This is a cool idea, my wife and I did the cross country ride (Oakland to Washington DC) in sleeper cars and it was a lot of fun. Some great scenery and a lot of time to think. Weird things at the time were the plastic utensils in the dining car seemed a bit jarring, and of course train stations in the USA can be fairly tawdry compared to European stations.
There are lots of things that challenge rail in the US, perhaps the most obvious is private ownership of the rails themselves, as opposed to freeways which are state owned and maintained. That shifts a lot of costs on to fewer payers. It also means the rail owner's trains get priority (in this case freight) so scheduling is quite difficult to maintain. There is also a tremendous amount of bureaucracy and complexity built into the system which I've found resists even modestly determined prodding. As part of an exercise in home schooling we tried to find out what it actually cost to put in the San Jose light rail in order to compare that to what we had learned about the Northern Pacific Railroad at a wonderful museum in Sacramento. All of our efforts to get what I had assumed was just boring public data were met with suspicion and resistance. That was pretty weird.
I think the biggest challenge to rail in the US is just how huge the US is.
Take a common train ride in Europe: Paris to Berlin. You've actually traveled less distance than from New York to Chicago, and it took 8 hours to do so.
In fact from Paris all the way to Moscow is much shorter than from LA to NYC.
Without some amazing new tech in rail, I doubt it'll ever be a popular alternative in the US to flying (other than intra-regional trips).
I doubt rail will replace cross-country flights, but there is a ton of air traffic on shorter routes.
As one example where it's already done, the DC-NYC Amtrak route is quite popular, despite being just as expensive, if not more so, as the plane ride. It takes a similar amount of time, factoring in travel to and from airports, waiting, etc. and is much nicer. There are still a ton of airline flights between these two cities as well, of course, and those could probably be supplanted to a large degree with additional improvements.
That's with current American trains, which are painfully slow. Imagine modern high-speed rail between, for example, DC and Miami. It's a bit over 1,000 miles which would take about five hours. That would be an excellent substitute for the plane trip, which is about two hours in the air, but tons of time and hassle at the airports. I have family in South Florida and if such a train existed at something like a reasonable price, I'd definitely go for it. As it is, Amtrak on that route takes nearly 24 hours and costs way more than an airline ticket. I don't see why they get any passengers at all, given that.
Seems like 1,000 miles is about the limit for high-speed trains. How many pairs of large American cities are less than 1,000 miles apart and have lots of travel between them? I would bet there are quite a number. Rail doesn't have to solve everything to solve a bunch of things.
I've done a lot of NY->Bos trips. The trains are much more reliable. It's a hair longer on the train, but it's all productive time. On a plan you're lucky to have an hour productive. There's also a NY->Bos overnight.
Chicago to Seattle is something like 40 hours, with almost the same number of stops.. Even with slow trains, the time would be much faster if you didn't have to slow down, stop for a few minutes, and then startup again every time you reached a town of 3000 people.. Its like they've had to put a station in every congressional district :)
If you consider that route pretty bad just consider this:
Kentucky and TN do not have Amtrack. [Well TN has a small segment on its western side that goes N to S but its pretty much a desert.
This means that if you wish to go from ATL, Raleigh/Durham, etc to Chicago, you have to make "connections" (good luck making that on amtrack) in either Charlottesville VA or DC. After that it is still 24 hrs at best.
Kentucky used to have Amtrak, the Kentucky Cardinal. It went from Louisville to Chicago and took what felt like 12 hours although not sure I'm remembering that correctly. It was only $30. I had high hopes for that route, that it would open up more options to travel by rail from my hometown.
The problem with that was that the short line from Louisville to Indianapolis hasn't been seriously updated in over 50 years. The speed limit on the entire section of track is something like 30 mph. Of course folks aren't going to go by train when it's over twice as long as driving.
There's been some talk of a Louisville-Lexington-Nashville line, but nothing particularly likely to happen.
You doubt rail will compete/replace cross country air travel because "it seems like 1,000 miles is the limit for high speed trains." Is there any reason to think that what appears to be the case is actually the case? I do not know a lot about rail travel why is distance a limiting factor? Is it a business limitation or a physical limitation?
The 1,000 mile rule is pretty widely quoted and is not too controversial. Reasons for it are:
1. Speed (physical limitation). Due to reduced overhead (time getting to and at airport), trains are faster or equivalent to air travel for short (<500 mi) routes, and are not much slower for medium (<1000 mi) routes. Whereas for cross country (~3000 mi) routes, even a high speed train would take a couple of days for a trip that could be made in 10 hours by plane (incl. overhead).
2. Infrastructure costs. Air travel infrastructure is proportional to the number of passengers and constant with respect to the travel distance (since each passenger occupies 1/200th of a gate at two airports for about an hour, regardless of the travel distance. Rail travel infrastructure is proportional to the distance traveled and relatively constant with respect to the number of passengers. These combine to mean that shorter trips with more passengers are more competitive by rail, and longer trips with fewer passengers are more competitive by plane.
1,000 miles is about the point where air travel starts to become substantially faster than modern high-speed rail.
