I suppose I overestimated passenger rail popularity in this country.. I knew it wasn't relatively huge, but there's several hundred miles in some cases between trains.

Edit: if you’re referring to Brightline West, construction hasn’t even started.

I just rode it last week, and it actually took 3 hours, not 3.5.

Most of the NEC corridor from DC to NYC has a speed limit of 125mph; from NYC to New Haven, it's generally 70mph (!), from New Haven thence to about Kingston generally 90mph, and from there to Boston it's mostly 150mph. Given the density of the corridor, Amtrak should be trying for 150-220mph speed limits, but even 125mph is generally agreed upon to be the lowest end of HSR.

A surprisingly easy way to make the train go faster would be to redesign the switching sections before large stations to allow trains to go faster through them. You can probably cut around 10 minutes out of the entire length with an investment of less than $100 million just by doing that.

In the UK and Europe, 125mph (~200 km/h) is considered the top speed limit of conventional rail. Legally, operating speeds beyond that require full in-cab signalling, positive train control, upgraded safety and structural requirements, and whatever else is required for HSR. Further, all the trains operating on a section of line need to be upgraded to those standards if any of them are to run at speeds > 125mph.

The UK does have some sections of conventional line that are capable of > 125 mph running, and even have done so in the past, but this is no longer allowed.

I’m not sure if the US has similar rules, but it wouldn’t surprise me if so!

> ”A surprisingly easy way to make the train go faster would be to redesign the switching sections…”

Yes, generally speaking, fixing the low-speed bottlenecks will typically yield the biggest benefits for the cost in terms of overall journey time.

UK is part of Europe. It's like writing "In California and the USA", or "In Mexico and North America".

Without such qualifiers, the meaning is clearly "continental Europe", which is a meaningful distinction when it comes to the rail, because they have two almost entirely disjoint rail systems.

Ok, yes, technically the European rail system does actually physically connect to the UK main lines at a few places on HS1 between London and the tunnel at Dover, but no public train uses such connections. Functionally, European and UK rail are essentially entirely separate in terms of operation, regulation and technology. Whereas on the Continent, trains regularly cross between countries and the whole system is much more-but far from entirely -integrated, politically and physically (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Rail_Traffic_Manageme...).

Probably why I mentioned political integration in the sentence then.

But at this point I'm akchually-ing an akchually to an akchually!

That's not true. There are some local connections and integrations, but outside of high speed rail which is generally built using the same standard, each country has their own load gauge, electrification standard, signalling system, etc. Cross-border trains are usually special traninsets built to multiple standards to be compatible.

There is progress on more integration and standartisation, and pretty much all new lines are built to the same standards, but the vast majority of rail is existing.

https://github.com/paddymul/train-calculator

So maybe it'd be a few billion at least. Not to say they shouldn't try. But I expect it'll be over budget and behind schedule, it would never happen like Brightline where they broke ground ASAP and just kept building until it was done.

(This doesn’t make the situation any less embarrassing.)

Acela is like a Formula 1 car that gets to do one quick lap on a nice racetrack, then has to take another course through bumper-to-bumper traffic for the rest of the race.

I think "passenger rail" implies passenger trains running on the "full/main" railroad lines that run all over the US. Something like light rail or local transit typically have their own discrete lines, in my experience.

Again, could be wrong, that's just how I interpret it.

I really wish they could at least get to a minimum of two trains, a "day" and "night" train on every route. You'd think the marginal cost would be minimal considering all the track/stations are there anyway!

When railroad companies merge they tend to abandon one or the other's trackage in areas where the formerly-separate networks ran between the same market areas, keeping the minimum segments of track to cover the maximum number of customers (not even maximum geographical area).

Check out the 2023 North American Abandoned Railroad Lines map: https://www.frrandp.com/p/the-map.html

In a sane world Amtrak would shut down most of the long-distance routes, fix the northeast corridor, and focus on gradually expanding that, but the politics of that are unattractive so it bumbles on with trains that only train nerds would ever consider actually riding on.

It has the potential to be nicer, safer, cheaper and more environmentally conscious. There's no good reason America doesn't have top tier rail transit.

Yeah, few people will take a cross-country train outside of for the novelty and the attraction itself (which are still not to be dismissed), but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of

In terms of where there should be lots of trains that there isn't, it's largely the Midwest outside of Chicago, Texas Triangle, and the Southeast, all of which could probably support hourly intercity HSR trains if they were competently built (although especially in the Southeast, this is going to be restricted basically to a single corridor).

I'm surprised anyone takes it at all.

