How to speed up US passenger rail, without bullet trains

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-04-10/how-to-speed-up-us-passenger-rail-without-bullet-trains

by petethomas • 1 year ago

65 126 1 year ago

jeffbee7• 1 year ago

America's only current, prominent bullet train is CAHSR and the goal of that project is not to speed up passenger rail. The project has nothing whatsoever to do with making existing rail riders happier or incrementally increasing ridership. The avowed purpose of CAHSR is to enable California to grow and prosper without having to build more airports and more freeways. So it's not really worth considering it as a choice between an expensive HSR on the one hand and slightly better Amtrak San Joaquin on the other. Only one of these projects would actually be suited to purpose.

xeromal3• 1 year ago

A private company called brightview (I think) built a small section of highish speed rail in Florida and is now building a line from the outskirts of LA to Vegas. I'm excited for it to open up

jeffbee7• 1 year ago

You have stretched "now building" beyond the bounds of reason. But yes, Brightline has an altogether superior press secretary.

alexeldeib• 1 year ago

Brightline https://www.gobrightline.com/

Never had the chance to use it, but one of the more exciting US rail developments I’ve seen recently.

whartung• 1 year ago

It’s going to be interesting to see. What they’ve done (as I understand it) is they’ll use common (UP, BNSF) right of way to get up Cajon Pass and out to Barstow.

From there, they’re laying new rail to LV.

The clever part is that they’re laying the rail down the middle of I-15, which is a divided interstate. This lets them built rail to their specifications, a dedicated rail, and also bypass no doubt a huge amount of approvals and things such as environmental studies.

Most of that simply doesn’t apply to the middle of the I-15.

So it’s a bit of a perfect storm that’s enabling this project.

The big question is whether they can get schedule priority getting out of the Inland Empire and over the pass to Barstow. Most passenger traffic is second class on the freight lines (which is where much of the delays and low quality of modern train travel stems from).

But, yea, eager to see this. Supposed to be ready for the ‘28 LA Olympics.

rayiner2• 1 year ago

Brightline in Florida is awesome. It’s not a short line, it goes from Orlando to Miami which is the same distance as New York to DC. Florida is set up great for it, with a series of pretty dense cities along the coast.

aposm• 1 year ago

There is no secret lost knowledge that enabled a steam-powered train to go from New York to Chicago in 16 hours in the 1930s. We simply do not care to run fast passenger trains anymore since they have largely been replaced by domestic air travel. The current NYC to Chicago train takes 20 hours and is routinely several hours delayed... all we have to do is invest in infrastructure and rebuild our rail system, but that won't happen unless it's "sexy" and can compete with air travel, and the best way to do that is with HSR. So while our passenger rail system _could_ be a lot faster (without true HSR) if it was run well, I don't think that's going to happen until we get the marketability/"sexiness" of HSR.

JoshTriplett• 1 year ago

We simply do not care to run fast passenger trains anymore since they have largely been replaced by domestic air travel.

That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. First-class passenger trains are much more comfortable, roomier, and less expensive, but as long as they're so wildly slower, they have a hard time competing with air travel.

alwa• 1 year ago

I'm not sure they're much less expensive. To pick an arbitrary weeklong Tuesday-to-Tuesday trip in May, between New York and Chicago, the cheapest direct Amtrak fare—in coach, not in first class as you mentioned—is $336 (and 19 hours each way), whereas the same trip on Spirit Air is $96 (and 2 hours 30 minutes each way).

The cheapest first class train fare is $1,621 for the round trip, vs $385 for first class airfare.

alephnerd5• 1 year ago

First-class passenger trains are much more comfortable, roomier, and less expensive, but as long as they're so wildly slower, they have a hard time competing with air travel.

Maybe, but around a third of all tourism spend in the US is business travel related [0]. You cannot justify spending an overnight train ride from NYC to Chicago when you can reach there within 2 hours by flight.

The US is MASSIVE - much larger than most countries, and population centers are extremely spread out once you leave the Northeast. Outside the NE, the math (time wise or financially) doesn't play out well for rail based public transit.