Airplanes add about three hours onto the trip just to account for getting to and from the airports (which are almost always far away from the city), going through security, arriving early enough to account for unexpected problems, etc. With trains it's much less, often well under an hour.
However, airplanes go much faster. That DC-Miami trip would be about five hours by high-speed train and is about two hours by plane. It would be roughly a wash when you account for the extra overhead of airplane travel, making the train more attractive due to being more comfortable and potentially cheaper. But go much farther, and the plane starts to get a lot faster. For a coast-to-coast flight, a high-speed train is still going to take nearly a full day, while an airplane can do it in about eight hours after accounting for the extra overhead.
So, as far as I can see, 1,000 miles is roughly the breakeven point on planes versus high speed rail.
Don't use Europe as an example for an efficient train system. Learn from the best: Japan. New York - Washington? Sure, no problem, takes about 2h 15min[1][2][3]. New York - Chicago? 8 hours [4]. Looking at the American timetable - holy crap, 19 hours for the same distance by train, 12 hours by car.
At one point I was attending college in Baltimore while my family lived in Chicago. I'm fine with long trains rides (8-10 hours or so) but the routes from Baltimore to Chicago were reported to be 27 hours (For this reason I never actually used them). I don't know how they come up with stuff like that.
I tell you what, I'd be fine too sitting for 8h in this[1], the standard Shinkansen interior. They even have wall outlets as well as onboard LTE between Tokyo and Osaka. I'm usually more productive in those than in my office. There's only one issue: If you're not a tourist carrying a weekly rail pass, it costs around 140$ one way for a 3h trip. Sounds like a lot, however considering the distance they travel in that time it starts to look reasonable again.
Yes, the U.S. is big. BUT if you implement high speed rail in specific corridors it would be quite a bit better than flying.
The DC, Baltimore, Philly, NYC, Boston route covers millions of people. It is absolutely criminal that we cannot get trains on this route which have average speeds greater than ~90mph (amtrack acela express). DC to Boston is only ~450 miles. Even if we get to only 150-200mph (which is already occurring in China over long distances) we are looking at only 2-3 hours from DC to Boston.
But no-one in a hurry takes the train from Paris to Moscow either. Conversely, look at the distances between, say, Chicago, Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Columbus, Ohio, and Detroit. The distance from Chicago to Detroit is only slightly greater than that from London to Paris, minimum time 2h 15m by train.
Even the bus system is pretty solid between these cities - but an upgraded train system would be much preferred through sitting in traffic & stressing behind the wheel.
The hub system in different locations (NE, Midwest, West Coast) with a few connection points - would be an incredible option to have.
I was actually just looking this up. Judging by the numbers on Wikipedia, US rail freight is about 10x per capita the EU's, while US passenger rail is about 1/10th per capita compared to the EU.
I don't know if this is true or not, but I have heard that most of the US's rail is unsuitable for passenger travel because it is unsuitable for speeds that would make passenger travel reasonable. With freight it doesn't matter so much since the name of the game is moving lots of things cheap, not moving things fast.
See, there's a simple solution to that as the Japanese show: Build more rails. Their bullet train system has a separate rail covering the whole main island of Honshu.
This is really cool and a great promotional idea for Amtrak. There used to be a universally romantic notion about long-distance travel by trains that I'm sure Amtrak is trying to bring back to the forefront of Americans' minds. Check out this article by a freelance writer about her cross country trip by rail: http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/riding-an-amt.... I'm sure that's the type of promotion that they're looking for.
One of my fondest memories from high school was an overnight train ride we took from somewhere in Italy to Paris during a spring break study abroad program. The majority of the rail workers had gone on strike and the only people left working the trains were the drivers. The rumors were that gypsies had taken over the trains and that they were now unsafe for normal customers. Being a large group of high schoolers in a foreign country trying to stick to a tight schedule, we didn't have much choice than to take the train or else have to deal with a logistical nightmare. When we got on, the train was deserted, and we had free reign to do whatever we wanted. That type of freedom was rare and pretty thrilling to a high school freshman.
One of my favorite New Year's Eve parties was on an Amtrack over a decade ago. I was headed back up to college and because of my schedule had to overnight it on a Northboand Amtrack on New Year's Eve. I'm not sure if it was because it was New Year's Eve, or a particularly long route, or just a special train, but it's the only time I ever remember seeing a liquor bar on an Amtrak (the entire bar was smaller than any closet in my house). I had brought my own liquor, and did my best to keep it out of sight.
Several hours before midnight, the coach I was in started morphing. Normally people didn't really talk to each other. That night, seatmates started talking, impromptu cardgames were started, I was certainly not the only one with hidden alcohol, and the bar was providing plenty for those without. By midnight the car I was in, and the adjacent car with the bar, were in full party mode. It was simultaneously one of the most surreal and awesome trips I have ever taken.
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As for the Amtrak writer program - very cool. As a young serviceman, I would frequently catch a Friday night Amtrack away from the military town I was stationed in, picking a random location that I could spend Saturday in, and then ride back Sunday afternoon. I didn't write about or photograph my travels (wish I had), but I can't image a writer worth their salt not being inspired by the scenery, events, or people met on such random jaunts.