US rail is starting at negative 100. Only a small group of masochists (raises hand) choose to inflict this on themselves.

The data is available and open!

By the time I left the company several years ago that data was being restricted to only certain employees. As noted below, hasmat is likely the reason this kind of data is not publicly accessible. It is shared in a limited fashion with shippers, etc.

⸻

1. Assuming average car length of 40'

and tracking trains ain't like tracking planes, where they're easy to see up in the sky and constantly transmitting -- train X takes a turn around a mountain and it's in a radio/cell deadzone and that's it.

plus unless you have high-end SAMs you're not able to impact most planes overhead, but shady individuals could certainly impact trains.

UK (not a map, similar view to what the signallers see): https://traksy.uk/live/M+58+STIRLNG

(although it also includes some buses and ferries, and you can only look at one region at a time)

Yandex has it for (mostly Russian) trains that it has on schedule.

Just a little feedback: the color for Amtrak and for Chicago's Metra trains are so similar it's hard to see at a glance where the Amtrak runs are amongst the many Metras that are out at a given time. Would be awesome to differentiate those marker colors a bit more.

Very cool! Didn't know this was even technically possible with the available data feeds. Great work!

I think you could go a little lighter, pretty sure the actual trains have a lighter more saturated blue on them. Something closer to the blue you're using for the Mass Bay Trans Authority would be fine, and there's no overlap in service areas to make that confusing.

Or maybe different marker size/shape for regional vs national trains.

Also saw the South Shore Line is there now. Nice!

As for Trainscanner, it looks promising, but it's a bit weird having buses show up on Trainscanner, and as the first and only option on most of the first trips in the default search (trips from Paris, today). A UX like Trainline's where it shows trains and buses in different tabs would be nicer, IMO.

Thank you so much for the feedback! I agree it would make sense to highlight the train a bit more !

Southshore Line - connecting Chicago, IL (Millennium Station) to South Bend, IN, via East Chicago, Gary, Chesterton, etc

Funny thing, is that Chicago has direct rail access from downtown to 4 airports in 3 states - Chicago O'Hare and Chicago Midway via the CTA, Milwaukee Mitchell (via Amtrak), and South Bend Regional (via the South Shore).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Shore_Line

My impression is that a lot of the rest of the world has much better passenger rail, but uses freight rail quite a bit less. I wonder if part of it is due to the inverse reason to the US. Amtrak often complains that it gets sidelined (literally) because of freight usage of the same track. Is freight rail usage in, say, Germany, lower than the US because of the dominance of passenger rail?

My curiosity is if the US has just traded off having better passenger rail for better freight rail, and if that's maybe a somewhat environmentally justified choice. How much more freight is going by truck in Europe because of the bias towards rail for passengers, and how does that compare to US people traveling by car when train would be better?

https://www.trucking.org/economics-and-industry-data

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1068592/eu-road-freight-...

Measured by ton-kilometers, the EU moves about 5% of freight by rail, whereas the US moves about 28% of freight by rail.

For rail alone it looks like 50/50. 50% is resources and dry goods, oil and gas, and the rest is consumer goods, boxcar, flatcar, intermodal. [1]

[1] https://www.aar.org/topic/industries-we-support/#!

Really it is a (maybe unintentional) decision not to use trains for passenger rail.

On the other hand. The density of population (and thereby logistic) centers in Western and Central Europe makes freight trains much less useful. From Germany you can reach all of Europe in basically 2 days. And that’s already stretching what you’ll need to reach in practice. And then you add the expense of getting the load to a train station and away from it again and you basically never end up with an easy or obvious advantage for the rail system. What you see here quite often is that a single company/factory fills up a whole train (think car carrier or chemical transport). In these cases at least one end of the journey is typically directly linked to the rail system and the other end is probably a port. And that’s before you take into account that a useful expansion of the rail system requires coordination between multiple governments (there was/is a plan to link Rotterdam to Venice by high volume train connections. AFAIK this is still limited by a lack of expansion of a short part in northern Germany)

So yes. There is a bias towards passenger rail, both for operational (passenger rail is much faster to accelerate/decelerate) and political (passengers sometimes punish politicians for delays, freight doesn’t) reasons. But even without that. The geography and industrial makeup doesn’t produce the same kind of advantages as in the US. So it would still be used less

Europe moved lots of freight by rail. But building of motorways shifted a lot of freight to roads. If your company moves just a few trucks of goods per week across Europe, road will be faster and cheaper.

Rail is now used mostly for bulk goods, but increasing conterisation is enabling easier use of rail even for smaller shipments (less than a full train length, which in Europe is max 700 m).

