It's scary that Amtrak is just as limited in service today as before 9/11. (rent, train station)
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Getting around the country travelling at 500 miles per hour is worthless if all you can bring on the plane is laundry and nothing else. Crossing the country in 1 to 3 days at 60 miles per hour is highly worth it if you can bring things to keep you comfortable like fans, space heaters, cologne, deodorant, body wash, anything in addition to just laundry, especially if it has sentimental value. Fans especially come in handy if your destination is, for example, a camping trip in the Florida Keys, and space heaters come in handy if your destination is, for instance, a dog sledding trip in northern Alaska. Also, if you are staying at a hotel, you never know if the hotel or hotel room you're staying at has faulty heat (space heater comes in handy), faulty air-conditioning (fan comes in handy), if one or the other is even not working at all, or what not.
And like I said, fans as big as even an 18 inch 1950s Hunter Zephair (steel blade fan!) have allready been brought aboard Amtrak trains.
Air travel is very unlikely to even let you bring a Wexford (plastic/acryllic blade) oscilating desk fan as a carry-on item or in carry-on baggage, let alone even a vintage 6-inch Eskimo desk fan.
Getting around the country travelling at 500 miles per hour is worthless if all you can bring on the plane is laundry and nothing else. Crossing the country in 1 to 3 days at 60 miles per hour is highly worth it if you can bring things to keep you comfortable like fans, space heaters, cologne, deodorant, body wash, anything in addition to just laundry, especially if it has sentimental value. Fans especially come in handy if your destination is, for example, a camping trip in the Florida Keys, and space heaters come in handy if your destination is, for instance, a dog sledding trip in northern Alaska. Also, if you are staying at a hotel, you never know if the hotel or hotel room you're staying at has faulty heat (space heater comes in handy), faulty air-conditioning (fan comes in handy), if one or the other is even not working at all, or what not.
And like I said, fans as big as even an 18 inch 1950s Hunter Zephair (steel blade fan!) have allready been brought aboard Amtrak trains.
Air travel is very unlikely to even let you bring a Wexford (plastic/acryllic blade) oscilating desk fan as a carry-on item or in carry-on baggage, let alone even a vintage 6-inch Eskimo desk fan.
6 hours travel time for $300 plus.. Another hundred in UPS charges to ship the fan.
vs
96 hours travel time plus $712 to travel by train.
Perhaps you feel your time is worth -$3.46 an hour.. Which is the difference in cost and time for train travel.
Driving.. Could be worthwhile.. Make it a trip where you stop and see the sights along the way.. But, you're not doing that via train travel.
And.. There's little you can't take by plane... You can even take guns on a plane. But, you have to follow the rules. Unloaded, packed in checked luggage, and declare it.
What some are not taking into consideration, is the rail lines are owned by the rail roads which are used to haul freight. They go a ways, and then the stop and park for a while while the same line handles trains from the other direction, till it is again their turn to go, and then they go a ways, and wait for trains from other directions. So it is not possible for the train to go fast in one continuous movement.
Plus, existing train tracks are not sufficient to handle freight and any more rail traffic to handle more passenger trains.
To build train tracks to cross and crisscross the country for fast bullet trains, would take decades to just buy up the right rights to build the track. And in many places it would be tied up in decades more to get those rights. An airline can get landing and take off rights, as they do not need property rights between the take off and destination. Not so for rail lines.
They would have to have all those property rights tied up and purchased prior to starting to build the railroads. That is decades more. By the time they were put in service, there would not be an adult alive today, that would still be alive when the trains all started to roll.
And where are the trillions of dollars it would cost just for rail road rights, to put such a project in place. What present services would be cut, or who would be hit with a huge tax burden to make it possible.
Except for a few routs, there would not be enough passengers to make such a project possible.
And I agree with Labonte18, who would want to stay in the kind of hotels where you have to take along a fan or space heater. If that kind of place is all you can afford, you can't afford either air or rail travel.
Getting around the country travelling at 500 miles per hour is worthless if all you can bring on the plane is laundry and nothing else. Crossing the country in 1 to 3 days at 60 miles per hour is highly worth it if you can bring things to keep you comfortable like fans, space heaters, cologne, deodorant, body wash, anything in addition to just laundry, especially if it has sentimental value. Fans especially come in handy if your destination is, for example, a camping trip in the Florida Keys, and space heaters come in handy if your destination is, for instance, a dog sledding trip in northern Alaska. Also, if you are staying at a hotel, you never know if the hotel or hotel room you're staying at has faulty heat (space heater comes in handy), faulty air-conditioning (fan comes in handy), if one or the other is even not working at all, or what not.
And like I said, fans as big as even an 18 inch 1950s Hunter Zephair (steel blade fan!) have allready been brought aboard Amtrak trains.
Air travel is very unlikely to even let you bring a Wexford (plastic/acryllic blade) oscilating desk fan as a carry-on item or in carry-on baggage, let alone even a vintage 6-inch Eskimo desk fan.
