The train was disgustingly dirty and the employees were surly and unhelpful.

Having taken dozens of train trips in Japan since 2001 I was incredibly excited for the American train experience. It was shit and I will never take an Amtrak again.

My wife and her grandfather took the train from Portland to Minnesota in the fall of last year. There were a number of issues with the service on the train that make it bad enough, but the speed of the train is a major problem of why these trains are somewhat worthless for travel. Freight trains get priority on the rail lines so many times the train was stopped for possibly hours waiting for freight trains to pass.

On my wife's trip the refrigeration went out at some point so cold food was no longer available, nor was food that required refrigeration before it was cooked. Fortunately they disembarked soon after that happened. The rest of the train was still a day or so from Chicago and those passengers were stuck with god knows what to eat.

>> The train was disgustingly dirty and the employees were surly and unhelpful.

> On my wife's trip the refrigeration went out at some point so cold food was no longer available, nor was food that required refrigeration before it was cooked. Fortunately they disembarked soon after that happened. The rest of the train was still a day or so from Chicago and those passengers were stuck with god knows what to eat.

Stuff like this makes it feel like the USA is falling apart from being a 1st world nation, crumbling in bits and pieces into a 3rd world one.

And even rich people in the US are satisfied with pretty terrible experiences because US culture is so disconnected from everything else that they don't get that things are a lot nicer elsewhere! Nothing like visiting someone's multi-million dollar home with worse plumbing than cheap 1-room studios elsewhere in the world.

That's exactly the wrong take-away!

Amtrak is totally irrelevant for trans-continental travel. There is a "daily" departure from Seattle to Chicago. I.e. one train per day. Probably a few hundred passengers on a good day.

I just did a quick check and there are 7 non-stop flights tomorrow from Seattle to Chicago. Average air travel time is about 4 hours. Cheapest fare for tomorrow is $262.

So this train exists for a few tourists and for a few people who can't or don't want to fly. Everyone else takes a non-stop plane and gets there in hours not in days.

It's an indication of the USA's wealth and bounty that we are willing to waste billions of dollars a year on useless vanity projects like this. Long distance Amtrak runs at a loss, the US congress provides $1.3 billion a year to make up the difference. In addition there is a $650 million subsidy for passenger trains between Washington DC and Boston. That's arguably something useful, since the route is heavily traveled. https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/03/21/amtrak-gets-n...

It's kind of a "nature preserve" of socialism in the US.

In the US, Canada, and Mexico trains are for freight. Even if you’re in the Northeast Corridor a bus is usually a better option if you aren’t driving or flying. Europe uses trucks for freight.

Basically Amtrak has to keep to a specific schedule, if ut misses it's window it loses the priority it had.

For a transcontinental trip: drive a car or a van.

That said, Amtrak engines are also often leased to other freight companies so you can frequently see freight trains being hauled by Amtrak branded engines.

http://utahrails.net/pass/amtrak-mail-express.htm

It stopped in 2004, presumably due to declines in mail volume. (Which I wonder if it would make sense again now, due to more mail-order package shipping.)

Anyway, it's not really "freight" in the sense that most people think of a freight train. It's all Amtrak rolling stock.

They still do offer Express shipping services between some stations. It's a very cheap way to send something between NYC and Washington for same-day arrival, especially if it's a big box. You have to have someone go to the train station on either end to get your stuff, though. They move them around on the passenger trains that have baggage cars (the 'named' trains, typically at least on the East Coast).

This mentality weirds me out. As in: Why are we explicitly valuing the time of companies over the time of actual people? Companies can probably adjust to getting their shit 8 or 12 or 24 hours late (or, if they can't, they can charter a plane). It's a lot harder to deal with for people who need to be somewhere.

I don't know why continental american train service is so stupidly over priced and inconvenient, but I really hope at some point they realize they are currently uncompetitive and could actually make more money offering a better service for a more reasonable fee.

Their continuous response to lower revenues is to raise prices.

