Interestingly I'm hosting my dad near Amsterdam for the week and to get from Sacramento to SFO (from where he flew to AMS) he... flew. Which I guess is logical, but seems insane to me when he lives close to Sacramento Amtrak which actually HAS good, regular service to SFO (via Bart, connecting at Richmond).
Even if you build the train some people won't give it a try, sadly. A lot of carbon was spewed in to the air to fly him and his suitcase over the capitol corridor tracks.
I really want to try Amtrak. I've looked at it a few times. But the only train line near me only has a train at it 2 or 3 times a week, at some crazy hour like 2:30am. If I'm taking a Monday-Thursday business trip, I'd have to arrive at my destination the Friday before and return home late night on Sunday. It's just not a realistic choice, unless you're really excited about trains.
It doesn't help that the website is terrible at helping you plan a trip, if you say "I want to leave on Monday" but there are no trains at the station on Monday, it just takes you to a page saying "there are no routes, sorry" instead of suggesting the next day a train is available. I found a download link for the train schedule, and it took me a solid 10 minutes to figure out what I was looking at. (If you're following along at home: the big bold date at the top of the page is completely irrelevant. It's just today's date, so you know when you downloaded the PDF. Because of course that's why you downloaded the PDF in the first place.)
I have a friend who is really excited about trains, and he wanted to take a weekend Amtrak trip. The only way he could make it work was to ride the train up and have someone at his destination who was willing to drive him back. And even then, most of the trip was plodding along in the darkness, because the train only stops at our city in the dead of night.
They're supposed to be putting in some new lines in the coming years, one of which will stop by our city. I'm cautiously optimistic, though I'm not sure how useful those lines will be if there's no trains rolling on them at reasonable hours.
Most of the issues above are due to Amtrak running trains on tracks owned by freight railroads. By law those railroads are supposed to prioritize Amtrak traffic, but they often block or delay Amtrak with their operations and there’s no real penalty for doing so.
In places where Amtrak owns most of the track (ie the Northeast Corridor) service is much more frequent and reliable.
That’s a problem that is solvable by public investment in infrastructure.
> Even if you build the train some people won't give it a try, sadly. A lot of carbon was spewed in to the air to fly him and his suitcase over the capitol corridor tracks.
They might be more willing to try if the service prices included the cost of the associated emissions.
It would also help if there were integrated ticketing the way there is in, say, Germany. If you buy a plane and a train ticket and miss a connection then you eat the cost of the ticket. Even better would be if luggage were integrated, but that would be asking for a lot more annoying security on trains I think.
I saw a cargo flight going from LAX to Ontario, California which looks like ~80km/50mi distance, which seems crazy to me.
I don't live in Europe, but I was there earlier this year going from Amsterdam to Paris. That's 430km/260mi direct from what I can find. I took the train, it took 3.5 hours, direct from central Amsterdam to central Paris, and no security theatre. And I had leg room!
The train is a superior experience to flying in pretty much every way, the challenge is often cost - trains can be more expensive. And, of course, this is really only possible because flying doesn't have its externalities priced in.
I bet if you and he were travelling together he would do it. I've gotten people to join me on train trips when the option was something different - flying or taking a one hour taxi ride.
Even if you build the train some people won't give it a try, sadly. A lot of carbon was spewed in to the air to fly him and his suitcase over the capitol corridor tracks.