I traveled from Beijing to Moscow on the trans-Siberian train. It took five days.
One tip: if you're thinking of making the journey, bring a small hose with you so you can hook it onto the sink and have a little shower. Also, there are companies that will arrange home stays if you want to get off in Yekaterinburg or a few other towns and kick around for a bit.
In the early 90s, I traveled from St Petersburg, Russia to London's Victoria Station. I'm pretty sure the route does not exist any more, as it involved going through all the Baltics, Poland, Berlin, and eventually the Oostende-Dover ferry and on to London. All in all, it took about three days (including a 12-hour layover in Berlin).
I had a bunch of Amtrak points sitting around that I recently redeemed for a bedroom sleeper trip between Seattle and Chicago.
It was an interesting experience but not one that I would repeat. It is by no means a smooth ride, and even with the bedroom I found it quite difficult to get any sleep. Between the horn constantly going off, the bumpiness of the tracks, and the hourly stops/starts, I basically ended up staying awake for 2 days straight.
While I was initially able to get some work done during the trip, after the first night I was way too sleep deprived to be able to continue programming.
But then again, I am a light sleeper, and I have trouble falling asleep on planes too.
I can sleep on a park bench that is on a non-stop roller-coaster (planes are a breeze) so for me sleeper trains are a delight, but I haven't take one in over 10 years since European flights got cheaper that trains. I do miss those long train rides across Europe, where you would meet people easily in the restaurant car. Amtrak I've never tried as I've never had the time nor inclination for train travel when in the U.S.
Trains in Europe are a pleasure compared to most of the U.S. system. I'm not sure if it's because Amtrak shares track with cargo trains or what, but the ride is pretty bumpy, noisy and much beyond a few hours not worth it with nothing to do and noway to sleep. I've done 20+ hour trips twice on Amtrak and I'll never do it again. I can see doing maybe a D.C. to NYC trip, but the economics of such a trip don't really work out for me over a plane even if door to door the train is only slightly slower (in fact I actually like the drive better).
Higher freight traffic in the U.S. has partially something to do with it. Buffering strengths here require that a passenger train be able to withstand 800,000 pounds of force without deformation, leading to trains that are nearly twice as heavy (and thus slower) than trains in other parts of the world. Europe, on the other hand, doesn't have quite as stringent requirements, and instead of requiring rigid frames they mandate crumple zones, which are arguably just as safe. MetroLink in SoCal has started employing something similar on their cars.
To give an idea just how big freight traffic is in the U.S., freight by rail is something like 1.7 trillion ton-mile (39.9% of freight by ton-mile). The total across all modes in the EU is 1.4 trillion ton-mile, of which rail makes up 17%, so only about an eighth of the U.S. in freight. This has led to fairly different rail systems.
Sure tax it to oblivion. Air travel impact per person is surprisingly low (comparable to driving). Trains have lot of fat which is not included in their footprint.
This is fiction. At best (long journeys) planes have per-seat co2 emissions comparable to an entire 5-person car, that's 5x. On journeys where planes actually compete with cars, double that. Add to that the 2-4x multiplier (greenhouse effect of co2 injected into upper atmosphere vs ground level).
Source on air travel being better than cars please.
I'm genuinely curious because I've always been told that flying is worse, and it would be nice to feel less guilty about flying.
Coming to think of it maybe planes are worse because of the fact that, even if driving is worse for the same distance, people are willing to go much further with planes because they are so much faster, and therefore end up polluting more overall.
For start why is long distance flight 10x cheaper than train?
Air planes require much less personnel and have no tracks. Trains are still in 60ies with fat unions and zero innovations. Also how is 50 ton airplane less efficient than 5000 ton train?
And if train takes 5 days instead of 5 hours, you should also count in the foot print of person who is traveling. In one sleeping coupe you could fit 6 aircraft passengers...
Sure airplanes do make traveling easier, but that does not make them less efficient.
I'm a light sleeper, but sleep pretty well on trains, all things considered. Planes are another matter, as it takes an iron grip on the armrests to keep the things in the air!
I wrote a lot of the early bits of Hecl ( www.hecl.org ) on trains between Padova and Rome.
Have you ridden on Amtrak trains before? In my experience riding Amtrak trains all around the Northeast Corridor I've never seen their trains smell like urine or vomit. The experience is less like city subways, regional rail, or buses, and more like what you would expect from airplanes (although with more space and without the seatbelts).
The primary problem with Amtrak is that they rarely compete with air travel in terms of price/speed. I prefer them to air travel anyway though because I rarely care about speed and the (effective) absence of the TSA more than makes up for it. (Also last-minute (literally, purchased minutes before departure) Amtrak tickets are more affordable than last minute plane tickets.)
I think that romanticising train travel is a good approach to attacking their speed disadvantage (though I think that working on reducing fares and increasing coverage are also essential).
> The experience is less like city subways, regional rail, or buses, and more like what you would expect from airplanes (although with more space and without the seatbelts).
