I guess it’s covered by 5., but the real, actual reason we can’t have trains is the civil engineering firms can’t extract infinite money from a completed railway.

Actually, they kinda can. Railroad tracks need upkeep just like roads do. Maybe not to the same degree and maybe the costs work out differently but they do need to be maintained. So there's plenty of opportunity to grift the hell out of a railroad buildout.

Have you SEEN what the UK is doing? HS2 is at around 700 million/mile (about 900 million USD) now, you can absolutely extract infinite money from a rail line without even finishing it.

California seems to be good at infinite money extraction for rail that never finishes.

Have you looked at railway maps?

There's a huge sprawling rainwater railway network across America... It's just only used by freight cause the bastards that own it decided passengers are unprofitable

I also can’t comprehend all-day drives over all-day trains. If I take a train on my own or with my family, those are (partially) actionable hours. I can read a book, grab a coffee, work on my laptop, draw with my kid. If I go by car, best I can do is a podcast.

Since I don’t own a car, my point of view is also biased by not having to make sense of a large investment. But if you factor is the costs of having the car, gas and tolls… I’d rather go by train. If necessary, I can rent a car at my arrival destination.

Because public transit is for poor people/minorities, and if they used it they'd be around a bunch of poor people/minorities.

Honest answer? Partly because I can operate on my schedule and not the train’s schedule. And the rest of it is getting to have adventures along the way that otherwise would mean getting off the train, finding a bus, taking a long bus ride to the thing, taking a long bus ride back to the train, getting on the train again…

Sometimes I drive to Seattle, sometimes I take the train. There are times when I like the relaxing ‘let someone else get me there’ vibes, but there are times when the train schedule doesn’t work with my schedule, or I want to check stuff out on route, like fun restaurants I’ve read about, cool educational places, silly tourist traps…

I remember seeing a sign for ‘World’s Largest Egg!’ one trip, so I just took that exit and went to find the World’s Largest Egg, because why not?

And another reason is sometimes I just don’t want to be around a lot of people. One crowded train trip up I was treated to a child that felt the best way to pass the time on the 3.5-hour journey was to scream. A lot. It was also a trip where I’d forgotten my headphones. Not fun.

I would love to have public transit where I live that could easily get me to work, without having to take the freeway and deal with traffic. There isn't a train near me which goes to my workplace, sadly.

It's impressive how terrible the amtrak website is. I've used amtrak pretty extensively over the years and haven't been able to login in over a year. I know it's probably due to some verification code that my tech stack violates but the site certainly doesn't fail gracefully. I won't touch the app, of course.

I can still buy tickets, but I need to checkout as a guest and manually enter my rewards number for each transaction. I imagine at some point I'll need to transact by phone or in person.

It is not only the AmTrack website. The rail line is really bad as well. In summer your train can be stopped because the rails are too hot. The rails expand too much and warp enough to make it unsafe to run the train on.

I think we need a new system from the ground up.

Oh man the Shinkansen is amazing. 2 or so hours instead of 9+ by bus to get somewhere while drinking beer or sake and eating is amazing. And you can take a dump lol

For context, a flight is already 6.5 hours and cost 350-400. To have comparable speed it would only take building two complete mag level rails.

hyperloop

Hyperloop are a scam

That's the joke — Americans will complain that trains aren't profitable while ignoring that roads and airports aren't profitable either. Sometimes it's stupidity and sometimes it's a bad faith argument.

the worst part of Amtrak is how often it's late, making it not only more expensive than driving or flying but also less reliable.

I'm going off of memory here, but what I heard was that passenger rail was never really as profitable as freight, so the government basically had to force all the rail companies to keep doing passenger trains. The massive subsidization of car transit made it hard for them to compete. Amtrak was basically created as a way to take the responsibility for doing passenger rail away from the rail companies, in exchange for guaranteed priority usage of the rails.

The priority of passenger trains is unenforced, so they have to wait for slow freight trains all the time. Additionally, the math on speed is different for freight vs passenger rail. A freight train getting somewhere an hour faster doesnt matter nearly as much as a passenger train getting somewhere an hour faster, so improvements to facilitate faster trains falls on amtrak.

Amtrak does own some rails, e.g., the northeast corridor, which is nice and profitable. It's also worth noting that the "unprofitable" lines are still vastly vastly vastly more profitable than roads.

The US is third on the list of countries in freight volume per year, so yes there's a lot of freight trains.

Only in car oriented societies. In Austria it is certainly harder to get around with only public transportation if you are not along railway corridors or in metropolitan areas but it is still perfectly feasible to get almost anywhere with train and bus. If you have a Klimaticket it doesn't even cost anything other than the flat rate of that ticket, which many already have just for commuting alone. (Just for context a Klimaticket for entire Austria, almost all trains and regular bus service included for a full year is 1400 EUR.)

The contiguous United States has a higher population density than Spain, which has a great high speed rail system. Metropolitan France is not much more denser than that as well.

A big share of the US population lives along feasible HSR corridors. The reason that this HSR doesn't exist isn't because there is no potential for it, but because the country is underdeveloped and honestly struggles to stay afloat infrastructure wise.

You use ELR in lower population areas

Look at Russia & China, they're just as spread out, more so, yet they have an excellent rail network that covers the whole country