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Especially when you consider how much longer it takes to get where you are going and the fact that it CAN be (not always of course) rather unpleasant!
Thirteen hours or more from San Antonio, Texas to New Orleans, for example! That trip takes 8 hours in the car. You have to really be on a very flexible time schedule and you have to really WANT to ride the train, in my experience. When my kids were little, someone at their school was related to an Amtrak employee and could work out a great deal, so they decided a field trip on the train to Austin (one hour away) would be great. Due to the way it works though, it took more like 3 hours and so there was a tone of time spent sitting on a still train with a bunch of restless and bored elementary age kids (I volunteered to help on that trip).. talk about no fun! By the time we got where we were going, there was no time to take the train back before the school day ended so we ended up having to hire a bus.
Now, we were able to take the train from Texas to Chicago, five of us (three 18 and up, two 15 and under which means half fare on Amtrak), round trip for something really inexpensive (compared to flying)... I think it was between $600 and $700 round trip and the benefit for us at the time was that we were traveling with an excessive amount of luggage and you can take a lot more per person vs a plane. Plus we wanted the whole "train experience" but after the trip to Chicago we were totally over that. Tons of delays, crappy customer service, they ran out of food at one point, just stressful and negative.
We bought the tickets pretty far in advance though and that helped.
Theres a Metrolink line to Ventura with daily service to LA Union....for 6-8$ one way.... Amtrak is for long distances and not Metro travel which best left to commuter or light rail.
And that is a big part of the reason rail doesn't work, at least in the west. Metrolink won't get the guy to Ventura on the weekend, and won't take him to a spot that's convenient. You can't take the train to LAX airport either. Nor can you take the train to San Francisco, or anywhere on the north coast. Out here, it's just a whole lot easier to get in your car and go, when you want to, where you want to...
My wife took a train from Minnesota to Pensacola FL once.
It involved 3 different Amtrak routes.
The only thing she did not like was when she was finally getting close, the long time the train was parked on a side track in Alabama waiting for freight trains as freight trains have priority.
Last winter we took the Amtrac from NH to Boston for $10 per person. So much cheaper than driving and when you get to Boston the parking is astronomical. These were Sr. prices so that makes a difference too. I have never used it on longer trips.
Trains were a major player in the intercity travel market only between roughly 1880 and 1950; prior to that, most Americans lived on subsistence farms of the variety depicted in Faulkner's novels, and travel was an expensive proposition, ususaly dictated by necessity rather than indulgence. The "accomodation" trains themselves usually operated at no more than 30-40 MPH and, fantasy films like The Harvey Girls to the contrary. meals were usually taken at "division points" -- servicing and crew-changing stops with in-station eateries that were overpriced, understaffed, and sometimes not-too-sanitary.
That began to change after the turn of the Twentieth Century, when industrialization and urbanization put much more traffic on the rails, but even back then, passenger traffic was usually an afterthought to the demands of an expanding freight business. There were a few exceptions like the New York Central, Atlantic Coast Line and Santa Fe Systems, which invested in the stronger roadbed and better signalling that safe passenger operation mandated, but these were the exceptons that proved the rule. Still, by the summers of the 1920's, high profile trains like the Twentieth Century Limited might operate in as many a seven sections (separate trains operating on the same posted schedule, following as closely as safety permitted). And that extra equipment could also be used to generate exra revenue via excusions, etc.
By 1930, the writing was on the wall. Privatre autos had been making inroads into short-distance passenger traffic for two decades, and air travel was getting organized, and into the public mindset to the point where the decision to fly outlaw John Dillinger from his capture in Arizona back to Chicagoland for trial was big news. But the major factor that prolonged the demise of the passnger train was the effects of Depression almost immedialtely followed by the demands of global war.
With hostilities over and an intact industrial plant in place for a postwar boom, a few of the private railroads made a final bid for passnger traffic with higher speeds (80 MPH as usually tops unless very sophisticated, and expensive, devices like cab signals, centalized traffiic control or automatic train stop were used), and a growing mail and package express traffic (similar to what UPS does today) contributed to the "bottom line".
One of the most interesting sidlights of that time, which some of the older members here with relatives who taught might recall, were the summer-only package trips to the great western National Parks. These deals used the same of the very oldest equiment that also served on troop trains, and the usually young, better-educated and cost-conscious clientele were expected to "rough it" to some degree; still the picture of several trainloads of the adventureome headed homeward from Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon on a Sunday evening in late summer was reportedly a sight to see.
And finally came the Vista-Dome equipped streamliners like the Super Chief, Empire Builder and Califonia Zephyr -- but these were generally operated as "loss leaders" for public relations purposes. The western main lines on which they operated usually posted at least one secondary schedule to handle the mail, express, travel by company officials and the people who didn't want, or couldn't afford to pay the extra fare.
