Except amtrak also went down…
plan a trip on Amtrak, it’s true insanity how long any significant trip takes unless you’re on a major route.
So you’re saying… we should invest in better infrastructure for trains?
Absolutely, actually not just that really we need to wrestle control of rail infrastructure away from the duopoly that owns most of it.
Trolley problem but its BNSF execs and the choice is between buttered or white cheddar popcorn…
Nothing is safe, even trains.
Spain, October 28, 2026:
- Train management system failure;
- all trains brought to a halt;
- once the system was back online the trains were given the signal to proceed;
- one train didn’t get the message;
- 69 people dead.
… Was anyone claiming trains are totally safe? I’m sorry, I’m not sure what you mean here.
You can’t be grounded if you’re always grounded.
thinking.jpeg
Amtrak steadfastly refuses to respond to my proposal to add a ski-jump section to the Acela route. Bastard car industry knows it would be too popular, so they keep suppressing it!
I took my first out of town train for Halloween weekend. The Northeast Regional. Boston to NYC.
I enjoyed it. Watched Sunrise evolve. Plenty of water views. We found the seats comfy with plenty of leg room.
If anyone is trying to sleep, you’d need a good set of ear plugs. There was 11 stops along the way with announcements.
We’d definitely do it again. I might look into splurging for an express.
You know any trans-Atlantic trains, OP?
hey everyone come look, there’s a super genius over here just made a brilliantly devastating point that wasn’t at all tedious
Or even trains that service routes in or to the West in a reasonable time, with reasonable options and price?
After taking a bus from NY back to CA, I would gladly pay the extra $25 it was to go by Amtrack even tho Amtrack’s service is abysmal.
Sure do - among many other groups that provide transatlantic car float transport (and Extra, according to reddit? If anyone has more info I’d love it) service, Foss operates a regular train ferry between Seattle and Alaska, and (last I checked) has scheduled routes between their Seattle terminal and Japan!
(the above is one of the barges used to connect to the alaskan rail network, but I don’t think it’s used for transoceanic trips)
the above is one of the barges used to connect to the alaskan rail network
So not only is it not a rail line, it’s not even near the Atlantic. That’s the Pacific!
I don’t think there’s two larger things on the planet I could have mixed up lmao. Coulda sworn you said pacific…
Anways, Seattle <> Alaska is indeed a rail line. By every common definition I have ever seen, rail lines do not have to be contiguous sections of track, they are just an established route or collection of routes.
Railway line, railroad line, rail line, or train line:
- A railway route connecting two or more places or other railway routes[200]But to answer the original question yes there are several transatlantic rail-lines, one very high traffic example being Mobile Alabama <> Coatzacoalcos Veracruz
(Picture of a retired ship from the route via wikipedia. Honestly, it looks so much more badass than it has any reason to)
Just don’t be on a river boat anywhere near that barge and hopefully you’ll be fine
Be a badass way to go out though. Up there with that alaskan trawler that got sunk because it ran into a moose.
Trawler had it comin
Would not want to be shoving that barge during a storm.
I bet it’d make for a damn good story if you survive…
I fucking love Amtrak, I’ll take it every time over planes.
BUT it isn’t without it’s own issues lol. Prices are outrageous these days, and more trips I’ve made have been delayed by a death (look before you cross tracks folks) than you’d be willing to believe (in case you’re wondering, it’ll be about 2h before they have the accident cleared).
That said the train can hit a car and only be delayed 2h, try that in a plane and all you leave is a crater in a Florida neighborhood. And instead of constant anxiety for 3h I get pleasant trip through countryside for 6h, I’ll take it in a heartbeat.
I want to use trains so much. I love riding on them. They’re slower, more expensive, and more delay prone. Why would I do that to myself? I can afford the time usually, but you’d think they’d be less expensive than air travel. Nope. Every time I compare, air is cheaper.
I don’t understand why trains are so damn expensive. There’s is no way using thousands of gallons of jetfuel is cheaper than a train
It’s because of freight.
Also, I can go see my sister in 3 hours. Or drive 16, I’m getting older so I have to make stops. Or I can take a few days. It’s $60 to fly or $400+ on train. Even then I would rather be on a train but that’s not an option.
I wouldn’t care about all the issues of Amtrak if the train tickets were actually cheaper than flying.
Amtrak can shut up and sit down with its slower than 1800s rail service while the rest of the world has already moved on to HSR.
I in Amtrak home from college one time. A 3-blue flight took about 36 hours (half that on paper) and cost the same.
But you can bring more luggage on and you get a lot more leg room.
Amtrak absolutely has plenty of tickets that are way cheaper than flying even reasonably long distances, but only if you book at least 3mo out. And even then there are plenty of exceptions. I took the Carolinian from Greensboro to DC for $57 last week, booked only a week in advance. The trains get plenty busy as is. At least for as long as the amfleet cars are still the default, people clearly will pay a premium to take the train over a bus.