Gee, I don't need to be *that* comfortable. Most of the places I fly to, have drug stores etc. When I go to California for the winter, I stop by UPS and ship some boxes ahead of me.
If I had to drive or take the train everywhere I go, I would spend my whole life in transit and never get anywhere.
Amtrak is what it is because it is, perhaps, the ultimate creation of politics -- designed by bureaucrats who did not understand the constraints common to the rail industry, and offered to a naïve public seeking a sentimental wallow in the past, and conditioned to expect far too much.
As far back as 1957, an ICC examiner named Howard Hosmer observed that the intercity passenger train had become completely incompatible with a market built around automobiles and airliners, and predicted that it would be extinct by 1970. The actual creation of Amtrak missed this prediction by only 5 months (June, 1971)
The prediction drew coverage in the national media, but it did not present a complete picture of the rail passenger market at the time. Even the staunchest opponents of rail passenger service understood that there were likely no alternatives to using rail service for commuters, and intermediate-distance markets like Boston-New York-Washington, where urban congestion would become a bigger factor. But branch-line "feeder" service outside urban areas had been declining for years, and it wouldn't be long before improvements in the safety and reliability of air travel would render long-distance passenger trains non-competitive.
At the time, many of the western transcontinental railroads offered a "two-tier" service; luxurious streamliners with Vista-Domes, diners, etc, were-run mostly as a public-relations "loss leader", and usually didn't cover the full costs of operation. "Secondary" trains usually handled the mail and package express that covered most of the expenses. There was a variation in the Deep South, where displaced agricultural workers, usually from the lowest social strata, migrated north; the former Illinois Central (New Orleans-Jackson-Memphis-Chicago) was the prime example.
So in 1971 (by which time the Postal Service was diverting mail traffic, and UPS had skimmed off most of the express business) the bureaucrats in charge of setting up Amtrak redesigned the service, but modeled it along the lines of the long-distance streamliners which had been losing money in the first place. The theory at the time was that the older, reluctant-to-fly contingent would die off, and Amtrak could then concentrate on the urban "corridors" where improved service at faster speeds still had a role to play.
At present, you can get reasonably good, and reliable service on Amtrak's "Northeast Corridor", and in a couple of new markets emerging around Chicago and on the West Coast. But matching the speeds offered by "built from scratch" High Speed Rail systems in Japan and France would require a huge amount of investment that the private sector won't touch. And you can still ride the dwindling number of long-distance trains, with upgraded amenities, but the charge for a sleeper berth will be around the same as that for a four-star hotel. And don't plan on punctual timekeeping, because the volume of freight traffic on rail main lines has increased by over fifty per cent since 1985 -- a product of both more efficient operation and regulatory reform.
As with everything else in life -- we can't have it both ways.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 09-01-2015 at 10:50 AM..
Sidestepping the fact that it's a thinly veiled re-hash of conspiracy theory and anti-TSA rhetoric...
Rail in it's current state simply doesn't go where people want to go in a time and $ efficient manner, with very few exceptions.
Airlines have made air travel increasingly miserable (as much so as any TSA involvement) but it's still very competitive time and $ wise for long haul. If I need to get from LA to NYC, I generally don't have 3++ days to do so, and I'd rather not be subject to multiple multi-modal transfers along the way. One stopover via air is plenty.
Considering the longest transcon flight (that may also be served by a train) in the US is MAX 6 hours, a train would have to be pretty damn cheap or fast to compete. And other than perhaps the NE Corridor and one or two other popular links, it simply isn't.
Some of the baggage examples you cite are pretty bizarre....who cares that a "fan collector" can't bring his fan on an airplane as a carry-on? Why on earth would someone need a space heater on a plane (when it can be checked)? A portable scanner in carry-on, huh?! These are meaningless, extreme cases. Sure, I think many of the carry-on restrictions are functionally meaningless, but I've never been terribly inconvenienced. And some of your list of banned items is wrong.
Last edited by elhelmete; 09-01-2015 at 02:21 PM..
Getting around the country travelling at 500 miles per hour is worthless if all you can bring on the plane is laundry and nothing else. Crossing the country in 1 to 3 days at 60 miles per hour is highly worth it if you can bring things to keep you comfortable like fans, space heaters, cologne, deodorant, body wash, anything in addition to just laundry, especially if it has sentimental value. Fans especially come in handy if your destination is, for example, a camping trip in the Florida Keys, and space heaters come in handy if your destination is, for instance, a dog sledding trip in northern Alaska. Also, if you are staying at a hotel, you never know if the hotel or hotel room you're staying at has faulty heat (space heater comes in handy), faulty air-conditioning (fan comes in handy), if one or the other is even not working at all, or what not.
And like I said, fans as big as even an 18 inch 1950s Hunter Zephair (steel blade fan!) have allready been brought aboard Amtrak trains.