This just feeds ever-more innovation in the message and package delivery markets, sabotaging themselves.

Canadian shippers could only dream of US rates for first class mail packages and flat rate boxes with insurance and tracking.

Canada Post did a good job of privatizing outlets, and as you said, leveraging that network for the last mile.

What Vancouver is missing is staffed front-desks like Toronto ;)

Dedicated post offices are incredibly silly, embed them into stores, and offering to reimburse clerks for the time they spend actually dealing with mail is wonderful. It means that instead of having one location in little old New Westminster we've got 6, downtown vancouver (just the penisula up to chinatown-ish) has 14 post offices in 2.3 sq. miles... that's way better than some gigantic greek revival building in the middle of town that absolutely everyone has to spend 30 minutes on a bus to get to.

I assume Canada has a similar history/present.

I've done the Empire Builder back-and-forth between Seattle and Chicago, or Saint Paul about six times in the last six years, and never had anything like that happen. I can only assume that things have improved since your trip.

The worst thing I experienced was a four-hour delay in Milwaukee because of a broken down freight train blocking the line. But we were free to get out and walk around and stretch our legs.

It can be frustrating to experience long delays if you have a tight schedule, but otherwise I think it makes the most sense to just relax and enjoy the view.

I'll be taking the California Zephyr (Chicago to Emeryville; said to be one of the most picturesque routes) this May, which I'm quite looking forward to. It will be my first time riding that line, and my first time in a sleeper.

Very true. Although I've had some awful delays on airlines as well, and given the choice between being stuck on a passenger train and in a plane, I'd take the train every time. (Though admittedly the airlines have gotten slightly better about not leaving passengers on planes to stew in their own juices on the tarmac for hours and hours. But it took some people really slapping them around in court I think.)

Apparently the freight haulers have tried to get them to stop publicly blaming them like this.

To the railroads it gets higher priority. But if a freight train bocks a passenger train the railroad gets fined by the hour (quarter hour?).

However, the freight railroads often just eat the fine as a cost of doing business. Like delivery companies do with parking tickets.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2016/04/29/...

Unfortunately, for various political reasons that part of the law has almost no teeth so freight companies openly flout it or treat the meager fines as the cost of doing business. It's a big part of the reason that passenger rail sucks in the US.

That makes you quite lucky, and you eventually got married. Most couples don't know if their future marriage is seaworthy until they hit their first major storm.

Good to be aware longer train rides might not be as nice.

What would work quite well, though, would be something like the Auto Train: you can get an overnight ride that ferries your car and you don't have to drive the thoroughly boring drive of the Great Plains.

I think this was specifically a train for fun and scenery. The destination is part of the point too but this wasn’t marketed or intended as transportation as a means of getting from point a to b.

In short I’m sure your experience is a reliable indicator of at least some of the state of train travel in the us. But it can be better than this, as a niche industry.

All Amtrak lines are operated a little differently, AFAIK. As far as the West Coast is concerned, I find both the Pacific Surfliner and the Coastal Starlight to be pleasant and enjoyable (although not very affordable). The Northeast Regional on the East Coast is pretty affordable, runs often, and makes traveling between cities in the Northeast megalopolis without a car pretty trivial, which is nice.

All that's to say that I wouldn't judge Amtrak by its least-used routes.

Found the problem.

If the wrong people get in charge (and very likely if the ideology is widespread) they make little effort to improve things other than to cut costs.

Competition usually improves things, it's true, but natural monopolies are still problematic.

Also, would you then be consistent and argue that the government shouldn’t be spending so much on highways for cars, since it’ll just waste that money too?

The USA has large areas of sparsley populted land where flying for long distance, and car for the the closer area are hard to beat. This is way different from more densly populated Europe and even more densly populated Japan (especially when excluding Japan's motain regions)

If there were drive more more trains this would first require massive investment in infrastructure, to build both: the medium distance lines through populated area (for example along the east and west coast) as well as a network of connecting services fading out in the suburbs of the hub. Hardly anybody wants to go from hub to hub. If they need an car for "the last mile" anyways it's likely they won't take the detour to the train station and then having no way to continue on the other end ... If instead they can drive the complete distance.

