damn it, I hate it when I get entertained while being advertised at.
I love it, trains are sexy.
Choos suggestively
To be clear, this tumblr account is in no way associated with the actual Amtrak company
Sure but advertising is advertising no matter who it comes from.
And whoever wrote that “ad” up there is kinda clever & a marketing genius.
I actually have it on good authority that what women want is pockets.
Amtrak is pretty pricy though. I’d love nothing more than to pop on a train for a leisurely trip, but it was astonishingly expensive to cover the same distance as a four-hour drive.
I’ve been looking at it for a roughly 5 hour trip and it comes out to basically the same price as gas most days of the week. The annoying part is that the departure is 2:00 AM and returning trip gets in at 5:30 AM. Assuming no freight train shenanigans
Nice! I just checked Amtrak prices and it would be $180 for my wife and I to make a trip for probably $50-60 in gas.
More money is spent each month on maintaining the roads in the United States than has ever been spent on passenger rail. If tax funding were reallocated away from roads towards trains the costs would reverse.
How is that possible? Trains are extremely cheap to run.
capitalism
Amtrak is government owned
The Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970, which established Amtrak, specifically states that, “The Corporation will not be an agency or establishment of the United States Government”
But indeed it is a special corporation that is not quite private, yet seeks profit. Subsidized by the government, it wouldn’t be the first capitalist enterprise to rely heavily on government funding.
The question is how you define capitalist then.
I would guess because Amtrak isn’t being subsidized enough. A lot of government money is spent on building and maintaining roads. If the consumer had to pay for that directly in the form of toll roads instead of through taxes then Amtrak would be much more competitive.
I believe part of it too is that much of the rail infrastructure is owned by companies, and so Amtrak is getting permission from them to use their tracks. Freight trains get priority over Amtrak trains, for example, and I assume Amtrak has to pay for permission to use those rails.
You also have to take into account that they are buying tickets for 2 people whereas they only need to get gas for one car. If I do end up using AmTrak, I’m just one person so the gas price to ticket price ratio is one to one
It shouldn’t be, but they’ve been handicapped on purpose so it costs more than it should, takes longer than it should, and goes fewer places than it should. It’s not that it’s rail that it has these problems, rather because the car and petroleum industries rule the US.
However, you do need to consider that taking a train prevents adding wear to your vehicle. You’re not only paying for gas when driving. You’re paying for gas, wear on your car, wear on tires, and also wear on the road, but that last one gets partially socialized across all people regardless of if they drive for some reason (some is covered by gas taxes).
We were shocked at the price of airline tickets recently, so we wondered if taking the train would be more affordable. It was actually MORE expensive. WTF?
I’m guessing this is comparing train ticket price fuel cost of driving?
Under ideal circumstances, trains can take you to enough places you need to go as to not need the car at all, at which the comparison actually works out to what it should be: TCO of a car vs total cost of taking trains everywhere.
The TCO of cars is astonishingly high, fwiw. Much higher than people often realise.
I needed to go to LA last year from Sacramento
I could take:
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Amtrak: 8/9 hours for $150 per person, uncomfortable and a slave to the freight network (I’ve ridden Amtrak many times in my life)
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Drive a rental: 120 for the rental for the day + gas, but a 6 hour drive
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Drive my EV: Just the 20 or so bucks for fast charging a few times, maybe an 8 hour total trip
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Fly: 80 bucks per person round trip, sub 2 hours flight, 30 minutes pre flight, Uber to where I’m going for 10 bucks cuz its not far from LAX
I REALLY wanted to take the train but my god
You’re not expected to solve systemic issues on an individual level.
Please do make sure to vote for someone to build trains, of course.
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Sad that we have the most wealth in the world but lost it all to corruption in politicians and company lobbying.
“We” didn’t lose it. We never had it. Boomers gave away our futures for us.
“we”
I thought Amtrak was known for maintaining passenger rail with extreme reluctance?
Nah Amtrak is awesome. They are just hamstrung by govt
More like deliberately crippled by the private freight railroads that own the tracks. Ones that the government bailed out multiple times mind you, yet they’re shamelessly resisting the government’s attempts to provide a public service.
Privatisation isn’t the answer.
Oh I immediately thought hamstrung like how the education, healthcare, and mail systems are hamstrung by a government that refuses to invest in them
Yeah exactly, that’s what I meant! Everyone is ignoring the context of what I’m replying to. Amtrak needs more funding. But they do pretty good with what they got.
They also need to be given priority over freight rail, instead of the other way around like it is now. Plus the super-long freight trains they’re using unsafely mean they can’t use existing sidings.
My understanding is that passenger trains always had priority over freight. The long freight trains are their way around giving priority. Can’t give priority if you’re too long to give it
…You think they’ll choose to keep passenger lines running if they aren’t forced to?
I think they’ll expand in a heartbeat with more government funding
We’d love it better if it didn’t have to give rail priority to freight trains.
And I’d personally like to be able to put our (modified for wheelchair) car on it so we’d have it when we get as far as the train can take us.
For the first part, I’m 90% sure that’s already the case when possible, but the freight companies just make their trains too long for the sidings so Amtrak has to sidetrack instead of them.
For the second part, that is sometimes an option, but it isn’t cheap. I know there’s an Amtrak train that runs on the east coast that does that. It’s from DC to Orlando, FL. I don’t know if there are any other routes for this yet though.
Yeah that’s the only one, and I’m on the Left Coast. Looked into it when our kid was graduating in Minnesota and it was impossible. I wound up driving the whole way and back.
Yeah, sadly passenger rail connecting the two coasts is fairly poor. I’m sure a coast-to-coast passenger rail with car transportation could do really well. It has to be expensive, because a car is about the size of a cabin so you essentially need to pay for two cabin spaces plus anything else involved in it. Still, it beats that long drive by car and all the miles you’d put on your car. We really need to get rail moving to where it should have been decades ago.