You see the same dynamics in China as well - the overwhelming majority of medium-long distance public transit is along the extremely dense coast.

Expecting a French style TGV is unrealistic as long as San Francisco to Los Angeles is the same distance as Paris to Berlin - except with almost no major population centers in between, and plenty of massive mountain ranges. Same for the rest of the US outside of the NE. Similar extent with NY to Chicago as well (roughly the same distance as Berlin to St Petersburg)

[0] https://www.statista.com/topics/1832/business-travel/#topicO...

jakelazaroff3• 1 year ago

China’s new high speed train from Beijing to Shanghai — about the same distance as between New York and Chicago — takes a little less than four and a half hours. That’s about two hours longer than a flight between the two cities. If you include the time spent arriving early, going through security, etc, it probably comes out about even.

roenxi• 1 year ago

Without disagreeing, it is a weird one to see described as a marketing problem. The political process is extremely low bandwidth; it is tough to express an opinion on more than one issue with one vote and usually the priority is not transport. Presumably the major reason that HSR isn't being deployed is that it is uneconomic or there is no legal way to do it.

panny4• 1 year ago

We simply do not care to run fast passenger trains anymore since they have largely been replaced by domestic air travel.

Trains replace road trips, not air travel. You can travel from New York to Miami for $175 on Amtrak. That's a lot cheaper and much more comfortable than driving 1300 miles.

Saying you can do this faster or possibly cheaper on a budget airline is missing the point, because traveling on a budget airline is not enjoyable. There's no scenery. You're packed in like sardines. Best case scenario, every hour you spend in the plane is miserable. Every hour you spend waiting in airport security lines is miserable. Every hour spent waiting on the runway for delays is miserable. Waiting for your baggage only to find it is lost again is miserable. You can't get up to stretch your legs, sit down, the seat belt light is on.

On the Amtrak there are dining cars, cafe cars, observation cars. There's five toilets on each car, you never have to wait. There's free wifi. There are no middle seats to be miserable in. You can bring your own beer and drink it on the train. You can't do any of that in car or on an airline. Riding the train is more fun than flying, and a lot less hazardous than driving. If it takes a little longer than flying, that just means more time for fun.

pseudo02• 1 year ago

Except that NY to Miami route you cited takes 28 to 33 hours... You could do that trip in a single long day driving, plus save money if you're a group of 3+ people. And then you'd have a car at your destination, which is pretty mandatory in most parts of the US.

It might be decent for a solo traveler, but for the stereotypical family road trip to Florida, the car still wins out.

rs1863• 1 year ago

There's five toilets on each car, you never have to wait.

Can't agree based on personal experience.

There's free wifi.

That wifi is barely usable. I often ended up using my phone as the hotspot.

Riding the train is more fun than flying

Depending on whether you are a big train nerd or plane nerd. I am a little bit of both, and I never consider train to be any more fun or boring than flights. On shorter trips where plane flies at a low altitude (e.g. Boston-NYC-Washington DC), if the weather is good, I would be staring at the ground and take (crappy) aerial photos the whole flight.

And your post doesn't mention the routine delays on Amtrak trains. Trains in China and Japan are much more punctuate.

Don't get me wrong, I take trains in the US for leisure purposes more than almost anyone I know, but it is not nearly as romantic as you try to paint, which is why most people choose driving or something else.

65102• 1 year ago

https://darienite.com/great-10-hour-new-york-chicago-railroa...

They do Beijing to Shanghai in 5 hours so you have to make New York to Chicago in 4 or it doesn't count.

The numbers are funny. Flying from New York to Chicago takes less than 2 hours but all things considered you lose 8 hours https://www.trippy.com/fly/New-York-City-to-Chicago

You might as well drive it in 12.

0xbadcafebee• 1 year ago

Or, y'know, just build a bullet train.

USA. Biggest economy on earth. Most powerful nation. Third largest nation by population. Could maybe build one bullet train, like the 20 other nations that already have them in service, and the 13 other nations that have them in development.