Successful railways need a network connecting complete regions providing enough potential for a frequent service.

Building that requires huge support by politics/society.

Private enterprise is great when taxpayers pay for the expensive part.

I have total faith that we could privatize Amtrak and have it be just as execrable in comparison. And then it would be sold off for parts, some assholes would get tremendously wealthy, and we wouldn't have any passenger rail network at all.

This has basically nothing to do with the fact that it is government-run.

I don't know if you noticed, but building massive infrastructure cost a shitload of money for private enterprise as well.

Of course, the people proposing/pushing for the idea and the people implementing the idea did not share a lot of membership, so the implementers put a person deeply opposed to the project in charge. Of course, no projects of use got approved, most of the projects that did get approved were obviously pointless and tedious, and they were constantly thousands of jobs short or what was needed to employ everyone who wanted work anyway.

So yeah, that's why we have the "digging and filling holes" analogy for useless make-work. Ideas are fine and all, but it doesn't matter for shit if you have an antagonist implementing them.

The question I'd ask is, other than preserving the way of operating that amtrak has, is it worth the subsidy - I'd say yes, preserving the knowledge of how to operate LD trains is important, so is offering the rural communities it serves transportation, I'd like to expand rail service even.

This is not a bad model: the public retains the land and tracks, and provides them for private enterprises to run trains on, subject to some sort of coordination so you don't have wrecks.

That's similar to how many airports work, how the Interstate Highway System works, etc.

However, for historical reasons it's not how the US system operates, and it would be very difficult for the government -- absent a lot of spending that I doubt the public has the appetite for -- to acquire the land and rights-of-way.

On routes where Amtrak actually controls the underlying trackage, it operates quite well. Where everything goes to shit is when Amtrak operates on others' track.

If we really wanted a good passenger-rail system, what we would need to do is build dedicated passenger rail lines, totally separate from freight rail. The two types of trains are so different today that it doesn't make sense to run them together. High speed passenger trains do best on banked track, and not having freight trains around for them to run into allows you to use lighter rolling stock. Acela trains have been described as "rolling bank vaults" because of the collision protection they have to have -- simply because they're liable to collide head-on with a fully loaded freight train. There's no good way around it, except to stop mixing the two up.

No it doesn’t. Amtrak owns the lines between Baltimore and DC. I used to commute it every day for two years and it was awful. Amtrak struggles to adequately maintain the northeast corridor, because as a result of government-imposed mandates, its operating profits from there go to subsidizing service on lines nobody uses. Similarly, Amtrak is just shitty at logistics and operations—planning around track work, giving updates about delays, keeping trains in working order, etc. Again, they have no mandate to turn a profit (unlike government owned rail lines in Europe) so they run like the DMV, rather than a rail carrier.

That said, Amtrak came into existence because most of the private rail companies had failed or were failing. Had the federal government not stepped in, we'd arguably have no long distance passenger rail service outside the Northeast Corridor (where Amtrak basically makes the money that it then loses on pretty much every other route in the country).

The US rail network is optimized for freight hauling (and it's largely owned by freight railroads and maintained at private expense, and those railroads turn a consistent profit). It also works well -- for its intended purpose.

If you want to move 3000 miles at 45 MPH remarkably cheaply, and you happen to be (or live in) a cargo container, the US rail network is built just for you!

But get a sleeper compartment, don't sit with the cattle. It's worth it, really.

And that's even though we spent little time in our compartment almost the whole trip we were up in the observation car watching the American landscape roll by.

One highlight of the trip was when storms over Helper, UT, washed out some of the ballast from the tracks. We had to wait three hours for someone from the railroad to come inspect to see if it was safe to pass. While waiting, there was a guy with a guitar in the observation car, and we had a nice sing-along.

It's just a great way to see samples of everything America has to offer.