And business declined rapidly drung the 1950's and 1960's as the improvements on ths highways, topped off by the Interstate System, and the growing acceptance of the safety of flying, and the economies of scale as it grew, took their toll. In 1957, an Interstate Commerce Commiion expert named Howard Hosmer predicted the disappearance of all long-distance rail passenger service, witrh the exception of densely-populated urban corridors like Boston-New York-Washington, by 1970. Mr. Hosmer missed the institution of Amtrak as a last-ditch emergency measure by only a year.
Last edited by 2nd trick op; 02-26-2013 at 08:33 AM..
And business declined rapidly drung the 1950's and 1960's as the improvements on ths highways, topped off by the Interstate System, and the growing acceptance of the safety of flying, and the economies of scale as it grew, took their toll. In 1957, an Interstate Commerce Commiion expert named Howard Hosmer predicted the disappearance of all long-distance rail passenger service, witrh the exception of densely-populated urban corridors like Boston-New York-Washington, by 1970. Mr. Hosmer missed the institution of Amtrak as a last-ditch emergency measure by only a year.
Great summary. Thanks for sharing! I would add to the last paragraph. While this link talks about urban mass transit systems, it ties into the discussion of why passenger rail has not developed in the US over the last 60 years to the same extent that it has in other developed countries.
Between 1936 and 1950, GM along with big oil and rubber tire companies bought and destroyed the street car and electric rail systems in the US, which some believe was a factor in the dismantling of public transit in the US, other than a few metro cities on the east coast.
Great summary. Thanks for sharing! I would add to the last paragraph. While this link talks about urban mass transit systems, it ties into the discussion of why passenger rail has not developed in the US over the last 60 years to the same extent that it has in other developed countries.
Between 1936 and 1950, GM along with big oil and rubber tire companies bought and destroyed the street car and electric rail systems in the US, which some believe was a factor in the dismantling of public transit in the US, other than a few metro cities on the east coast.
That conspiracy theory is very popular with the "progressives" with big plans right now, but it's somewhat overblown. As Cano's. biography of Robert Moses points out, every new highway or bridge was overloaded almost as soon as the concrete was dry, The public clearly embraced the auto as an alternative to the limitations of mass transit, and very enthusiastically.
If you shop around, you can gets flights for cheap. But to be fair, compare the type of seat and room you get in a train to flying, and suddenly, the train is cheaper than flying first class.
It's a lot easier to get onto and off a train without all the airport security.
In New York, add the cost of getting from the airport into town. The train lets you off right in the middle of Manhattan.
However time is money. I can leave my house right now and be on time for a late lunch in San Francisco. By train it would be at least three days.
Now, we were able to take the train from Texas to Chicago, five of us (three 18 and up, two 15 and under which means half fare on Amtrak), round trip for something really inexpensive (compared to flying)... I think it was between $600 and $700 round trip and the benefit for us at the time was that we were traveling with an excessive amount of luggage and you can take a lot more per person vs a plane. Plus we wanted the whole "train experience" but after the trip to Chicago we were totally over that. Tons of delays, crappy customer service, they ran out of food at one point, just stressful and negative.
We bought the tickets pretty far in advance though and that helped.
Which pretty much explains the problem if you look a little deeper. People usually want to travel during the peak summer season, but the limited availability of equipment, plus the fact that it must be stretched more thinly over a downsized, freight-oriented infrastructure means that more can go wrong. This sort of thinking is a lot less likely to happen during the off-season.
When Amtrak works as intended, it can look pretty good. But it is a shadow of what was operating at least as late as the early Sixties, and the people who designed it foolishly allowed the "head-end" or mail/express revenue that paid much of the "overhead" to be lost. Ab attempt to recover some of it about ten years ago failed because Amtrak doesn't serve enough of the places that count and UPS/FedEx have a larger, more-efficient network.
Amtrak will survive in some form. It does perform a necessary service along the two coasts where the highway and air systems probably couldn't expand enough to accommodate the displaced ridership, a portion of whom are quite satisfied anyway. But the biggest share of the losses probably originate on the "cruise ships" -- which have never been held accountable to market discipline at any time since their inception.
My uncle, worked in the newspaper business, always took the train from Kansas City to Minnesota and from Chicago to Minnesota.
Around 1970, he started to complain about the lousy service.
He stated he was used to trains having bars as he enjoyed a drink and conversation while traveling.
Around 1970, he asked and was told where he could get a cold beer.
There was a fat guy in RR uniform sitting in a chair next to a little refrigerator selling beer at an outrageous price.
My uncle ordered a bottle of beer and the fat man grunted , reached in the refrigerator w/o getting up, and handed my uncle an unopened bottle, ponted to the opener attached to the side of a little table that had a shallow bowl with a "TIPS " arrow pointing to it.
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By the time we got where we were going, there was no time to take the train back before the school day ended so we ended up having to hire a bus. 
Tons of delays, crappy customer service, they ran out of food at one point, just stressful and negative. 
You can't take the train to LAX airport either. 
Nor can you take the train to San Francisco, or anywhere on the north coast. Out here, it's just a whole lot easier to get in your car and go, when you want to, where you want to...
