As is, you can try to get an Amtrak ride and wait 12 hours past your scheduled pickup time
And stop every 1/2 hour for a 1 hour loading/unloading cycle.
But rail will never take off here. Too much pressure from the automotive and airline industries.
This train bullshit has to fucking stop.
All technology is a product of a localized set of economic and cultural pressures only uniquely present in the time they are born in. Trains were the PINNACLE of technological achievement of their time much the same way space exploration, satelites, cel phones and related technologies are today. They filled a need in a time and space that made sense.
The most important thing to understand about the economics of the train age is that in those days you had ONLY TWO mass transit technologies: horses and boats. When the train was invented, compared to horses and boats, trains were something analogous inventing space travel. Not only could people move from one high density area to another, you can create new rail lines and extend your civilization along the train lines.
This is no longer true. Like at all. Primarily because human population is so large now that manufacturing and scientific research of economies of scale are such that not only do we manage to invent new technologies all the time and improve old technologies all the time (invented cars, planes, rockets, space craft, satelites, intercontinental communications ... and on and on and on) WE ARE ALSO CHANGING CIVILIZATIONS RAPIDLY. So, where 100 years ago we had large rich industrial zones, 100 years later those industries have been shipped overseas and those zones completely depopulated and laid barren by niggers. Technology is changing civilization so fast that only in the last 16 months we converted a huge portion of our or economy to a mobile workforce economy alone.
People that talk about trains seem to have no fucking clue what they are talking about because they seem to always talk about trains as the one solution for all problems because ... reasons.
The correct way to understand trains as a mass transportation solution is this:
Think of trains as a technology.
Visualize trains as just one technology of an EVER INCREASING sea of technology option.
Understand the sea of technological options as being bound by local demographics, local economics, local politics, local geography and all sorts of local pressures. This means that each group of people will pick a set of solutions from this ever growing mix if technology options that fits them, their needs as they see fit.
There is a place for trains and rail and it is dynamic and varied. In North America where we have a large landmass, sparse population, hugely changing technological options, hugely changing civilization requirements trains MAKE NO FUCKING SENSE AT ALL. Most people in North America, most of the time in most places need dynamics transportation solutions that solve the travelling salesman problem. Virtually no one in North America lives their whole live in one place and works in another to make anything even remotely close to trains being viable.
Small rail systems only make sense in large metro areas and for transport of fixed location goods source to market. Beyond that, plances are so fucking cheap and so fucking efficient that it makes no sense to even think about building out rail. Now, if North America gets to a population of 2 billion, then we can start talking trains.
I really wish people would stop talking about trains as 'it won't happen / it will happen / it should happen'. Trying to make train economics work is not the same in 2021 as it was in 1700.
You are correct just look at Russia. There is not point of making their cross country rail faster, planes are cheaper and more efficient.
Also there is a genetic problem, you can't be on a train full of nigger species, it doesn't work. Only in Japan and Europe can you have train transit.
you can't be on a train full of nigger species, it doesn't work
You should see Paris!
Those are really great points. I never thought about those specific examples.
Huh.
Thanks.
Even before that, the unions killed rail. Now it's a pipe dream for anything other than cargo.
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