That bit sounds like hell to me but I'm glad you had fun! In the UK we have special carriages where you're not allowed to make a noise so you can avoid that kind of thing.

https://www.metrotransit.org/northstar-line

The lines that goes between the Mall of America, downtown Minneapolis, and St Paul are light rail, and are faster than what would normally be considered a "tram" or "streetcar".

I mainly mentioned it since the parent comment was about a group of girls getting on the train purely for the experience of being on the train, and my experience seemed pretty similar.

Don't know that it terribly matters one way or the other though I guess.

So there are some tram/streetcar/light rail systems out there (like the one in New Orleans) that consist of individual railway vehicles, and are thus not trains.

Haha when I took Caltrain daily to mountain view this was my nightmare. Bluetooth headphones and a white noise app were a requirement.

Those field trip days, and the rides home on baseball game days... I do not miss that commute.

I grew up in the eastbay, and at least while I was growing up, the bart train was a friendly environment of people interacting with one another. Obviously it came with some not so pleasant things (i.e. homelessness and unwanted touching) but more human none-the-less.

I don't think it would have been many children's first trip either, just a cheap morning's entertainment for the nursery...

1) Fuel tax. There's no tax on jet fuel, but rail companies pay tax on their diesel or electricity

2) Inflexible service, but high expectations. The European rail timetable is changed twice a year, and those trains will run (in normal circumstances). There will be a train from X→Y every hour from 5am until midnight, and those trains run even if very few people use them on a particular day. An airline can change the schedules more easily, and cancel/rebook passengers at fairly short notice.

3) Rail infrastructure is subsidized differently to aircraft infrastructure. I don't know enough to compare which benefits the most. Externalities aren't costed properly (e.g. noise and pollution).

4) Railways must still provide low-profit-(even loss)-making services, they may be expected to do this using profits from other routes. For example, long distance intercity trains might be subsidizing rural services.

More of an issue for lumbering freight trains than passenger trains though.

Answering your question, on the issue of price they note that no fuel tax is is paid on airplanes fuel and no VAT (21%) on flight tickets.

I think it’s a clever win/win play: reducing short haul flights in favour of railways not only reduces emissions and noise pollution, but it also frees up some capacity at Schiphol.

And there’s been some success already: the house has accepted a motion to eliminate the Schiphol-Brussels route.

By american standards, both methods are dirt cheap.

Ryanair cuts every cost you can imagine. No free water or pretzels, tiny seating area, no first class, outskirts airports, no checked or carry on, tarmac boarding.

On trains you get sufficient space to stretch your legs, a power outlet, wifi, unlimited baggage etc. and you get to arrive and depart in the city center.

I think the pricing is based upon consumer value more than service costs.

1. The discount airlines have become masters at turnaround times. When the planes are sitting at the gate, they're not making money. They slashed these as much as they could.

2. They only fly one model of airplane (typically either the 373 or a320) to simplify maintenance.

3. Most major airports in Europe are privatised. One of the effects of this is that they've become giant malls that want to get people through them, so landing fees have steadily gone down (there are edge cases where the airports pay the airlines to go to them, but those are rather rare exceptions).

4. Some airlines (more specifically Ryanair) fly to cheaper/more outlier airports. If you take a Ryanair flight to Paris, you're landing in Beauvais Airport, which is almost halfway to the english channel. You'll then have to take a bus. When in europe, I usually prefer Easyjet for the reason that though they're more expensive, you're landing at an airport with decent transit to the city you're visiting.

5. There's no frills at all. If you're just flying with no luggage, you won't believe how cheap it can be (I flew from madrid to london for 25 euros). But the fills aren't cheap. Checked baggage is more than the cost of the flight, food is a rip off, etc.

Also, trains in europe are still often state-owned (not the case everywhere, I know), so they're forced to run uneconomical lines for political purposes, etc.

Thing may have changed since a few things happened meanwhile, but a couple of years ago Ryanair got about 100 Million EUR [1] (sorry, link in Italian) from various Italian airports. Verona airport used to pay up to 24 EUR per passenger to low cost companies.