Air travel is very unlikely to even let you bring a Wexford (plastic/acryllic blade) oscilating desk fan as a carry-on item or in carry-on baggage, let alone even a vintage 6-inch Eskimo desk fan.
Where to even start a rebuttal of the inaccuracies and wild exaggerations?
1. You've never heard of checked luggage? What is wrong with checking luggage? So you wait another 15 minutes to retrieve it. It's just no big deal.
2. Your list of "banned" items in not accurate. About three weeks ago I flew from Los Angeles to Little Rock, Arkansas, and returned a week later using only my carry-on bag and a brief case. I had my deodorant, my tooth paste, and some mouthwash (in a small enough bottle) in the carry-on bag. No problem.
3. in a later post, you went on an emotional rant about political freedom. Yes, I too regret the old days when the actual dangers of terrorism were less or non-existent. But government's job is to keep us safe, and I would rather be safe; therefore I will put up with a few minutes of inconvenience waiting in the security lines and/or checking baggage if I need to bring problematic items with me.
4. Out of the thousands, probably tens of thousands of people who fly every day, I wonder how many actually desire to bring space heaters with them? Not sure when I've heard something that absurd. "Oh my god, I have to use checked luggage for my space heater!!"
A further comment about the thread title word "scary":
I do not find it scary that people would vote with their dollars and choose a mode a transportation, which, given the distances involved in the United States, is by far the quicker and in the long run more convenient. This remains so despite the admitted time and inconvenience of security checks, which pale into insignificance when considering distances even as small as one-fourth or one-third of the way across the country, say, Los Angeles to Denver.
I have no quarrel with people who decide to travel by Amtrak - there is nothing wrong with it - but not everyone has the enormous amount of extra time required for that choice.
What I do find scary is the notion that we should all be inconveniencing ourselves out of adherence to an irrational and narrow anti-government ideology. Giving up our freedom to travel with the normal speed of modern technology - since the early 1960's by the way - in the name of fighting for some illusionary "freedom" to carry space heaters on airplanes doesn't make any sense.
Where to even start a rebuttal of the inaccuracies and wild exaggerations?
1. You've never heard of checked luggage? What is wrong with checking luggage? So you wait another 15 minutes to retrieve it. It's just no big deal.
2. Your list of "banned" items in not accurate. About three weeks ago I flew from Los Angeles to Little Rock, Arkansas, and returned a week later using only my carry-on bag and a brief case. I had my deodorant, my tooth paste, and some mouthwash (in a small enough bottle) in the carry-on bag. No problem.
3. in a later post, you went on an emotional rant about political freedom. Yes, I too regret the old days when the actual dangers of terrorism were less or non-existent. But government's job is to keep us safe, and I would rather be safe; therefore I will put up with a few minutes of inconvenience waiting in the security lines and/or checking baggage if I need to bring problematic items with me.
4. Out of the thousands, probably tens of thousands of people who fly every day, I wonder how many actually desire to bring space heaters with them? Not sure when I've heard something that absurd. "Oh my god, I have to use checked luggage for my space heater!!"
Checked baggage often gets lost, ends up in another city which can easily bring total and utter ruin to your vacation as the only way to ever even get it back is to have it shipped back home. Plus, checked baggage gets tossed around a lot, which can destroy anything valuable that you have in there that would get confiscated and even land you in jail if you tried to bring it as carry on baggage. It is especially serious if you buy souveniers on your trip that, in the eyes of the TSA, can easily be either used as weapons, or even broken and turned into weapons (especially those which are known as "shanks" in prison language), especially such items as sea shell sculptures, wind chimes, glass artwork, garden spinners, kites, and vintage/antique items that have either glass or metallic components including but not limited to pots, stirrers, mixers, fans, heaters, oil lamps/lanterns, crystal balance scale things with the brass/copper frames, and vintage toys, too. And antiques are highly valuable as they represent an era when things were made in the USA and with quality. Today's things are often garbage that is made in China. And according to the TSA, it's either "Made in China," or it doesn't fly.
And if you especially are travelling to either a southern state, or somewhere foreign even, no deodorant/cologne = a trip without interactions. Especially as American women are not the best kind of women to meet and mingle with, either. And cologne/perfume especially normally comes in glass containers which will shatter in checked baggage if the bag is roughly handled.
And like I said, it is only a matter of time before even cameras, laptops, CD players, cell phones, i-phones, tablets, and walkmans are banned from carry on baggage on commercial airplanes.
You know, what are you people going to do when all carry on baggage on commercial airplanes is banned totally? What are you people going to do when you can no longer bring laundry, or even a book, into an aircraft cabin anymore? Suppose you even have to check your shoes, belts, wallets, ID cards, cash, credit cards, watches, glasses, contact lenses, hats, bandannas, ski masks, yes, even prosthetic/artificial limbs?
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