Europe does have more favourable rivers, so some bulk goods (grain, coal, fuel, chemicals) are transported by barge. Other freight can go by sea.

As the parent says, the solution would be to add dedicated high-speed rails, but then you loop back to the US density issues. How fast would the Acela have to be for it to justify the price you'd have to charge to ever come close to paying back the cost to add a whole dedicated train line between Boston and Washington DC?

No faster than it already is, I would think. The experience is SO much nicer than taking an airplane that a little extra time is worth it. Don't forget how much time is wasted in airplanes just getting to and from the airports and waiting for security checks and sitting on the tarmac waiting to taxi. Trains travel directly between city centers with almost no waiting time.

The Acela doesn't really need to be much faster, though it'd be nice; it just needs to be cheaper and more frequent.

This goes to what I was talking about in my initial post. Right now, part of why Amtrak is bad in the US is because we're getting pretty efficient use of the same rails for freight purposes. The ways around this would either be to somehow legally force freight to fully be lower priority than passenger, which presumably raises prices/lowers efficiency of freight on the rails or to build a mostly disjoint system of rails for passenger only.

The costs required to build a passenger only system is high and the density of the US makes me question if it would get the use needed to be viable. In the meantime then, is it net positive for the US to prioritize freight use over passenger? Even if we gave passenger traffic maximum priority, would it defer enough flights to offset the freight efficiency losses?

Don't be fooled by population density, the western states and Alaska have a lot of nothing and bring the density down. You can find overlays of France and the Midwest that have similar populations. Overall there are lots of potentially great rail routes east of the Mississippi, and along the west coast. (But of course only if you invest in local transit, otherwise everyone may as well drive as they will need their car when they get there.

We're past the era where we could just put a highway or rail line through the poorest neighborhood of minorities we can find, pay them all $10 for their land, and pretend it's a net good for the country. Without some truly insane government intervention that is both unlikely to happen, and probably shouldn't happen, I don't see how we'd add a full new rail system.

If you want to see the real Railways of North America, check out these interactive maps [1]

[1] https://www.acwr.com/economic-development/rail-maps

What would that map look like if even 5% of the annual military budget of the US would be invested in trains?

You will be baffled by the amount of trains.

Would love to see where the data's coming from -- with enough detail that I can spin up my own instance and shove the geo data in a database. (Unless you plan on making money from this, that is. The fact that you're aggregating a dozen random feeds with their own format into one schema is 100% "all the work")

I wanted to do this for ADSB data, but couldn't figure out how to get any quantity of data without paying money.

https://www.map.signalbox.io/

Anyway, according to [1,2]: US: Ridership 549,631,632 UK: Ridership 1.738 billion

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_Uni... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Great_Britai...

http://vonatinfo.mav-start.hu/

Pretty cool, it's a shame that the actual (state-owned) trainlines are in shambles.

Which is a shame, because I actually worked on a live train map internally when I was an intern there a decade ago.

I built a project that predicts how late trains are based on their current location vs historical averages and posts the data to Mastodon. https://caltrain.live.

I did a quick write up about it here: https://rydercalmdown.com/projects/trains-fyi/

The hardest part was learning about GTFS-RT, which was a data format I wasn't familiar with until now.

Do you have any estimation of what percentage of passenger train traffic is currently displayed vs. still to be implemented? As others have mentioned, I also was little bit surprised of the (small?) amount of trains on the map.

Similar map for Finnish trains: https://www.vr.fi/en/live-train-tracker-map

Here's the map for Belgium btw https://trainmap.belgiantrain.be/

These threads always focus on the lack of passenger rail service in the US but ignore that the US also has one of the largest, safest, and most efficient freight rail systems in the world[1]. I'd love to see it live!

https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-network-development/freight-r...

The Class I's and their obsession with operating ratio and PSR have strangled freight in this country for decades and pushed costs onto the public by means of increased truck traffic (and the congestion, pollution, and roadway damage that entails). Unless you're shipping bulk chemicals or coal, you're probably gonna use a truck.

I'd love to build some sort of service that takes this data, references a DB of signaling blocks, and establishes an estimated lat/lng - but that's a huge project of its own.

https://atcsmon.software.informer.com/

https://www.rail.watch/rwmon.html

It's incredibly more helpful than timetables (printed or online) or late train announcements and trying to find the right train names and numbers. Instead of identifying the right train, then checking the latest changes for that train on the schedule board and wondering if "3 minutes late" really means "3 minutes" you just look at the map and see, oh there's my train half way here from the previous town, I'll go have a cuppa.