My understanding is that some airports have been opened for political reasons even when there was no real need, so they are "forced" to make such agreements in order to guarantee a decent amount of passengers.

I'm wondering if this happens also elsewhere in Europe.

[1] https://www.corriere.it/economia/17_marzo_18/cento-milioni-a...

As a european who moved to the US recently, this was mind boggeling the first time I boarded a plane in the US. I arrived at the airport expecting a typical 10 minute boarding time, but kept getting more surprised at how inefficient they managed to make boarding a plane as time passed. Just the time spend waiting in the plane at the gate before they let you get out seems to be longer in some cases than the typical turnaround time for euro flights.

Your statement that "As far as I know, for example, trains are significantly more fuel efficient per passenger-mile" definitely has some merit, but... trains are only more fuel efficient per passenger if they are as full as planes. An Airbus with 180 passengers might beat a train in per passenger miles if the train is not loaded.

Considering that, trains definitely are cheaper for highly utilized routes (commuting routes, for example), but for a leisurely trip across Europe, an Airbus packed to the gils could be cheaper.

The complicated area of railroad tracks probably doesn't help either. Someone is paying for them and the maintenance is frequent judging by the business my friends working on the railroads get.

And that's the catch. I've been told that years ago it was better, but try to catch a train to a secondary city in New England and you'll often find that the only offering is an occasional Amtrak branded bus.

I don't disagree that some other services might be alright, but that's clearly not one of them.

Düsseldorf-Munich for 26,70€ including reserving a seat.

Kiel-Düsseldorf 29,90€. To get back, 26,90€.

Kiel-Munich and back for 53,80€.

Not even Ryanair is that cheap, especially when you consider that with trains you don’t have to go through security, have none of the check-in times and other bullshit, and can take luggage without paying a 60€ surcharge.

You just have to check sites like https://bahn.guru/ to find the cheapest connections.

For americans its something quaint and wild whereas for europeans its just a basic form of transportation

You're either repeating outdated cliches from the internet, or you must not live in a large metropolitan area with passenger train service.

Looking at the top 20 metropolitan statistical areas in the US, you're already at nearly half the population of the US. And I know from the experience of having ridden commuter rail in most of those that most of them have commuter rail, i.e. passenger train service.

You've got to go pretty far down the list to find one without commuter rail or even a subway/light rail system (which I'm not counting as passenger train service).

If it isn't the majority, it's at least a normal experience for a huge swath of the population.

"Yeah, we have passenger train service"

"good passenger train service?"

"Hey, lets not get ahead of ourselves"

I personally think a well-executed acoustic guitar singalong can add a lot of real joy to any group experience.

I've played in rock bands since I was 15 (I'm north of 50 now), and I've been on stage in front of a thousand people and I've played to killer mosh pits and all that, but my best memories of all those years were the after-parties where it was just me and my bassist with acoustics and a room full of drunk people singing along to the Eagles or Sublime or maybe even Weezer...

Now, it helps to have a professional level acoustic guitar and, of course, a professional lead singer to hide everyone's mistakes, but it can be a magical, cathartic experience when the room all sings at the top of their lungs...

Great memories.

Of course, this changes if alcohol is involved.

I get the feeling that showcasing some skill in a public fashion is loved in the USA, not so much in the UK. We typically want to sit and not disturb others, and find any other kind of disturbance awkward; we try to sit quietly and pretend it isn't even happening, eg. not even looking at the person making the disturbance. eg. some people arguing at the back of the bus probably won't make people at the front of the bus turn around or tell them to shut up.

I think this is a bit different than busking which tends to be relegated to locations where people aren't required to hang around for long periods of time (like outside a metro station where someone enjoying your music can stay and chill for a while or just continue into the relative quiet of the station platform.

I don't have as much of a problem with street-corner busking, in large part because it can be avoided, but even that drives me nuts when I can't get away from it (outside a place I work, for example).

