If it takes more than 4-6 hours to drive there, high speed rail is the clear choice. I’m someone who has been on several 10+ hour road trips, and driving for more than a few hours at a time sucks. You waste up to an entire day just driving. Even if it does take the same amount of time, it’d be nice to nap or read a book in that time instead of focusing on just driving. It’s mentally and physically exhausting.

Especially I-70 in western Kansas and eastern Colorado.

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8 points

The furthest I’ve driven in one day was about 9 hours to Edinburgh. Our trains over here are stupid expensive so it worked out much cheaper. But damn I regretted it big time around hour 4 when I realised I wasn’t even half way.

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6 points

No way man, I’ve ridden the train London to the UK. It’s expensive in the sense that a first class ticket for me was … 200 pounds I believe? Amtrak is gobs more for a much worse experience. We’re fighting tooth and nail over here in the states to try to have something close to your system

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2 points

Not tried rail in the USA so yeah, fair enough. But I’ve been to Italy a few times and I’m always jealous of their rail.

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2 points

Except in most of the (non-New England) US. San Antonio to Dallas by car is 4-5 hours. By train it’s 10-11 because it has to constantly pull over for the freight trains that own the tracks. The US only has about 100 miles of HSR for the whole country.

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12 points

I think they meant it more in a β€œhigh speed rail would work better in these situations if we had it” rather than β€œwe totally have that infrastructure in place let’s use it”. That was my read anyway. Plus, my understanding is that what we consider HSR here barely even qualifies as such in other parts of the world.

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-2 points

The problem with trains is that they are expensive to maintain and slower (at least the traditional trains are)

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16 points

It’s all electric now and you can only hear the electric motor and the wheel grinding the rail, so train these day are more like

WwwoooooooooooooOOOOOOOOOOOOO

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

REEEEEEEEEEEEE

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3 points

It doesn’t feel the same. Some engineer please design a chugga chugging machine for use on electric trains.

Thx

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2 points
*

AhahahahahHahahahahahaha

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16 points

I want more trains because I think being a train robber is cool and I want more opportunities to become one.

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3 points

In California it is pretty easy

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1 point

On a completely unrelated note, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaCZ5QzTlFw

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14 points
*
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2 points

What if we combined the two together perhaps we could even call it mmm a bus!

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14 points

I like trains because they are much more comfortable than airplanes (especially with TSA gymnastics) and I can do something interesting or productive rather than try to focus on the road for hours on end.

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1 point

Where to I sign up

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