Train travel is fantastic for the entire East Coast and Rust Belt, probably even into the midwest depending on where you’re based.  I’ve even taken it into Canada.  It’s especially a great way to travel distances you can cover by those puny flights where you spend more time dealing with the airport than actually in the air.

Best things about the train: plenty of leg room and roomier seats, something to look at out the window, you can walk around and stretch your legs, there’s often real food cooked fresh (and at least sandwiches and snacks), you can arrive at the station 5 minutes before your train is due to board, the list goes on and on, really.

That train would be awesome if it existed.

I’m just surprised someone else even knows Chu Chu Rocket.

Heck, trains could be the salvation of a rational airline industry. All these stupid little flights where you have to go from Cincinnati to Detroit by way of Atlanta or whatever—a huge chunk of the tiny-plane huge-ticket-price low-pilot-pay higher-crash risk market could be eliminated by a decent intercity rail system. Sure you’d have to subsidize the heck out of it, but we subsidize the airlines and the highway system and pretty much everything else but rail.

I’m always a little befuddled by the arguments about the huge amount of money that rail systems supposedly take. Sure, the initial capital costs are big, but the operating costs thereafter tend to be lower than for most other modes of transportation. In a country where we could finance the laying of millions of miles of optical fiber for the internet, or the building of millions of houses no one can afford to live in, there does not exist the financial instrument sophisticated enough to spread out the construction cost of a railway?

For several years, I was living in Madison, WI, while my then-girlfriend, now wife, lived in Chicago. It always baffled me that there was no rail link between Madison and Chicago (and Milwaukee and the Twin Cities. Besides, an ecoconscious town like Madison would eat this rail stuff up.

Huh, I went to school with that Kriston Capps guy (linked in the article for reasons unknown).  Who knew he was Internet Famous?

I was looking at options for travel from the Twin Cities to St. Louis, and I would have to go through Chicago if I went by train.  There’s only one Amtrak line that goes through St. Paul.

Texas is another place where intercity rail would be wonderful.  There are lots of people who do business in Austin, Houston, and Dallas, and have to travel for day trips to one or other place, while living in the third.  They now use airlines, which is a huge waste because these short hop flights are all takeoff and landing.  It’s not even an efficient use of time, since the flight takes an hour but the security checks at the airport take two.  That’s the same time as driving.  Getting on a train and working or sleeping or reading for two hours would be so much more pleasant.

One question, would wondering why the keyboardist is a gorilla but the rest are bears be over the edge?

That is the Showbiz Pizza band, and not all of them are bears.  There’s a mouse cheerleader, a dog playing drums, and a wolf ventriloquist, in addition to the gorilla playing keyboard.  Also, there’s a bird that sings, and the moon and the sun can sing too.

That video is amazing, and I was surprised I knew roughly where to look for each member of the “band” still, even though I last saw the animatronic singers when I was like 6, before Chuck E. Cheese bought out my hometown’s Showbiz.  According to Wikipedia, the main difference between the chains is the specific robots forced to sing for children.

California.

We left for Frisco in your Rambler
The radiator running dry
I’ve never been much of a gambler
and had a preference to fly
You said ‘forget about the airline,
let’s take the car and save the fare.’
We blew a gasket on the Grapevine
and eighty dollars on repairs
(chorus)
All aboard (Sausalito summernight)

All aboard AMTRAK—it connects a long string of cities. The ride is more comfortable than any other mode of travel, with power plugs, tables, seats facing each other if you want them. There’s been talk of adding a bullet train route some day to make LA to Sacto and SF truly rival the planes. There’s even been talk of making it a mag-lev line.

Gotta agree that the heavily populated Texas Triangle would be a great place for high speed rail. It’s been proposed many times and makes more sense than flying or driving.

Houston to San Antonio and Dallas . San Antonio to Ft Worth via Austin, and a heavily traveled link in the DFW Metroplex and we’re done. Let Soutwest Airlines operate some of the trains and skim some revenue tomake up for lost flights. Lufthansa does that in Germany.

I went to school with that Kriston Capps guy . . .  Who knew he was Internet Famous?

You actually went to high school with the man named hottest male DC media figure of 2007?  Impressive . . .