Wild of Amtrak to post this when their trains are always late, inaccessible and slow as fuck. Nice try. Post again when you run actual higher (note I said ‘higher’ not high bc that’s never gonna happen) speed trains that don’t get stuck behind freight.
Yep hich is why we should be investing in fixing those issues instead of say, spending $50 billion on the grifters that broke the FAA.
Train good, car bad.
Ooh, also dragons and unicorns?
If you’re seeing dragons and unicorns I think you’ve misunderstood what “mainline” was referring to here.
WELP.
Ok.
They’re rushing AI/LLM integration because they lost the midterms.
They’ll all be scrutinized, not funded, impeached, etc, so they have to do what they were either paid to do and/or will personally lose a ton of money if they do not do… NOW.
So we are basically getting the ‘logistics week’ version of DOGE, right now.
At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if they manage to break like, turnpikes, toll bridges, truck weigh in stations, port authorities, alllll that kinda shit.
… God help us if they attempt to ‘install AI’ into our powergrid, dams, water treatment facilities.
EDIT
Also, the last thread you and I were commenting on…
… doesn’t exist any more?
???
Lemmy is acting like it doesn’t exist for me, but maybe thats a problem on my end… somehow?
Or maybe its just the whole comment chain we were on???
Yeep, that sure seems like a pretty good read on the situation. Really not looking forward to the next few weeks of them grabbing everything they can and running. They’re already trying to AI-ify foodstamps for “fraud detection” which is just fucking insane. Revolutions start when people go hungry and hoo boy 6 million people is a lot of gambling on apathy…
(IDK why that post was removed, but it appears to have been removed. The OP might have deleted it or the mods??)
edit: Oh
Knowing the .world admin, news moderation team, my guess would be:
The title of the post indicated that the groundstop order is currently in effect, as of ~30 min ago, it has been lifted, so the post title does not reflect reality, therefore this news event and the discussion it spawned now need to be euthanized, to prevent the spread of misinformation.
… something like that, that seems like jordanlund logic to me.
American passenger trains suck, though.
Just as expensive as flying, except that it takes days of travel time instead of hours. And there are very few stations – some entire states don’t have a single passenger rail station.
Well, yeah. There’s a reason planes got popular in the US, place is fuckin’ huge, takes a while to get anywhere especially thru the mountains. Well, that and our rail service was systematically crippled by a long series of utter fucking bastards so that people had no choice, that contributed too. But hey, it could be worse; we could be stuck with Deutsche Bahn…
(FWIW the only states without are South Dakota and Wyoming last I checked (well and hawaii/alaska), and lets be real the kind of person that would take a train would never want to go to SD/WY. Real pretty scenery - real ugly everything else.)
Gonna argue your last point, I would LOVE to take a train to WY or SD specifically for that scenery. Hate planes and don’t feel like driving that far.
But at that distance I’d need the sleeper and at those sleeper prices I’d have to sell a kidney, so I won’t be doing it any time soon as fun as it would be.
This is what happens when you don’t qualify your statements, you find the one person that’s a counterexample lmao.
I’m genuinely glad that there’s people in the world that lack enough cynicism to believe visiting there could be fun, but if you’re prevented from going to WY/SD by the lack of trains, that’s only an argument in favor of not putting more trains there for your own protection.
… Look I just really hate Wyoming. SD can have a station I guess but fuck Wyoming.
I’ve been to one before, went to WY (and MT) as a young lad, saw Yellowstone, have a better camera now and would love to go back tbh. WY was gorgeous, I love trees and shit.
I suppose SD also has Mt Rushmore and Deadwood that’d be neat visits, and the Black Hills, and the Badlands. But I’m a nerd lol, I know I’m the exception!
I’m sorry, I fundamentally do not know… how to respond to someone earnestly saying they want to visit mount rushmore. I just. Sincerely, I hope you have a very happy life.
Eh, big carving is art, even if it is art of president faces.
Still neat even if anarchism is my ideal lol. I do still like (or “have interest in” at least, if we have to be rigid in our definition of “like”) history, and art (incl sculpture). I mean, would I prefer the undisturbed natural cliff face from before the carving of it? Yeah sure, but unfortunately my time machine is on the fritz lol.
Tbf I’d go see “world’s largest pheasant” if I was driving by Huron, and yes I know it’s made out of fiberglass, fuck it we’re in town lol. Same thing.
My experience as a young adult seeing that mountain and reading the history was very different.
There was also the whole auto industry conspiracy to destroy commuter rail and public transportation.
Making up a rather significant portion of the aforementioned “long series of utter bastards” yeeeeeep. Who Framed Roger Rabbit was a documentary…
I was gonna include that bit about it being the backdrop to Roger Rabbit but decided not to. Glad others know the true true.
People say that, but it wasn’t like there was anyone fighting for commuter rail and public transportation until it was too late. Private railroads hated having to serve passengers and multiple municipalities let mass transit due once it required a public subsidy.