Or just settle for mediocrity. Whatever.

0_____02• 1 year ago

IMO:

The US suffers from the notion of exceptionalism spawned from its position of massive advantage after WWII, as well as a deep seated aversion to mass transit that was borne out of the backlash against desegregation.

I'm probably missing many smaller factors, but I'd be interested to know if someone thinks that I've incorrectly identified those two as major factors.

WillPostForFood2• 1 year ago

No, American exceptionalism is not a post-WWII idea. It was core to the expansion of the country in the 19th century.

dabiged• 1 year ago

Not from North America. But I disagree that the exceptionalism started post WWII.

How do you explain the country's ability to perform civil engineering feats prior to WWII. The Erie Canal, Trans-continental Railway, Panama Canal, Brooklyn Bridge, Empire State Building and Golden Gate Bridge spring to mind as feats of engineering that few other country's (if any) could rival. There are obvious examples post WWII (Manhattan project, Apollo program, Interstate highway system), but for all of the USA's pitfalls, they do have an incredible history of civil engineering projects prior to WWII.

pyfon3• 1 year ago

Someone made a good argument on Reddit when discussing Australia which is also has a slowish rail network.

It is a 3hr drive Sydney to Canberra and 4hr on train. Mainly because the train track was originally for freight so has more curves than needed for passenger.

They said rather than aim for a super fast train just improve the tracks we have and get the time down to 3hr to compete with the car.

This is a good point because then you get more revenues and usage (the trains are full right now but infrequent - maybe they can run them every 15 minutes)

Then you can go make the case for an even faster train for 2050.

The Japanese Shinkansen is something else. Doing my first decent trip on one this week and can't wait!

tokioyoyo• 1 year ago

Then you can go make the case for an even faster train for 2050.

I'm very sorry, but such timelines are extremely disheartening and sound like a joke. The problem is, factually, other countries can build out HSRs within 5-10 year horizons, from planning to finishing a route. If it takes 2+ generations to even get a single line... I'm not sure what I can say.

I understand bureaucracy and problem solving processes work differently in our countries, but incredibly sad to see how a person can't see a significant progress within their own lifetimes. I'm not sure when I became such a defeatist, but it is what it is.

pyfon3• 1 year ago

I think once the decision is made 10 yrs is fine. But Australia has a smaller population than most so you'd need to prove decent usage first.

jpalawaga2• 1 year ago

that your name is tokio yoyo is sort of funny to me because if you look at shinkansen build/planning timelines, it is absolutely on the order of 2050 for extensions.

the japanese have a world-class trainsystem and it's built by putting one foot in front of the other for decades, not expecting it to be built overnight.

of course, you can build it faster, but then it is more expensive. so what's the priority? it's easier to fund high speed rail projects in developed nations by long, sustained investment that is easily planned for rather than having to suddenly come up with billions of dollars and then deal with the political fallout of inevitable cost-overruns associated with rushing things.

rtpg• 1 year ago

I'm very sorry, but such timelines are extremely disheartening and sound like a joke. The problem is, factually, other countries can build out HSRs within 5-10 year horizons, from planning to finishing a route. If it takes 2+ generations to even get a single line... I'm not sure what I can say.

While there are places where the build out itself looks fast, in reality I think most any train line ever build spends decades in "would be a good idea" phase of planning. The Hokkaido Shinkansen idea was on the books since the 70s, and we're still just up to Hakodate!

The Utusnomiya rail line (a local tram line) was in the proposal phase since 2001, and launched in 2023. It's been super successful (profitable!), but was still 20+ years for a single line.