The NRE is more like what flying business class used to be 15 years ago. Plenty of space, clean, relaxing lighting, a snack bar, etc. Most airplanes these days are filthy (they scrimp on cleaning between flights), don't run air conditioning enough on hot days, not to mention cramped.
Are you thinking subway or? The train experience I had was amazing. More legroom than I knew what to do with and when I got bored I could go to the dining car, observation car, and I think there was a bar car, but I was too young to drink at the time. AND THIS WAS IN THE US! I've heard wonderful things about trains elsewhere so I can only imagine.
I have, on the only time I've used Amtrak. It was from Raleigh to Charlotte NC. The train bathroom smelled horrendous, it wasn't confined to the bathroom either, and we had to stop and wait for 2+ hours for the rails to cool when a really heavy freight train had passed before.
I had to travel by Amtrak (forced, I lost my passport and I couldn't board a plane) from LA to NYC via Chicago once. ($230)
Not only I got to see a lot of places, but I truly accomplished more quality work than I normally do in a similar time-frame. Nearly zero distractions other than the occasional beautiful sight and the rest breaks I took, I had the chance to visit the surroundings of the major stations the train stopped at.
Perhaps it's my ability to sleep in the weirdest places, but I found the sightseer lounge car couches very comfortable. I went to bed 1hr or so after dusk, and I woke up with the morning lights. That's about 8h of sleep or so every night.
PS: Make sure to download a metric shitton of music before you do this. The sightseer car (the only place where one can truly work comfortably in the train) is usually a noisy place.
The inaugural residency ("beta test") happened in February, when an NYC writer, Jessica Gross, was given a free 39-hour ride between NYC and Chicago (and back) in a sleeper cabin. She wrote about it in The Paris Review:
Amtrak must go really slow. In Europe, with a considerably higher population density, and thus more stops, 800 miles can be traversed in 10-11 hours. That train apparently takes somewhere close to 20.
Amtrak's running on a lot of very old track, which limits the top speed the trains can go on most routes. They don't have the power to upgrade the tracks because they don't own them, and the freight companies who do own the track don't have much incentive to upgrade it.
Also Amtrak can be forced to stop if a particularly heavy freight train or traffic has gone through. Heavy freight can heat up the rails enough that Amtrak has to wait for them to cool, the only time I've ever used Amtrak that happened and it took forever.
In addition to the points made by the other comments, I'd also add that "thus more stops" doesn't necessarily follow. Amtrak tends to be the subject of a lot of stupid politics, with the routes and stops determined more by what wins votes than what makes sense. As a result, a lot of Amtrak routes stop extremely frequently in pretty small towns.
As an example, the Amtrak train that runs between Washington DC and Boston (serving NYC along the way, and continuing on to Norfolk, VA) stops not only at DC's main train station, but also at New Carrollton, MD and Alexandria, VA, which are not only quite close to DC, but actually on the DC Metro system, making these stops almost completely redundant.
I count no less than thirty two stops between Boston and DC. The trip is about 9.5 hours long, so that's an average of one stop every 18 minutes.
The NYC->Chicago trip isn't quite as bad, but still has 19 stops in between. Along the way, it stops in such bustling metropolises as Elkhart, IN (population 51,152) and Sandusky, OH (population 25,493).
An even better example is the Acela, which makes fewer stops than the regular Northeast Regional trains, but stops in Wilmington, Delaware (pop. 70,000 and a 30 minute drive from Philadelphia). Joe Biden, now Vice President and formerly Senator from Delaware, used to commute on the Acela every day, and was a strong advocate for Amtrak funding.
As soon as the Southeast Highspeed Rail project looked like it was going to be viable, the mayors of all the small towns along the route started lobbying for it to stop in their burg.
Most of those stops between Boston and D.C. only have one train service per day.
The typical Northeast Regional between D.C. and NYC is: New York City, Newark, Metropark, Trenton, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Baltimore, BWI, New Carrolton, D.C. That's 8 intermediate stops over 3.5 hours, or one per 26 minutes. The Acela Express doesn't stop at Metropark, Trenton, BWI, or New Carrolton.
Why does even the Acela pass through Wilmington? The city only has 70,000 people, but is also a hub of corporate law firms and credit card companies. Wilmington boards about 800k passengers per yer, versus Baltimore's 1m, despite the latter being about 10x as big.
Also, a train going between Chicago and New York is traveling through Indiana, over CSX-owned tracks, and they are notoriously terrible about prioritizing freight over passenger rail. Expect to spend an extra 1-3 hours stopped waiting for a freight train!
The Lake Shore Limited (NYC <-> Chicago) runs through Albany and Buffalo, so it's closer to 950 miles, instead of the 800 miles you'd expect taking I-80 straight through. So the train does average closer to 50 than 40, which is better but still not great.
Depends on where in Europe... the long-distance trains from Copenhagen (mainly CityNightLine) are closer to Amtrak speeds. For example Copenhagen to Basel is ~700 miles, 16 1/2 hours; Copenhagen to Amsterdam is ~500 miles, 15 hours.
They do go slow, but that's not often the point, and that's what this campaign is trying to help. They are trying to point out a different way of looking at it. They are pointing out the romantic-relax-enjoy side of trains rather than the hurry-up-and-move-move side.