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlDC/hottest_media_types/hottest_media_types_the_winners_64075.asp

Rail will work if we want it to.  Soon (two decades at the most,) it will have to, and we’ll need it.  Airline travel will become something for the rich again, car travel will be ridiculously expensive, and someone will figure out what I’ve thought about for years: an easy way to put your car on a train, go to a passenger compartment, get to the city of your choice, and then take your car.  Since cars will also soon be for the wealthy, most people will load trains with bikes and scooters to get to work in the cities.

The suburbs will still die, however.  They’re just not salvagable except as scrap lumber and copper.  That, or get used to the idea of only seeing the breadwinners on weekends since it will cost too much to travel back and forth each day.

Amtrak seems pretty good going Kalamazoo to Chicago and back. Unless they overbook the train and you have ride until the first stop lap-dancing a pair from strangers from the jumpseat. But after that, good. It was on-time coming and going, despite having to stop and wait for freight trains in Indiana.

Here in Michigan we’ve got the Detroit to Chicago line and the Lansing to Grand Rapids to Chicago line. (That second must start somewhere east of Lansing, maybe Flint)

The maddening thing about most of these cities folks are mentioning that “could use” better rail access is that they used to have it, and this country wouldn’t have developed much at all if they hadn’t.  The whole midwest, as well as the Texas and California major cities, developed in response to rail access—the fact that you could get your cows or corn or whatever from Dallas or Des Moins to Chicago in a reasonable enough amount of time, they could be processed there, and then sent out to the population centers of the east as part of the food supply.  The plains and the west would still be as underpopulated as the Australian Outback if that development hadn’t taken place. 

Of course, then everyone was all Yay Cars And Planes!!1!111!!!!!, and that was the end of passenger rail connections between most major American cities west of the Mississippi.

His point stands for rail as it exists now.  You can’t compare the service we have now - slow speed trains with stops in every station - to a high speed corridor which could easily compete with air travel on long distance hauls.

Atlanta to Birmingham could use a short rail too. There is an Amtrak train but it takes too long. I know a lot of businesses work in both towns and end up using puddle jumpers or driving the three hours.

The other problem for Amtrak right now is that other than the Northeast, it doesn’t own any of the rail line, so it is dependent on the freight line schedules. The one time I took it in California, it ended up six hours behind schedule, and that was a commonplace occurrence.

What the US should do is make the rail lines like roads and airports—a public infrastructure, and then privatize the passenger service if you can’t convince the powers that be to give us a fully public train system.

Karen commented:

Texas is another place where intercity rail would be wonderful.  There are lots of people who do business in Austin, Houston, and Dallas, and have to travel for day trips to one or other place, while living in the third.

Amtrak already run an Austin - Dallas train ... it takes 6.4 hours and costs $38 each way. Not bad on price, but not exactly speedy.

RE trains, there has been at least one proposal or another to have a train between LA and Vegas for as long as I can remember.  And even something as relatively straightforward as that gets killed, regularly, only to rise from the dead again, and then get killed.

That’s probably the #1 example of how fucked-up Amtrak’s policies are:  a train direct from Los Angeles to Las Vegas would be a guaranteed moneymaker ... which is probably why they can’t get it funded.  God forbid that Amtrak be allowed to actually make a little money and not let conservatives whine about how much in debt it is!

I’m going to a conference in Santa Clara this winter and I’m seriously considering taking the train (though the 6 hour delays that lou talks about is making me a little nervous).  It’s actually cheaper to take the train from LA to San Jose than it is to fly right now and since I won’t need a car once I get there, there’s no point in driving.

Does anyone know if there are taxis from the San Jose Amtrak station to the Santa Clara Convention Center?  If I did take the train, it wouldn’t get in until 8 pm and while I could take a local train to within a couple blocks of the convention center, I’m a little nervous about doing that at night by myself in a strange city.

Mnemosyne, as a native and used-to-be-resident of San Jose, I can tell you that there are taxis avaliable at the Amtrak station, and there are also a bus/buses from the VTA that you could take. 

I would actually recommend getting to within 2 blocks and walking, as Santa Clara is pretty safe at night, one reason being that it has no real ‘downtown’ like most American cities.  You might say it’s Americas’ oldest exburb.  For meals, I would recommend Blossom Garden on the Monterey Highway(southward extension of San Jose’s 1st Street) for dim sum if you have the time to get down there.