Having said all of that, plenty of ideas gestate for a while, so hooking into an existing idea and getting that actually happening feels like a very good use of energy compared to trying to come up with your own special new idea.

rtkwe2• 1 year ago

One large problem is passenger rail is a second class citizen on US rail, legally it’s supposed to be given priority but ultimately it’s all on private rail and enforcement is non existent so it’ll get delayed for things caused by cargo. I had an Amtrak journey that had to sit and wait for an hour or two to let the tracks cool after a particularly heavy cargo train had gone by.

throwaway20377• 1 year ago

I would counter this by offering: Long Island Railroad, MetroNorth, New Jersey Transit, MBTA Commuter Rail, Bay Area Rapid Transit, and Caltrain. (Sorry, I don't know about the Chicago system.) All of these are very good commuter rail systems that mostly own all of their track or have primary right-of-way, so undelayed by cargo trains.

andymcsherry• 1 year ago

Australia has a slowish rail network because it is sparsely populated. It is an extreme version of America, the distances between population centers are quite large and there's not much in-between. There's also not much reason for anyone from Sydney to visit Canberra, and if you do, you certainly need a car to get around.

pyfon3• 1 year ago

Sydney to Canberra centre for government adjacent business you probably don't need a car. The train is near parliament and probably near your office and hotel. Maybe a taxi to get to the city centre which is 5 min away.

daemin• 1 year ago

The main place in Australia where it would make sense to make high speed rail is the big Sydney-Melbourne route as it's been the world's 3rd or so busiest air route for many decades now. Currently it's about a 2 hour flight at a cost of a few hundred dollars with flights leaving multiple times per hour. By car this journey takes 7-8 hours, and these are the cities where you can do a lot without needing a car, so there's no incentive to take yours.

The other places where it might make sense are Sydney-Brisbane and maybe Adelaide-Melbourne since both are also 7-8 hour drives and about 2 hour flights. Last I travelled Adelaide-Melbourne the trip by train was 13 hours and by bus it was about the same because of the route and extra stops.

As another commenter has pointed out, in the smaller Australian cities you pretty much need a car to get around. So realistically the train journey is competing with the 2 hour plane ride rather than the 8 hour drive. Because you'll either drive and have a car at your destination or fly/train and need a hire car or taxis when you get there.

Don't get me wrong, I like trains and I wish Australia was less like Los Angeles and more like Europe, but it would take serious investment by the Government to make this happen and compete with the airlines.

rs1863• 1 year ago

Sounds a lot like Boston-NYC-Washington DC. Multiple flights per hour, 4hr drive between closest pair of cities, but thankfully there is a railroad that takes about the same time of driving, depending on the (rail/highway) traffic of the day.

indemnity• 1 year ago

Rode the Shinkansen twice in the last week (Tokyo<->Osaka). Not the most scenic, but you do have a spot where you pass Mt Fuji.

Not sure if this route goes the full 320 km/h but it was plenty fast!

Loved the convenience and ease though. Having to schlep to the airport and deal with all the hassle of flying sucks by comparison.

Rock up to the station, buy a ticket, wait 30 minutes and go.

iambateman• 1 year ago

I assumed that “just go faster” wasn’t an available option for Amtrak on existing rails but this article strongly suggests that it is.

jeffbee7• 1 year ago

Am I having a stroke or did you post this exact comment yesterday

seabass-labrax4• 1 year ago

It's the way Hacker News bumps articles to the top (second-chance pool). Everyone's old comments get a new timestamp! (Actually the timestamp stays the same; it's the 'time ago' which is counted differently. Very counterintuitive.)

Stroke diagnosis is fortunately negative :)

rr808• 1 year ago

This is a better solution. I think a lot of high speed rail enthusiasts think that if we build the passengers will come. Its really unproven, I think American cities are so different to most of the world high speed rail would be unpopular. Very few people want to go from downtown one city to another - most city centers aren't that nice and when you get to your destination you'll need a car anyway.

fnord77• 1 year ago

20 years ago I backpacked around Europe on a Eurail pass for all of April and part of May. I even paid the supplement for the high speed trains.

Most of the time, the trains were all but empty.