It's perfectly feasible to have far quicker diesel trains than is common in the US (see the British High Speed Train, from the 1970s, with a top speed in service of 125mph, or the ICE-TD from a decade ago, again 125mph). Of course, you then need to have signalling for that line-speed and have pathings that allow it.
My impression is that EU passenger railways are less likely to have at-grade crossings, which also would contribute (in terms of safety at a given speed).
High speed rail (typically considered 200km/h+, i.e., ~124mph) is almost always built with no at-grade crossings; on existing track upgraded for 200km/h line-speed it's normal to have lower speed limits around at-grade crossings.
Rather than a free program for a limited number of people, I would be much more interested if they offered a similar program for all sorts of people at an affordable rate.
I think you are right. The idea that you get a proper cabin seems wrong to me, the best train literature is travelling 'hobo style', not deluxe luxury. Clearly selling cabins is more profit, however, if sat with the riff-raff with just a chair to sleep in you can have a more interesting and unexpected experience.
I was 'fortunate' enough to sit next to a girl that had ideas on me from Grand Junction Colorado all the way to Chicago. I would not have had that random encounter had I travelled deluxe cabin class. Writing about the hundreds of miles of corn fields going by has not a lot going for it whereas an expected girl meets boy experience has broader appeal. Also on the same coach were a couple I had met months before in Yosemite. Having them in proximity cramped my style as far as my new-found lady friend was concerned, this was a constraint that adds to storytelling. A cabin based romantic experience would not be so good and neither would a few moments of passion with an existing partner in a cabin really have the 'Mills & Boon' factor.
Food was a problem on said journey for me, in part due to the train being six hours late at Grand Junction, by which point I had eaten almost all of the luxury ready eats I had bought for the journey. Even the six hour wait was noteworthy - you cannot leave the station as the train could arrive at any moment. So, for me, it was the random happenings and the constraints of money, timetable and what you can do in public that made the journey an adventure.
The thing is that you cannot have an authentic travel experience and write about it at the same time. You have to live life rather than be there to document it.
I really hate the "authentic travel" term. It reminds me of backpackers trying to one up each other on how horrible of conditions they've stayed in. Or why the travel destination they chose is more real than the one someone else chose. Staying in uncomfortable conditions doesn't make the travel more authentic or real it is just a different experience.
As for being able to experience it and write about it, you just did. My wife does travel writing and you don't have to go around with your face in your notepad ignoring the experience. Just take notes now and then about specifics you might forget(usually costs and package names) and have your pictures.
Some of my older relatives spend a lot of time going on holiday. They get to go on coach tours, see lots of airports, take cruises, swim with dolphins and all that stuff. Clearly they enjoy being waited on at various hotels around the world or they would not do it. However, it is not like they ever have 'the time of their life' and an experience that they just have to tell everyone about. They are content doing what they do, it fills the time.
For me though I need more. I need to not know if I will come out alive, I need genuine hospitality that need not be paid for, I need to meet people along the way that are not directly connected to the tourism industry. I need to be treated as a guest and a human being, not just a nice-enough tourist. I also don't need to be poking cameras in people's faces or writing about them. In summary, I need adventure, as in the stuff you cannot have an itinerary for.
In some ways your back-packers comparing notes on who stayed in the scummiest places are a bit like my relatives, just at a different point in life and on a different trail. At times on my travels I have crossed paths with them and their backpacker dives, however, I am typically able to avoid all that. I can call someone up that I met on the road and stay with them, unannounced. They might live in some unusual house, have some interesting job and be more than willing to give me an insider view of town rather than what I would discover as a tourist. That is what 'authentic travel' is about.
I should say that I have a secret weapon - a bicycle. With a bicycle you don't stay in the small out of the way places just to be more 'cool'. It is a necessity, you cannot just blast 500 miles along the big highway, at best you can do 50 miles in one burst before needing to stop for at least water, and on little roads 'off the tourist trail'. On the bicycle there is no windscreen between you and the world, you are actually in it and part of it.
Regarding writing, a retrospective account is always wrong, even if filled with tedious 'specifics'. There is no way of conveying genuine anticipation once the moment has gone, in your writing this knowing-the-answer-already aspect is not something you can disguise honestly, merely feign as the feeling has passed.
Careful trying to be the traveliest traveler. No matter how bad ass you are, there's always a bigger badass somewhere.
I remember a conversation at a little dive hostel in Durban, where the table was recounting their Bad Flight stories, one upping each other as one does at dive hostels around the world. After a particularly grim story about The Gambia, this heretofore quiet older guy mumbles "yeah, I'm never going to fly Air Ethiopia again."
Conversation proceeded, but after a few more stories, I asked the guy why, exactly he wasn't planning to fly that airline again.
Turned out he'd personally been on not one but two Air Ethiopia plane crashes. Crashed two thirds of their fleet single handedly evidently.
The second time, they'd landed in the jungle in the Congo, were detained by a local warlord, attempted escape, and were gunned down by the local militia. Back in government hands, the survivors were put on a plane, which sat on the runway for an hour surrounded by jeeps and shouting men before they were unloaded and marched off to a shed, expecting to be killed. Several tense hours later, the "general" came back and said they could go now, and apologized for the delay, as they needed the plane "to bomb the rebels."