And though the light rail goes there, miss the opportunity to visit the Winchester Mystery House.  It’s strictly for the rubes.

All aboard AMTRAK—it connects a long string of cities.

I live out here in the San Joaquin Valley, where the nearest station is at least a 45-50 minute drive away if you don’t want to take the bus(unless you live in Hanford or Wasco), and you can’t get from here to there unless you want to ride a bus at some point in your itinerary as the system is set up now.

Broadcasting from the buckle of the California Bible Belt…......................

Maybe it’s because most of my travel isn’t for business, but I don’t really have issues with the longish and slowish travel via train as it currently stands in the US.  It’s not like a flight, to me, where after a couple hours you Must Get Out Of This Box Or You Will Die.  One of my favorite travel memories is reading almost all of The Dubliners (fantastic old Modern Library hardback edition) on a ten hour trip from Montreal to New York.  Looking out the window occasionally checking out the Adirondacks, Lake Champlain, etc.    And yeah, that’s a day I’ll never get back, but I’d rather 10 hours blissfully lost in a book over 5 between security, airport madness, strapped into a tiny seat between two smelly/obese/annoying people (you only share with one on Amtrak, and it’s rare that the train is so crowded you don’t have any control over who you share a seat with), etc etc etc..

What Eisenhower did with the interstate system, Obama should do with high speed rail.  And the discussion needs to include being able to load your car onto the train, riding in the passenger car, and then you have your car at your final destination (as Jon mentioned above).  It’s impractical to keep adding additional lanes onto an interstate system that’s overburdened in its present state - at least where I am in Tennessee.  Interestingly, a Maglev train has been in discussion for a few years (moreso lately) that would connect Chattanooga to Atlanta-Hartsfield airport and then continue north to Nashville/points in between/Chicago as well as Knoxville/points in between/Washington DC, etc…to be up and running by the year 2030…oy.

...but I’d rather 10 hours blissfully lost in a book over 5 between security, airport madness, strapped into a tiny seat between two smelly/obese/annoying people (you only share with one on Amtrak, and it’s rare that the train is so crowded you don’t have any control over who you share a seat with)...

Of course, when the day comes that trains come back in style, expect that to change.

Re: The title and image, I feel it my duty to say this: SABABABABWA!

Anyway, yes, rail travel is pretty nice.  No insanely strict security, no ridiculous gas prices, no cars breaking down.  Just delays.  Looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong delays.  I’ve waited until noon for a 6:00 AM train.

I’m just surprised someone else even knows Chu Chu Rocket.

Uh, it WAS pretty popular in the old Dreamcast days.  Given the DC’s fairly small amount of intelligence-based games, it was welcomed openly.

Plus it did also have a rerelease for the Game Boy Advance.

Ah, trains. I went to Switzerland for many weeks of training, and was absolutely amazed that I could get from the airport in Zurich to my hotel in a small town south by TRAIN!!!! I think the whole time I was there, I rode in a car once (back and forth to a restaurant in the mountains) but for everything else, trains, trains, trains. (Well, boat occasionally, too, and buses.) At the time it was about $175 for a pass which included all trains, boats and buses in the zone I was staying, and the pass was good for a month. Plus, everyone in our group could equally partake of alcoholic goodness if they wanted, so no chance of car crashes.

Unintended benefit? I lost about 20 lbs with laughable ease, just because I was walking more.

The only downside I saw to the whole thing was getting from point A to point B with a lot of stuff (suitcase(s), computer bag, tool kit and parts bag required for my regular job) is a giant pain in the ass.

The only downside I saw to the whole thing was getting from point A to point B with a lot of stuff (suitcase(s), computer bag, tool kit and parts bag required for my regular job) is a giant pain in the ass.

Which is ironic, since I find that tyet another plus side to taking trains is that there is virtually no limit to what you can bring with you.  There’s no formal restriction on luggage (aside from, like, no bombs or guns or anything), which means you can check multiple large suitcases, carry on basically whatever you feel like up to and including pillows and blankets if its a nighttime train, ice chests of snacks, etc. etc. etc.

As opposed to flying, where you get two bags and maybe a purse or briefcase if you’re lucky.