I think eventually Boston-NYC type routes will be handled by quad-copter type drones that land right in the city center. That type of passenger rail will be obsolete

AlotOfReading• 1 year ago

For one, that was 20 years ago. Ridership has increased significantly since through a combination of deliberate EU policy and efforts to remove the barriers that made long distance rail journeys so terrible decades ago. Old experiences riding long distance international trains (likely at non-peak hours), outside peak tourist season aren't necessarily representative of the modern experience.

otabdeveloper42• 1 year ago

Passenger rail competes with highways, not airplanes.

whiskeyb4bfast• 1 year ago

Demand for traveling from city to city in the US is unproven? What is 819 million domestic airplane passengers in 2023? [0] That's an average of 2.2 million people per day. Granted flying will almost always win for cross-country trips, but I'd bet a significant chunk of those flights are within a range competitive with HSR.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/197790/us-airline-domest...

smilekzs• 1 year ago

GP hypothesized the situation "from downtown one city to another", which is distinct from airport-to-airport.

onepointsixC• 1 year ago

Amtrak's ridership has been growing and hit an all time high. The Northeast Corridor is a profitable route which is held back by century old infrastructure. If it actually had real high speed spanning the whole route it's ridership absolutely go up. Moreover your comments on not wanting to go from city center to city center are very off. Going from Union Station DC to Penn Station Philly, or NYC is really nice. Have you ever rode Amtrak, specifically that route?

bpodgursky2• 1 year ago

The ridership and convenience of the Acela route is really not representative of the rest of the country.

It's extremely speculative to extrapolate that dense route with the induced demand for travelers going from Kansas City union station to Denver union station... with absolutely nothing in-between.

Lammy• 1 year ago

The Momentum framework calls on Amtrak and commuter rail agencies to […] shift their focus from increasing the geographic coverage and capacity of their rail services
When making changes to rail infrastructure or services, state and local railroad agencies often must negotiate with the freight railroad companies that own most of America’s track network. These companies [are] reluctant to allow more frequent passenger service that could reduce the amount of time their freight trains have access to track.

This article completely fails to mention the actual cause of our modern situation. Before focusing on increasing geographical coverage we would first need to focus on not decreasing geographic coverage. Check out the Abandoned & Out-of-Service Rail map of North America and you can see the result of massive corporate consolidation where newly-combined railroads abandon parts of each constituent company's former network to end up with the most track they can run for the least money. There is zero redundancy left: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=10akDabya8L6nWIJi-4...

tvb12• 1 year ago

Dang, there's a track on there, within a bike ride from me, that goes all the way to the biggest city in my state and passes within a few hundred feet of the university I attended. That could have made things easier.

jordanb• 1 year ago

end up with the most track they can run for the least money

ITYM "least track?"

The railraods are all obsessed with this metric called "capital ratio" which is the revenue intensity of their equipment.

Most of corporate america cares about "operating ratio" (how much money do you spend operating your business versus revenue). Railroads are a somewhat uniquely capital-intensive business, since they're the only transportation industry that owns and maintains their own roads. They consequently have come to see their best metric for efficiency is how small their capital asset base is, versus their revenue.

This leads to the joke that "the optimal railroad has no track and runs no trains."

dangus• 1 year ago

There is a need for increased geographical coverage in the right corridors. Many corridors with high population density are just not covered.

As bad as the passenger rail situation is in the US, I can totally understand how it got this way compared to other countries from a pure geographic point of view.

The US landscape is ideal for freight trains and not quite as ideal for passenger trains.

If you look at countries like Japan, the geography makes a perfect condition for passenger trains to be most ideal. Railroad as a shipping method for goods doesn't make a lot of sense, you can just put goods on ships that travel along the coasts and for shorter journeys trucks make more sense.

Or look at China: massively higher population, and their population is much more concentrated in the East of the country than the US with its split up coastal populations. Maybe we could say that a high speed train between Indianapolis and Cleveland would be nice, but there isn't even a single direct commercial direct flight between those destinations, so how will anyone fill up a train? China's huge population makes it an extremely ideal high speed rail use case.

But in the US, putting goods on a train from Chicago to LA makes way more sense than any sort of truck or ship situation. And even a high speed train on that route wouldn't make a whole lot of sense compared to a flight.