Hey at least deutsche bahn has connections and a lot of rail. You can at least theoretically get somewhere using DB
It’s easy to have vast amounts of pristine rail if you never wear it out by doing something crazy like “running trains on it”. Seriously wtf is going on with that system - the last two interurban trips I tried to take on DB both involved going approximately to the city limits before getting stuck onto a coach bus because there was some massive technical failure that shut down the whole system. Like nah I’ll happily take Amtrak over that shitshow. Sure it’s slow and useless if you’re trying to go anywhere that isn’t between the country’s largest metro areas, but it’s reliably and predictably slow and useless. Moribundity you can count on!
(And non-sarcastically, even tho it sucks there’s straightforward ways to improve it pretty rapidly. It’s bad for sure, but it’s still shockingly useful for the few areas it’s able to be useful in. The incredible amount of overhauling that needs to be done for DB is… well, I’m glad it’s not my problem to deal with because holy shit is that a mess. Starting from nothing does have some perks and, yknow, at least amtrak’s radios don’t melt when it gets a bit warm out)
Trains are so huge in Europe thanks to the wars of the 17th-19th centuries.
America is roughly the same size and only now has half the population of Europe.
In 1800 Europe had about 150 million people. That’s about half the current population density of the USA for landmass BUT still extremely dense populations around the capital cities in the countries.
A nationalized train system was a lot easier for a individual nation the geographic size of Virginia with the a population larger than current US states.
Especially when your neighbor is invading you every 20 years.
American Rail during the civil war helped the north dominate the south (though the rivers of the USA may have been even more beneficial for the north) BUT showed the need for off rail transport and helped usher in the military application of wheeled and tracked vehicles that can go off rail. Weird how that works.
TIL on Lemmy: the solution to the US’ atrocious transportation is a civil war between all states.
By any chance, would that help get decent bus services too? I’m guessing those are rather a post-WW2 thing.
the kind of person that would take a train would never want to go to SD/WY
But people who live in SD/WY might want to go other places?
If you want a real answer, it’s because WY/SD have such a small and low-density population that there’s not really anywhere useful to put a train station. And yeah, obviously in an ideal world it would be better to have them connected with passenger rail for the usual host of very good reasons. But, with the limited resources and the minuscule (but growing!) ridership on Amtrak, it would be a tremendous expenditure to extend coverage and would grant no real benefit to the people living there that isn’t better served with intermittent air travel or their current car-centric infrastructure.
If you want a slightly less real, but possibly more honest, answer: Ew, no, fuckem they can stay put in their racist little shitholes. They wanted this, they can figure out how to cope with the result.
So it is not just flyover country, but also drivethrough country, too?
“Pass-through states” is what I’ve heard them called in logistics. Awful places, beautiful landscapes.
Do people live there? I think that’s just a legend.
Sure, but do the people in those other places want them there?
Well, North Dakota got a station, and we all know that North Dakota is Worst Dakota.
i regularly take an interstate trip on amtrak. $99 round trip, takes 8hrs vs a 5 hour drive.
That’s because American rail tracks have never been built for speed. Some time ago there was an article about a new (or completely rebuilt) track, and they were happy to save a few million on the project by building it in a way that limits the speed to 80-100mph, instead of spending just a few percent more that could have enabled 200mph for bullet trains.
Just out of curiosity where about are you taking this? Amtrak in the northeast corridor is a vastly different service from Amtrak in the rest of the country.
Tbf that’s true of any service. Internet, cellular, interstate, etc. it’s wildly different living in the West before you hit the coast.
texas eagle
Interesting, the stuff I usually look at for examples is Midwest areas. For instance Cleveland to New York city is around a 7 and to 8 hour drive but Amtrak schedules it at 13 hours and I guarantee that route will have a delay.
yeah that tracks. delays are common, and it tends to be a little under twice the drive time.
i wouldnt call it convenient travel, but for my ride its definitely cheaper than driving or flying.
Ah, that explains it. You guys are already used to moseying along, so the time the train takes doesn’t bother you.
I tried to take an Amtrak from Albuquerque to Denver, a 7ish hour drive. The train is over a day, i think closing in on 2 days. And about 4 times the price of a plane ticket.
Edit: Amtrak’s ticket finder was down last night. It is 44 hours one way, $310 for one way coach, $1600 for private.
Still ridiculous that it’s slower than driving.
And that’s a very short trip. Most people wouldn’t take a plane anyway to go somewhere that’s a 5-hour drive away. So I don’t think that’s very representative of what it would be like for the average person to replace an airline trip with a rail trip.
And trains aren’t immune to computer outages either, control rooms are basically all computerised.
If they only had some that could bear the load of national traffic.
In Europe, the security theater installed after 9/11 was a godsend for the trains. Suddenly, saving an hour by going by plane instead of bullet train didn’t matter anymore if you had to waste hours waiting at the airport security queues.
Two tough (but important) reminders for the US this week:
- You can’t rely on Big Tech.
- You need a national high speed train system.