Edit: It uses nearby cell towers to estimate the location of train

https://www.transitchicago.com/developers/traintracker/

Later this year I'm going with a more luxurious version instead (ocean liner).

But it's pretty famous - we even have a song about it! [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Railroad_Trilogy

The highlight though is the Jasper-Vancouver leg going through the Rockies - if you don’t have 3 days to burn that’s a good choice. Rocky Mountaineer line goes through there as well iirc.

The scenery is pretty great, especially through northern Ontario where it feels like you are traveling through an alien planet where the only thing that exists are rocks, trees and eerie, pitch-black pools of liquid that you could imagine isn't water. You fall asleep at night then wake up the next morning and the view out the window is exactly the same. It's wild.

Crossing the Rockies isn't really worth it if you're only going for the views, imo. Lots of tourists get on the train at Jasper, but I imagine they'll be disappointed because the epic vistas are fleeting and most of the time your line of sight is blocked by trees, cliffs or tunnels. Unlike the route out of Denver on Amtrak, you don't get an awesome desert on the other side either.

Either way, the main point is that it's pretty much the only way to get from one side of Canada to the other if you don't want to use a plane or zig-zag through the US. Greyhound is gone, STC is gone, stringing together a bus route with a hodge podge of local operators is tough and in some places just leads you back up to Via anyway. If you're lucky enough to live along the CN line then Via is all there is, and it's better than nothing at all, which is the situation for a huge chunk of rural Canada.

The CTA has this: https://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/wireless/html/eta.jsp?...

Those are the only two cities I've lived in, but the ability to track buses seems widespread to me.

[0] https://www.mbta.com/developers/v3-api/streaming

I also noticed the map makes it look like the trains are travelling slightly south of the track. It seems to converge once you zoom in though, so I think the data is probably accurate, but somehow the map is distorting things.

This gives me lots of ideas of additional agencies to include! Maybe we should join forces :)

On that note, one feature that would be really helpful is if I selected a particular train, that it would show me where the stations are on that line. Maybe the train company would even give you a commission if I clicked through and bought a ticket.

For US inter-city rail there is also Amtrak’s official Track Your Train: https://www.amtrak.com/track-your-train.html

I'll add them to the list and investigate; thanks!

[0] - https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/usage/passenger-rai...

[1] - https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

Because it doesn't seem to show the active passenger light rail systems in several cities and metro areas.

I just drove by a train station, one train passed by, not on this map, haha

Sadly, there's very little data available for most trains on US rails. For example, there's no way (AFAIK) to see what freight trains are active on the network. It's a little frustrating in comparison with how rich our air traffic sources are.

If anyone on HN knows of any richer sources for train network data, please let me know. I'm highly interested!

I know the Royal Hudson (BC coast, Vancouver to Whistler (at least) retired years ago and is a museum just in Squamish. I rode that one as a child, too...

This feels like an internal app that somehow got a public URL. It has neat features like being able to make the same departure board they have in their stations, and it has a departure view that shows how many people are on the train: https://radar.mta.info/countdown/GCT

But not much more, and it makes me so sad that we undervalue real public transportation here. I wish we could do better.

Still! This is something! And this website is cool!

I was just in Japan, and took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto, which is a similar distance as SF to LA.

That train:

- runs every 10 minutes -- if you miss one, just take the next one!

- takes 2.5 hours travel time

- starts and ends in city centers on both ends.

- has better legroom and wider seats than economy

- free, fast Wifi on board, your cell signal still works, and you can use your computer the whole trip.

- has no security or boarding hassle. You can show up 5 minutes before departure and just get on.

- has no luggage limitations AFAICT

It's faster and far less stressful than flying SF to LA, with the security and boarding hassles, Ubers on both ends, and cramped onboard conditions.

1. https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/programs/san_jose...

Also, in what world can you reliably get from central LA/SF to LAX/SFO and through checkin & TSA in 45 min each?

BART takes 30 minutes to get from Civic Center to SFO. Even without TSA pre-check, it takes less than 15 minutes to get through security. If you get through security 15 minutes before the plane leaves, that's 2.5 hours total travel time to LAX. From the same place in SF it takes 20-25 minutes to get to 4th & King. (Yes, Muni is that bad.) Let's say the train leaves 15 minutes after you arrive at the station. Then it will take 2 hours and 40 minutes to get to Union Station in LA. Total travel time: 3.25 hours. And again, the train cost is 5-10x that of a flight.

