SubscribeAren't most of the tracks controlled by descendants of the same Robber Baron companies that stole the land and built the railroads in the first place? They let Amtrak run on their tracks at their convenience. She is a second class citizen, barely tolerated.
At no time in its entire history does the United States appear to have had anything in the nature of a rational and sustained governmental policy on transportation. The government, with public approval, seems to have been content to leave developments in this field entirely to the chaotic workings of the free-enterprise system, allowing those workings to carry us where they might, regardless of the growing evidence that they were having profound effects on the social and economic conditions of our society.
Thus there was a time, in the 1840s and 1850s, when speculative calculations appeared to favor the building of canals. The result was that great quantities of capital and of backbreaking labor were poured, with the government's blessing, into such enterprises, only to find most of them suddenly and wholly overtaken, a few years later, by the development of the railroads, leaving a great part of the canal investment and its results wasted and abandoned. Society, one way or another, was the loser. The same thing happened little more than half a century later, when what was by then the world's greatest railway network, constructed at vast cost and representing a veritable triumph of American engineering and technology, was sacrificed, with equal abruptness, recklessness, and abandon, to the compelling commercial intrusion of the automobile. In each case not only were enormous capital investments and material values lightheartedly sacrificed, to the ultimate detriment of society as a whole, but the trends of urban development, sensitive as these are to the available means of transportation, were whipsawed mercilessly by these abrupt and profound changes. Government, in each case, appeared indifferent.
You can readily see that, as even large developing countries where rail and air travel compete, preferentially move people by air as soon as the economy can afford it.Not any more. Plane tickets in India have increased by 50% in the last two years; when I went from Hyderabad to Delhi in 2006, I paid INR 3000-ish for a single-journey trip. Now the same trip would cost me INR 7000+. Know quite a few people who're shifting to Rajdhani's, Shatabdi's and other "high-speed" trains.
train. In 2003, 10 million Indians travelled by air domestically. In 2004, 25 million took to the skies within India and 6 million Indians travelled abroad. [...] Around 100 million travellers every day on state-owned Indian Railways,Yes, that's right. 25 million flew domestic in all of 2004. 100 million take to the trains every day. I remember reading somewhere that even the new airports such as the one in Hyderabad are designed to handle only 10 million passengers every year (or at least in Phase 1, which is operational now)
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Anyway, there were far less crazy people than on a Greyhound, the stations were a lot better than most bus stations I've seen, there was more legroom than on an airplane or a bus, and my train actually arrived early into Chicago.
Maybe this is an exception and not the rule but frankly, I'm impressed.
Also, 77 hours cross country? No different if you took Greyhound or maybe if you drove cross country. If time is valuable to you, then take a plane. Otherwise, what you pay for is what you get.
This is not to say that there probably are problems with Greyhound, mostly due to the whole freight priority thing, and it would probably be better off if it was in private hands, but I must say, I'm planning on traveling via Amtrak again.
posted by champthom at 8:56 PM on July 10, 2008 [1 favorite]