Then he showed us the bullet wound in his back.
Since then, I tend to temper my speech when discussing how authentic my personal travel experiences are in relation to others.
The funny part is that you are talking about the backpackers on my travels like you aren't doing the exact same thing as them. The point of them talking about the scummiest stays isn't the squalor it's trying to convince people that their experience is more real/better or that they are a more real traveller.
You like the things you do. That is great. It doesn't make your travels more authentic than your older relatives though it is just a different experience. And you can get all of those things you desire and still spend your nights in a Hilton.
With regards to the writing I have to honestly disagree. Maybe you can't do it but doesn't mean no one can. You are ignoring the possibility that you just have a worse memory or writing skills than a lot of people out there. You assume your travels are more real and apparently you also assume your writing skills and memory are the peak as well.
"Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the Canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something, maybe."
Wow, did Amtrak knock up that guy's teenage sister or what?
As someone who has taken train/plane/bus/car between NYC and DC the last couple of years, I can say without a doubt that Amtrak is the most civilized way to get between those two places. If I didn't have family in Oregon I'd never get on a plane again.
> In recent years the train acquired the nickname "Coast Starlate" because of its abysmal on-time record. From October 2005 through August 2006 it arrived on time only 2% of the time, often running 5 to 11 hours behind schedule.
I've taken that line... it is beautiful (and provides an amazing view of Vandenberg AFB) but you've got to be in no hurry. The staff were amazed when we were "only" 6 hours behind schedule.
Unfortunately for Amtrak the North-East corridor trains that you've experienced are the exception, not the rule.
They should change the schedule. What's the point of having an impossible-to-meet schedule anyways? Sets unrealistic expectations and constantly disappoints passengers.
The problem isn't that they don't have enough time to get from point A to point B. The delays happen all over the line.
Since the route has dozens of stops, and a multi-hour delay could happen between any of them, where do you put the slack in the schedule?
It also didn't help that it took until 2013 to get GPS tracking on their fleet:
http://blog.amtrak.com/2013/09/google-helps-track-a-train/
I would have linked to the status page itself but it is, fittingly, down for maintenance today. Just knowing whether your train was running behind before going to the station wasn't available until recently.
That is a very long line, though -- 34 hours. 6 hours behind schedule is a lot in absolute terms, but it's only about 17%. I've often had 6 hour trips turn into 7 hour trips, in all modes of transportation.
What it comes down to is that 34 hour trips are not something we are ready to put up with anymore, unless we somehow make the trip itself part of the goal, whether it's an "Amtrak Residency" or a long range road trip with the sights and the hotels.
Having 3-5 shorts lines service the 34h/1400mi overall length makes more sense really. Maybe 5 7h lines during the day, and 3 11h overnighters. 7 to 8 hours is about as long as I'm willing to spend in a daytime train, and my previous experiences with 10 to 12 hour sleeper wagon trips have been pretty great, too. Any trips longer than that you can either spend a night in Sacramento or you have to take a plane or you just don't go and vote that the rail network gets improved beyond a pathetic 40 mph average.
It's in Reason, a libertarian magazine (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reason_%28magazine%29), so it's not surprising that it views Amtrak, which is funded by the government, as History's Greatest Monster.
That being said, there is definitely a drop-off in quality of service on Amtrak between the Northeast Corridor (DC to Boston) and the routes covering the rest of the country. Because the Northeast Corridor is by far the most heavily traveled and profitable part of Amtrak's network (see http://www.brookings.edu/research/interactives/2013/amtrakro...), it gets a level of service that other long-haul routes unfortunately do not.
The superior service in the Northeast Corridor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Corridor has a lot more to do with Amtrak and the like owning those rails, and optimizing most of it for passenger vs. freight traffic (the former prefers banked tracks in curves, the latter vertical rails for bearing weight).
It's pretty striking really. Amtrak makes a fair bit of money on the Northeast Corridor (and a couple of related routes) and then universally loses that money across the rest of the country, especially the long-haul routes like the California Zephyr. One of these days I'll have to take one of their long Western routes although I suspect that it's more romantic in theory than it is in practice.
"Amtrak makes a fair bit of money on the Northeast Corridor (and a couple of related routes)"
This claim was made in a WP article[1], but as this government report[2] points out, the accounting procedures used were flawed. To the point a Brookings Institute report[3] which reported in Slate[4] got the numbers wrong. Basically, it is only profitable if you do not count capital costs.
Thanks for the pointers. Although it doesn't invalidate the fact that ridership in the Northeast Corridor is a huge percentage of that in the overall system.
Yep, that is where the ridership is and is also the reason for quite a few objections to pouring more money into Amtrak. The service and website are a pain anywhere else.
The comic seems a pretty accurate description of an unlucky, delayed train trip. It's how you would see it if you were an unbelievably self-centered whiner who despised people in general.
I have no doubt that his train arrived 6 hours late, and that one of the crew couldn't pronounce Sauvignon Blanc. Not sure that it counts as a major tragedy.