But there's definitely room to improve geographical coverage in specific corridors where that expansion would have great positive impact.

mitthrowaway25• 1 year ago

How does the geographic context explain how the US was (apparently) an excellent fit for passenger rail until the 1920s-1930s, but not anymore?

I don't think geography is the explanation. US geography is great for passenger rail. Japanese geography is terrible for it (too many mountains). In my opinion Japan's passenger rail situation today would be no different than the US if American rail companies had managed Japanese rail lines throughout the 20th century.

It's nice to imagine that geography is the reason, and so everything is as it should be, this was the fated result. But that's simply not the case.

Of course, rail is not a good fit for a weekend getaway from LA to New York. Even in Japan, where you can ride the bullet train all the way from Kyushu to Hokkaido, almost anyone would book a flight for that unless they really hated flying. But that doesn't mean that rail isn't well suited to American geography.

imaginationra• 1 year ago

Time travel is real- take a passenger train in the US in 2025 and you travel back in time to 1985- and no one has cleaned it properly since 1995.

65102• 1 year ago

There are so many parameters that it is impossible to figure out. They should probably load all params into a virtual model and have an AI try out everything.

Besides the obvious investments making tickets more expensive a different example would be if you accelerate faster you need more rails maintenance.

You can also leave carts behind and pick them up at stops so that people who need it have all the time to get in and out. If you do that (like with many options) it gets marvelously complicated really fast.

Even if you try fit an intercity (that doesn't stop everywhere) it will have to be at the right place at the right time to pass the other train(s)

You can also not make it fast and make the trip more enjoyable. You can just stop for 30 min or an hour at each station and have stores and museums at the station bring in more revenue than tickets.

If I had to guess the most successful trick for the US would be to have people bring their car on the train.

jchmbrln• 1 year ago

An even more significant improvement would be electrified trains, which can accelerate roughly twice as fast as those with diesel power...

Can someone comment on why this is? My understanding is that the existing diesel trains use diesel generators to power electric motors.

My questions are: 1) Does "electrified" mean pulling power from a third rail? 2) Whatever it means, what makes "electrified" twice as fast as diesel-electric?

seabass-labrax4• 1 year ago

Does "electrified" mean pulling power from a third rail?

Yes, or more precisely either third rail or using overhead lines (catenaries). Overhead lines have many benefits over third rail so they make up the majority of new electrification projects, but third rail still has a lot of use in suburban railways and metro systems.

Whatever it means, what makes "electrified" twice as fast as diesel-electric?

You're completely right about the engineering, it's just that the diesel generators don't have quite as good peak power output compared to a fully electric system. I think that the article is overplaying this particular benefit of electrification though. The trains that I frequently take are bi-mode, and although you can certainly feel the extra 'kick' of acceleration when you enter the electrified parts of the line, it makes little difference to the total journey time compared to the old diesel-electric trains that used to run on the route.

Bjartr• 1 year ago

They mention it only offhand in one sentence, but my understanding of most of the slowness of the US rail network is that it's mostly passenger trains having to let long freight trains pass that eats tons of time.

Nominally, passenger trains have priority and freight trains have to pull into a siding to let them pass, but freight companies made the freight trains longer than the available sidings and so it's the passenger train that gives way in practice most of the time.

Doesn't really matter how fast the train is, or how efficiently it's boarded if it spends excessive amounts of time sitting still waiting for freight to pass.

Ericson2314• 1 year ago

A lot of people seem to be missing that the point of the report is more what we would call "commuter rail", and trying to improve it in the direction of, say, Swiss railways. This is, as a matter of engineering, just very orthogonal to trying to TVG up longer distance Amtrak routes.

Everyone wants to talk about the latter, but really should do both!

johnea• 1 year ago

Those suggestions would really help, and also, why don't we just _build_ high speed rail?

This is a shining example of the downsides of the financialization of the US economy: the inability to build almost anything at scale.

Really great at owning, not so great at making.

If it were possible, I'm sure Andy Grove would be rolling over in his grave and uttering a ghostly "I told you so..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Preference_for_a_...

How to speed up US passenger rail, without bullet trains

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