Type in Dallas, if the auto-suggest from popular destinations doesn’t show Dallas. And note that the price they show is closer to final price than plane fares are, after you add up everything.
Maybe a Bullet Train [Houston - Dallas] will attract enough riders to be somewhat financially viable. The current passenger railroad setup in Texas doesn't come across as a strong alternative to flying.
In some countries riding by train is the same or even cheaper than plane depending on the route. It’s also more convenient given you can take the train from the central city without getting to an airport on the outskirts. Like many things there isn’t a single reason why train travel isn’t cost effective or as convenient in the US. It goes all the way to the rise of automobile travel in the 1950’s and a shift in building an interstate highway system instead of upgrading our train system. Later as airlines got deregulated and more people flew there was less impetus to maintain and upgrade train lines in favor of building air infrastructure.
Let me build the railroads, I got all the time in the world. I’m from Alief, we can not let Europe and Asia win this one. Come on you guys!!
At least there's a good chance you'll get to your destination the same day (or at least eventually) by plane. lol. You pay a lot for a train ride and then make 30 stops along the way and break down at stop 31.
Like everything, scale and volume reduces prices. Americans are stuck with infrequent rail service that simply isn't priced to compete with airlines as a result. If trains can operate at frequency and scale, the cost per passenger mile (and subsequently the price you pay per mile), goes down dramatically. This is true in aviation as well. However, you need so much infrastructure before trains make sense. High speed rail needs dedicated tracks that are fully grade separated and you need prime real estate since the advantage of trains is that they can go into the city center. If you look at what we have, the only example of rail that makes any money is the Northeast Corridor and even that is sitting on some pretty dated infrastructure. The NEC has bridges and tunnels that are simply out of date and as a result, trains have to operate very slowly on those sections. HSR in other countries is optimized so that trains can run at full speeds for most of the track length. Amtrak can only run at full speed (150 mph) in a section of Massachusetts. But at least the NEC trains have decent frequency (even if Acela isn't really HSR). The other HSR example is Brightline in Florida and they have the same issue. They dont even run on fully grade separated track so they have to really slow down in some sections (and have to deal with accidents as a result). Kudos to them for building a semblance of an HSR on the cheap and frankly they are probably the best that we can hope for in the US so I dont want to be too critical. So for a successful rail product, you need funding but you also need to greatly simplify the process of acquiring land and actually building the track and infrastructure. California HSR is evidence of how absurd US regulations are and they've burned billions of dollars on environmental reviews and other bureaucracy. We've perfected the art of building new highways but apparently building rail track requires mountains of permits, bureaucracy and reviews and as a result, we end up with a very poor product.
The other catch with HSR is that existing railroad companies want to jump in on that action and will either stifle new rail construction or influence standards to promote repurposing of their older/slower lines. Amtrak is like a frankenstein of older bailed out companies that never learned to share or play nice (aging infra, incompatible equipment, no money for across the board upgrades). Imagine creating a working network from that and reducing lines to ones that fit together. They're also dealing with existing rail cos that survived because they didn't play nice.
Passenger train routs, US vs Europe. Joke over there is that you can take the train to get from your living room to the kitchen.
Trick question. Germans underestimated the time they needed to conquer Belgium. They assumed little to no resistance, and faced the opposite. Still, they outpaced their supply line. An army runs on its stomach. And ammo. So the better rail lines would have helped here. But not enough. Politics. Moltke redirected some of the troops from the western front to the East. In this era, more men made a bigger difference. In the end, the Shlieffen plan was doomed to fail. A six week window to conquer a vast swath of Western Europe, hop on trains then beat Russia was idiocy. Obviously Germany learned its lesson and applied it in round II. However, the Germans were still slowly winning by attrition. The biggest lynchpin in their loss was the unrestricted warfare by their subs which kept sinking civilian American ships, killing Americans, and ultimately fueling the American public shift from isolationism to a willingness to enter the war.
Flying is cheaper because carbon pollution is free. If we had any kind of policy that made customers account for the pollution they caused, trains would be kings of transportation.
I heard that they finally caught the Mexican train killer. Upon interrogation they found that he had Spoiler locomotives