There should have been a warning on that link for people who remember Peter Bagge from 90s comics: "Yet another person that you were entertained by when you were young turns out to be a total prick, don't click if you don't want a piece of your childhood spoiled."
Yes I take amtrak every other weekend, i love it. No horrible and insulting security checks, so much leg room, decent toilets, power outlets, good air conditioning, food pantry that sells alcohol, polite staff.
I dont get the hate. I love it.
Amtrak's NE Corridor is wonderful (I also do the NYC<->DC regularly) but elsewhere its a lot worse. I also did DC<->Norfolk a lot, and that (a 4-5 hour ride) was often delayed 2-4 hours and sometimes as much as 24.
I am guessing the NYC/DC train corridor is nicer than what we have on the west coast. I was looking into a holiday ride through silver country here, and the reviews unfortunately came back a big "heck no."
I've taken the Coast Starlight trip 2 times and would do it again in a heartbeat (had a sleeper room both times) - there's some awesome scenery in southern Oregon and through northern California as it travels along the coast:
I've done cross-country Amtrak travel multiple times and enjoyed it every time. You just have to be prepared for potential delays and willing to take it easy and roll with it. If you aren't in a hurry and see the trip as part of your vacation, then it's great.
And for Boston to New York, I really find it a lot more pleasant and almost as fast as flying--especially if you're going into Manhattan anyway. The only reason I'd fly to New York would be if I had a morning meeting and couldn't go down the night before for some reason.
That said, you go much further than New York and the train makes less sense either in terms of time or money.
I found the Acela north of New York (NY-Boston) to be great, but south of New York (NY-DC) my experience was a bone-rattling ride from hell. It was shaking so bad it threw my laptop off the table not once, but twice.
Boston to NYC or NYC to Washington are relatively short runs (under 4 hours or so) as well. And they're in a very populated corridor in which IMO the driving isn't very pleasant. (Plus they can take you downtown to downtown which is often an advantage.)
Train gets a lot less interesting as an option as the distance increases. I have taken Amtrak from Boston to Washington and it's definitely doable but it's not really especially competitive with flying .
I've never taken the NYC/DC route (never had a need), but taking the California Zephyr and the Empire Builder have always been magnificent experiences for me. Absolutely beautiful, relaxed rides. Let that be a counteranecdote.
My long distance travel has been exclusively by Amtrak for the past ten years. I live in Chicago, which is pretty central to the system - I might not have been so strict if I lived somewhere else.
Plane or (personal) car. The two more expensive options, unfortunately.
I used to take a train from San Diego to Santa Barbara regularly during college. I probably road it 10 to 15 times. The train was often late, and twice EXTREMELY late. Once, I waited at the station over 8 hours. The train had broken down, and another train was sent to push it to the station. That train broke down too.
On one trip, my train ran out of fuel. I didn't think this was even possible. We sat in dim emergency-level lighting in the blackness of night for 4 hours waiting for another train to come push us to the station.
Otherwise, it's a great experience. Low price, smooth ride, electrical outlets, and cell phone signal. It takes longer than other modes of transportation (even when on time), but that's fine by me.
>Once, I waited at the station over 8 hours. The train had broken down, and another train was sent to push it to the station. That train broke down too.
I was on that train; it was the day before Thanksgiving. It was the worst public transportation incident I had ever experienced. On top of the engine breaking down the electricity also went out, which prevented the air conditioners from running. With the large amount of people the trains were carrying, the heat grew to be too much and someone ended up fainting. So we had to wait about an hour for the ambulance to come by and revive the person.
Once we reached the LA station, because we had two large trains coupled to each other, people couldn't get off because the platform wasn't large enough. So they had to back the train out, decouple some cars, and go back into the platform. This went on several times before everyone could get off.
read the fine print. It is not a good deal.
From my friend Cate:
I would NOT advise applying, as it means essentially signing away the rights to the work you send them as a sample just by APPLYING:
"6. Grant of Rights: In submitting an Application, Applicant hereby grants Sponsor the absolute, worldwide, and irrevocable right to use, modify, publish, publicly display, distribute, and copy Applicant’s Application, in whole or in part, for any purpose, including, but not limited to, advertising and marketing, and to sublicense such rights to any third parties."
"Applicant grants Sponsor the absolute, worldwide, and irrevocable right to use, modify, publish, publicly display, distribute, and copy the name, image, and/or likeness of Applicant and the names of any such persons identified in the Application for any purpose, including, but not limited to, advertising and marketing. For the avoidance of doubt, one’s Application will NOT be kept confidential"
"Upon Sponsor's request and without compensation, Applicant agrees to sign any additional documentation that Sponsor may require so as to effect, perfect or record the preceding grant of rights"
That seems like pretty standard language for a this kind of thing. Not a lawyer, but I've read very similar things in many other contracts covering submissions for contests, etc.
Doesn't seem like that big of a problem, just don't give them anything you can't afford to lose control of. It's pretty fair that you compensate them with free advertising since they're giving you something cool for (otherwise) free. The deal might not be for everyone, but I wouldn't say it's a bad deal. If I was running a contest like this, I would have used similar language to make sure the program created a virtuous circle of coolness rather than applicants clamping down and keeping the experience private.