I love music, and when I'm in the mood, I'll seek out a street performance. City parks are great for this, and I think they're an appropriate venue. A rail car is not even remotely appropriate, and a subway station during your unavoidable morning commute, with loud brass instruments and a shitty PA system, echoing off the walls, ought to be a crime.

Yes, even if the guy is really good. You can stand not being the center of attention for a few hours.

Yeah, us Brits don't like to do anything that sounds like it might be fun when we're under stress. We want to sit there and bitch and complain about the fact nobody is fixing the track and who is going to get fired for it. We definitely don't want to have anyone distract us from that with anything that looks like it might be fun. /satire

Jerry and I share sentiments on this.

John Belushi concurs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqpNQ9AJYgU

So we were sitting there wondering if the same storm that eroded the tracks had maybe eroded the cliff around that boulder, allowing it to tumble down through the oil tanker to send us plunging into the flood waters below.

Brooding over that was less fun than the distraction of the sing-along.

After MacWorld we did a little sightseeing, then took the Coast Starlight to Portland, where we changed to the Empire Builder back to Chicago.

Except what actually happened was that an avalanche in the Cascades held us up until a work train called "Snowball" showed up to clear the tracks. It had a massive snowblower, a plow, a flat car, a crane car, and a couple of coaches full of workers and equipment.

We then missed our connection, so they loaded us on double-decker buses that raced to catch up with the Empire Builder. It was very memorable.

(I do recommend the California Zephyr, and second the parent's suggestion of spending the whole of it in the observation car, but skip the part of the route between Chicago and Denver; Denver and onward is where the real action's at.)

My family went by train from Flagstaff, AZ to Trinidad, CO for a wedding and the observation car was amazing, it was part of the Southwest Chief route [1].

Even through what you'd think would be boring stretches of New Mexico not one scene wasn't awe inspiring. We got to see landscapes out of westerns and mostly away from roads/main bustle, but you'd be surprised how there is always something to see and almost always people living out there. We had to go through the Rockies in historic coal mining country Colorado and had to stop once for freight trains to go by, but the views were amazing. It is fun to lookup what you are going through on Google maps and finding lots of interesting stuff. Trinidad, CO was a nice little interesting historical town, once a border town, where Fishers Peak was a guiding landmark for settlers on the Santa Fe Trail, with Native American, pioneer and Spanish history, that has a Masonic cemetery, old limestone masonry buildings and underground tunnels for coal, once the sex change capital of the world, and today it is now a cannabis hot spot [2].

Best part of the train is the view and you can get up and walk around unlike on a plane, the rides are longer of course but more flexible to move while traveling which is nice. I brought my laptop to work but the views were too good to pass up.

If I had more time I'd love to take the train all across the US. I wish there were more trains simply to see the less busy areas and interesting viewpoints you can't see from the road.

Amtrak does leave lots to be desired in terms of technology, price, the food (dining car wasn't good) and general areas like maintenance, but the observation car was difficult not to be up there the entire time.

[1] https://www.amtrak.com/routes/southwest-chief-train.html

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2016/04/20/health/trinidad-colorado-smal...

I did two of them and they are some of the best travel experiences I had in my life.

And it still exists (just for the record):

https://www.eurail.com/en/eurail-passes/global-pass

But of course the times have changed.

The huge thing about this was that for most young people at the time the 18 years birthday meant a lot, in most EU countries that was (is) a "threshold" you become to all effects an adult and getting an Eurail ticket was the first "totally independent" travel experience without the family, and you got for an all in all affordable to everyone amount of money "freedom", you met a lot of other young people doing the same, you could try to start a conversations with someone (a "peer") in (actually usually much improvised) other language, you could visit places you had only read about in books, etc.

It was a great experience.

China rail have pretty bad hygiene at that time. The passengers freely throw their trash on the floor and out of the window. The attendants swiped the floor every few hours. Every time they pushed a mountain of peanut husk away. There was a peasant family on board with a baby. The baby needed to relief. So the parents held him up to have him shit on the floor. The attendant saw it and really lost it. She scolded the hell out of the family.

