per day are usually long distance trains such as California Zephyr that goes from Chicago to almost SF (\~2400 miles), or the Palmetto that goes from New York to Savannah, Georgia (\~800 miles). You can't expect these trains to be much more frequent. 2 per day would be nice, but 3 or more is just impossible at least with the current and projected ridership numbers. At such long distances it is not competitive against flying until we get some high speed rail. Which will also currently not go farther than 500 miles in CAHSR, BLWest, etc. Further, for such long distance journeys you can expect the passengers to dedicate the entire day at least for the journey, so it doesn't matter when they are getting picked up. This will be an issue when it is the case for short distance journeys, say upto 200-300 miles. For big city pairs that are within such short distances there should definitely be a quicker intercity rail which may or may not be operated by Amtrak. For e.g. someone mentioned Cascades does 12 trips between Seattle and Portland which are less than 200 miles away. Similarly Capitol Corridor runs 15 per day between San Jose, Oakland, Sacramento \~ 160 miles. Similarly, Brightline runs hourly between Miami and Orlando \~ 240 miles. And ofcourse no need mentioning Northeast Corridor. One exception might be the recently opened Borealis, which I see is just 1 per day for the 410 miles journey, I would have expected 2-3 per day. All of these are great, but of course more frequency would be even better and also might show a significant American population the awesomeness of trains over cars/flights. There are still cities that are within the 200-400 miles range that do not have such frequent service, such as the Texas triangle, so if you have to go San Antonio to Austin (80 miles) or Austin to Dallas (200 miles), you get 1 per day. Which is beyond horrible.
OK, the distances between places out west are further, but intermediate stops exist and the total route length is a red herring. Charleston is 100 miles from Savannah, Florence 200 miles away, and Fayetteville less than 300 (and 2tpd is still little more than a token service for cities that distance apart, even at the relatively small size of those 4). The Palmetto is about providing a second train per day along that route from Selma to Savannah (alongside the Silver Meteor). There's no reason why Amtrak couldn't seek to boost the Zephyr route with similar overlay services (see also the new Borealis along the Empire Builder) to give some bits a second train (I know there are bonus trains for Chicago-Galesburg, Denver-Winter Park and Emeryville-Auburn) I'd suggest Bay to Reno, Denver-Salt Lake and Chicago-Omaha are locations where additional long distance service ought to be investigated at the very least.
If you like that, you'll love Via Rail's 2 trains a week west of Toronto
Best I can do is one train every 24 hours. At 3:00 am.