From what I've heard(my wife is a travel writer and lawyer/writes a law column for writers) there are a lot of other questionable clauses in the contract as well though I don't have specifics. One she mentioned was pretty harsh content limitations too. She was actually just telling me about it a few hours ago while we were having a walk so it was random to get back here and find it at the top of HN.
Perhaps they can follow up with a "Code for Amtrak" on-train hackathon. Amtrak is part of our civic infrastructure, perhaps Code for America could run it.
Their onboard WiFi is horrible. Tried to stream PornHub on a train ride but lagged constantly, instead had to settle for a erotic story podcast. Very unsatisfying.
Their phone support line is actually incredibly useful. I've had to buy a ticket after boarding a train before, and a nice gentleman (in America) was able to get me booked in under two minutes. It would have taken longer to enter my information onto their website.
Sunday at 2:45pm mountain and the follow message is prominently displayed:
We are currently conducting site maintenance.
The Amtrak.com reservation system is temporarily unavailable while we perform site maintenance. To make reservations during this time, use the Amtrak mobile app for iPhone, Android and Windows Phone or call 1-800-USA-RAIL and speak to a customer service representative. We appreciate your patience.
I took Amtrak from Sacramento to Salt Lake City once, and by the end of the trip I certainly felt like I should be establishing residency. I guess this is one way to turn lemons into lemonade.
The brilliant thing is not the nature of the program, but the timing. Americans are driving less and less, for a lot of reasons, but in my opinion the desire to use mobile devices in idle time is paramount.
I was curious too, so I tried to look it up. According to the DOT, it looks like driving mileage has trended downward slightly since a peak in 2007, FWIW.
And the US population is 10% to 20% bigger than it was the last time it was this low, so the VMT per person is trending downward even more. Here in the northeast corridor we're trying to figure out what to do about a bunch of pending plans to add lanes to highways.
This is a great idea! I traveled on Amtrak a few years ago from NYC to New Orleans (30 hours) with my wife and young daughter and had a great time - it just a pleasant way spend some time, talking, reading, thinking. During the day we set up a little play area for my daughter in our sleeper car and she loved watching everything go by. We were by far the youngest in that section and we often sat with retired folks at meal times (and had some great conversations).
Although it was impossible to get important work done over a VPN over Amtrak's Wi-Fi (I really need VPN access for my job), it was still a fun journey from Charlotte to Philadelphia on my way home from a new years party. I worked from home that day, and while I was mostly incommunicado I could still get a lot of code work done on my own machine that I'd been putting off.
Unable to have reliable VPN access over Wifi as you travel across several states? That's hardly a complaint. There's no way to travel that would give you that.
Many Windows-based corporate VPN clients like to tear down the connection on every little net hiccup, forcing you to do redo your SecurID or whatever login. And Windows IP stack likes to tear down your TCP connections on any brief loss of link, so eg. your SSH session cannot survive this type of event.
I for one am super excited for Amtrak and what this will mean for the travel industry. As a travel blogger that has been in the industry for a long time, I've worked with several brands that have no idea what to do with "new media". This is setting a fantastic example for other brands that will hopefully catch on.
This promotion is of course targeted toward writers but how amazing would it be to have 2-5 focused days to hack while on the train? Perhaps mobile connectivity would be an issue in some locations but the upside of the focus-time would probably be greatly productive. A train hack-a-thon.
I'd love to do this for coding, except the onboard wifi is unusable. I tend to prefer Amtrak to any airline in basically every area except wifi, which is bizarre considering how recent a development in-flight wifi is.
The idea of the artist in residence is to get away from one's daily routines and environment into a new and enriching environment for the artist. Its not a "get from point A to point B" that they're giving away its a "experience riding around the US on the railway and talk with the people who are on the train or see the scenery so that you can become a better writer." The start and end of the trip are purely coincidental.
As to if its less expensive than tickets: section 10 of the official terms shows what will be given: a travel voucher for 1 person on a sleeper train for between 2 to 5 days that would be worth about $900. The key here is given - free is much less than the cost of tickets.
It's really fun for me, being from Utah, to have it pointed out that this is a stunning scene. I was pretty disappointed when I clicked through—it honestly just reminds me of boring car rides. Thanks for helping me continue to realize how much I've taken the scenery of my home state for granted.
There are lots of things that challenge rail in the US, perhaps the most obvious is private ownership of the rails themselves, as opposed to freeways which are state owned and maintained. That shifts a lot of costs on to fewer payers. It also means the rail owner's trains get priority (in this case freight) so scheduling is quite difficult to maintain. There is also a tremendous amount of bureaucracy and complexity built into the system which I've found resists even modestly determined prodding. As part of an exercise in home schooling we tried to find out what it actually cost to put in the San Jose light rail in order to compare that to what we had learned about the Northern Pacific Railroad at a wonderful museum in Sacramento. All of our efforts to get what I had assumed was just boring public data were met with suspicion and resistance. That was pretty weird.