But even so, it was a wonderful experience. The Chinese landscape is nothing short of awesome. And the culture that unfolded was completely unknown to me, so constantly interesting.

One thing that really made me take notice was the wide range of people. On the way to the Shanghai train station, we had walked by a Lamborghini dealership (I don't recall ever having seen even one of these in the USA) - there's a not-insignificant population of filthy rich people in and around Shanghai. But on the train we saw people peasants using an ox to plow a rice paddy of only a fraction of an acre. The degree of inequality was hugely wider than America or any other nation I've seen.

EDIT: the Shanghai airport maglev train was an interesting experience just to say I've gone 300+mph on a train, but otherwise totally boring.

I’ve also done Shanghai to Changsha and Changsha to kunming like that. It gets interesting west of hunan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo2ZsAOlvEM

Cattle?

People sometimes aren't just stacked, they're squashed.

"Don't sit with the cattle" is (IMHO) pretty harsh, and unnecessary.

And, for the record, cattle class seats are (or were) about the size of first-class airline seats, in the days before the bed capsules. It's not a cabin but it might be the least-cramped train seating you will ever encounter.

This is true, they're FAR better than standard airline seats. On the other hand, if you're going NY to SF you're going to be sitting in them for 3 days, so they better be comfortable.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_class

But then you have to ask why the train is stopped in the middle of a crossing, rather than just knowing it's so the train police could remove the dude a few seats over.

If I were going with a partner, a sleeper seems compelling. But alone, the back is more than fine.

How much does it cost?

If we had 300mph bullet trains going across the country, it would make some sense because you'd get there a lot faster while still seeing the sights, it'd be more comfortable than an airplane's economy seats, and the ridership would probably be higher (which would lead to lower costs). As it is, long-distance rail travel in the US is an expensive disaster.

That said, a sleeper car on Amtrak gets you: a flat surface to lie down on, your own toilet (note the toilet is just there in the roomette, next to the bunk, prison style), access to a shower (your own shower in the rooms, one per car for the roomettes), access to the first class lounges, and includes meals in the dining car.

Rooms have a slightly wider lower bunk versus roomettes to sleep 2 (skinny) people and an enclosed toilet so you don't lose mystery from your romantic or work relationships. Roomettes are too small for a first world prison cell but have the beds oriented parallel to the direction of travel, which many people find more comfortable -- the rocking of the train is more soothing and less jarring.

If you have the time, don't mind paying four-star hotel prices for a two-star experience, and hate flying or have a medical condition that makes it infeasible you should definitely consider it.

Or, if you're on this site, it's a great excuse to sit in a small room with a view and not talk to anyone for several days, just read, write and program.

With spotty cellphone reception, so if you want to disconnect from constant connectivity that's also an interesting way.

It's a great experience, but if you're thinking of just sitting in there and programming in a room with a view, keep in mind that the scenery changes and is pretty amazing, which might distract you from programming.

This sounds like fun. I wonder if there are any European routes that are as long/uninterrupted that I could try that on.

I went London-Japan overland but my longest single segment was two and a half days (Moscow-Shymkent), and that was about right - time to relax and do nothing for a bit, but by the third morning I had definitely spent enough time in the same compartment, as nice as it was.

The London to Ft. William sleeper, when there's leaves on the line?

A sleeper for one is ~1'800$. About 300 more if you're two.

That's about half of a yearly train pass for Switzerland (2nd class). The pass allowes you to travel in virtually any mode of transportation without restrictions. Except for taxis, some boats and some mountain railways.

So yeah, that's pretty steep.

But that price includes the sleeper and meals. If you view this as the vacation itself, it's not far off the price you'd be paying for hotels and meals.

But compared to a one way flight, which can be had for as little as 100 bucks it's still pretty steep.

Alas, the experience certainly cannot be compared. It's not about getting to the destination, when you take the train. You pay for the entire experience.

You should take a TGV, you'll realize that at 300kph you don't see the sights.