Edit: If you think my math about the long-term profitability of California High Speed Rail is incorrect, I'd love to see some numbers showing how it could be priced similarly to air travel. I was agnostic about CA HSR for a long time. I even voted for Proposition 1A back in 2008. But no matter how I crunch the numbers, it really seems like CA HSR is a boondoggle.

Also, your best case scenario of 1 hour from SF to plane is hysterically optimistic. BART headways are 20 minutes in theory and often delayed in practice. If you have bags to check, that'll chew up another 15 min easy. TSA is 15 min on a good day but many days are bad. Gates close 15 minutes before departure, so you need to get through TSA another 15 min earlier so you can walk to your gate. I would leave at least two hours before my flight, and most airlines recommend arriving at the airport two hours before.

The reason I didn't add travel time from LAX to Union Station is because LA is incredibly spread out and most destinations are not downtown. To get to where you want to go in LA, you'll need a car.

And don't forget that this is a comparison of a trip you can take today versus a hypothetical train that will cost you several times more. In real life the train is unlikely to run as frequently or to be as fast as claimed. Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone will ever take high speed rail from SF to LA. The current plan is to finish Merced to Bakersfield some time between 2030 and 2033. Will the political willpower to continue the project still exist a decade from now? I don't know.

We can go back and forth arguing about which is faster all day long, but the real problem is the finances of CA HSR. I've yet to see any figures that show it being financially competitive with air travel. Is the plan to increase taxes on everyone to subsidize ticket prices? Considering the clientele of high speed rail, that seems rather regressive.

What would change your mind about this? I'd be in favor of CA HSR if costs were significantly lower. (I naively assumed government competence when I voted for prop 1A.) It looks like that's not an option, so the best course of action is to stop wasting money on this boondoggle.

Many of the rail lines are subsidized in countries with extensive rail travel. So they don’t have to be economically viable, it’s viewed as a public good, contributing to general economic development.

I'm not saying that countries with lots of rail are wrong. I'm saying that passenger high speed rail doesn't make sense in the US (at least, not outside of the northeast). We're too spread out.

Air travel is a problem when it comes to emissions because there really aren’t any viable alternatives, where as you could pretty much sub in nuclear + renewables for anything else energy/transportation wise and the math makes sense after a large investment. Knocking overland air travel out and replacing it with high speed rail cuts down a ton of air travel, and replaces it with something that is almost trivial to run on cleaner energy.

Another part of that comment you were responding to dealt with comfort and convenience, and having ridden HSR in Japan and Europe, I much prefer it to air travel. Air travel sucks and it’s only getting worse as fuel costs more. If you’re not flying business, you’re basically treated the same way livestock is treated, with a multi-hundred dollar or thousand dollar price tag to add to the insult. I’ll vote for my tax dollars going to HSR all day, “boondoggle” or not. I remember in Massachusetts the big dig was marked as such, but man has it worked. Tunnels under the city where you can drive 45 rather than elevated roads or no roads or surface streets, yep it was expensive but it’s so much better. I’m willing to bet with my tax dollars and ballot measure votes HSR will be the same.

And unfortunately carbon offsetting is rather unreliable (companies buying offsets don't have any incentive for the offsets to be actual savings). I'd be wary of climate change solutions that consist of continuing business as usual and assuming that decarbonation will happen in some other sectors. I also suspect the 20% price increase estimate works for a specific price of carbon, but that price could increase if carbon offsets started becoming widely used (and the demand increases).

Anyway, I don't know what's the right way for the US to reduce travel emissions, whether that's electric coaches, cheaper rail, taxation to increase prices and reduce demand... But I don't think the solution can be "just keep planes and add carbon capture".

Last time we arrived it took an hour to (get bags, wait for shuttle to rideshare park two miles away, and get paired), then another 45 minutes drive in heavy traffic to east Hollywood.

Train to union station would have been much more comfortable.

Flying has huge friction to engage in, as OP indicated Japanese trains have almost none.

I highly doubt that, since you have to board 20 minutes before take off, plus the time it takes to get through security, as well as getting to the airport which won't be in the city center.

The current airfare also doesn't include any sort of fee to ease the ecological impact of burning jet fuel.

And that’s before even considering induced demand.

The attempt at analysis here is just nonsensical. Not even wrong.

That CA is bad at all of those makes it expensive and hard

In addition to very low competence levels in gov't compared to Japan due to many factors. Sure Japan has financial corruption in construction but it's a known system and they build things treating it as a tax. In CA there are many more parties who all attempt to hold construction projects hostage.

The maglev Chuo Shinkansen, originally meant to be finished by 2030 or so, has been stuck in limbo for several years now because the prefecture of Shizuoka refuses to issue the necessary permits.

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14718670