You folks are very lucky to even have trains…
Agree… in spite of the delays that are regular on the route this post was originally about, we will likely keep using it because it beats a four hour drive for me or my ex to take my adult kids between our houses. Only a few times/year when they are visiting, and less hassle than flying still.
The Italians supposedly supported a egotistical, megalomaniacal fascist like Mussolini because he made the trains run on time. Maybe after Jan 20th, Amtrak will run on time…
The only place trains make sense is on commuter routes in high density areas like the NE corridor. Amtrak is a relic of an earlier time and has become far too expensive to maintain. Why should rural and suburban taxpayers subsidize it with no benefit for themselves?
It’s the rural population, through their congressmen, who refuses Amtrak plans to cut unprofitable rural stops and routes. Big government is only bad when you don’t benefit from it.
Japan has better train systems; never late and faster trains than the US. Japan bullet trains are hardly ever late as described as follows:
The Shinkansen is very reliable thanks to several factors, including its near-total separation from slower traffic. In 2014, JR Central reported that the Shinkansen’s average delay from schedule per train was 54 seconds. This includes delays due to uncontrollable causes, such as natural disasters.[17] The record, in 1997, was 18 seconds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shinkansen#Punctuality
Now, the question is how the Japanese Govt can afford the better railway systems than us the USA? simple answer is they do not have to protect their own country as protection comes from us the US.
“The only place trains make sense is on commuter routes in high density areas like the NE corridor. Amtrak is a relic of an earlier time and has become far too expensive to maintain. Why should rural and suburban taxpayers subsidize it with no benefit for themselves?”
As @NoVADad99, it is those same taxpayers and their reps who refuse to allow Amtrak to drop the very routes that cost them the most and are barely used, every little town sees losing an Amtrak stop as being losing prestige and so forth. As far as why rural and suburban taxpayers subsidize it, that could be said for people in places that heavily use Amtrak, given how much of a tax subsidy is given to the rest of the country from, for example, the NE corridor.
Long distance train service these days is generally a kind of nostalgic journey for people who take it, it is not used all that much for ‘real’ transportation, it is people using it as a tourist trip.
As far as why Japan has better train systems, it is a combination of factors, Japan is a relatively small country that is densely populated and because of national policy car travel is expensive, it is expensive to own and operate a car there, and as a result they built a major rail network. Not to mention that it is likely given how devastated Japan was after WWII that they were in effect starting from scratch, the tracks trains use in this country were laid a hundred years or more ago and were built for the conditions that existed then, so Japan could build a rail network that didn’t have grade crossings, that was seperate from the land around it. More importantly, there was a national will to do so, there wasn’t the same mentality of the US where the automobile (and in freight), trucks, were the driving force on a national scale. Even long distance train service can make sense, China has high speed train service between relatively long distance waypoints and it is effective, but it depends on the details. A high speed train (300 MPH) could potentially work on the NY-Chicago route, if you factor going city to city time wise and convenience wise it would likely be easier than flying, if you factor in getting to the airport, getting their several hours early, then when you land getting from the airport to the city after getting your luggage. Not sure it would ever happen, though, there is still too much of the idea that cars represen’t ‘freedom’, or that trains are this ‘typical government’ service that cannot compete because it is inefficient as compared to ‘business efficiency’ like airline travel, both of which if looked at logically don’t hold up (airlines are heavily subsidized, as are cars, but because those subsididies are hidden, unlike Amtrak subsidies, they ‘don’t exist’).
Right, simple answers to complex problems are always correct, and always work out so well.
Japan is smaller than CA.
Germany is the size of Oregon. Why do they make sense as examples?
My husband and I just took the train from Chicago to California at Christmas, and we’re taking it to New Orleans next month. We love it. There are a lot of tourists like us who enjoy the view, but there’s definitely a population of folks on every train who cannot fly or (in coach class) can’t afford it. Every long-distance train I’ve taken has groups of Amish/Mennonite people aboard. You get to know people on the train you’d never get to meet otherwise.
Back in the 1960’s our elementary school teachers made it sound like flying cars were just over the horizon…it’s a half century later, & we can’t even get the trains to run on time.
^^I think you should turn that into a short poem.
“Now, the question is how the Japanese Govt can afford the better railway systems than us the USA? simple answer is they do not have to protect their own country as protection comes from us the US.”
That may be a simple answer but like most simple answers it isn’t even close. Japan is relatively small in square mileage and has a rather dense population, and because of this geography and the fact that Japan has always had to import all its oil (making gasoline expensive and also leaving them vulnerable if supplies are short), so they made a conscious decision to build a strong commuter and long distance rail network, it is very expensive to drive a car in Japan, so people use the rail to do anything but casual driving. Before the second world war the US had extensive train networks because it was the only way to travel, roads were often poor, and airplane travel was in its infancy. Post world war II the car in the US became a symbol of personal freedom, and the government supported this by, for example, building a huge network of roads and highways, not to mention through tax policy keeping the price of gasoline cheap. The airline industry was subsidized as well, and trains were seen as an anachronism, rather than vital to the economy and were allowed to languish and passenger service almost died totally and eventually required the government to take it over, Amtrak for the long distance lines, states and conrail (what today is metro north and NJ transit were run by conrail for a while, for example).
The reason Japan could build those trains is they built them as a matter of policy and dedicated tax revenue to that, rather than subsidizing the private car by keeping gas cheap and building roads and highways and whatnot, it had nothing to do with national defense. Think about the cost of building the interstate highway system, the hundreds of billions that were spent on that, and instead some of that was invested in high speed rail and commuter rail where it made sense, and we would have world class trains as well, but that is not the way it played out, trains were allowed to languish, and to a certain extent we pay a high price for that shortsightedness.