based.
this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Train infrastructure is so underfunded (thx oil) that you can still get the fingering at most train stations for a really reasonable fee.
Meanwhile, right wing parties in Quebec are fighting against a tramway project in Quebec city, that the entire country agreed to pay for, for which we have already invested half a billion, build stations, etc. They call it "War on cars".
The US has been fighting for years to put a high speed rail in between DC and New York. Every right-wing neighborhood in between is throwing signs out stop the maglev.
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Can Boeing make a train? Just wondering if I should look out for occasional flying safety exist door while watching trains go by.
Maybe they do make trains, but like so badly they just accidentally take off (for an uncontrolled amount of time).
tickets are cheaper? if you want to travel the same distance it is far from cheap to travel by train, in Europe at least
Ameribro here, I can almost guarantee that your airlines are running at a loss as part of a long term EEE strategy to monopolize long distance travel. Once they've got the market cornered, your tickets are going to get A LOT more expensive like ours are. Oh, and they'll start demanding subsidies from your governments to keep from going tits up because they accidentally the whole thing to their shareholders. Don't fucking fall for it.
Traveling by ICE in Europe was fucking awesome. 300kph and like $10 euro to go basically anywhere...well 15 years ago it was that cheap. Dunno about now. And I say this as a gear head.
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Such infrastructure should be completely & unlimitedly free for private use.
When Germany did (twice? Forgot the details :/) the experiment with the unlimited EU monthly tickets for 7€ or whatever people were really glad, everyone could travel & see more. And they still talk about that.
The "unlimited" ticket for 9€ (then 49€, now it's 58€, "conserveratives" hate it so who knows what it'll be next year) is limited to regional and local transit. No long distance IC/ICE trains with some exceptions where an IC is operating as part of a regional connection.
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The only national passenger train service I know of is Amtrak, which shares its tracks with freight carriers. So the current infrastructure isn't designed for high-speed rail and freight carriers usually get priority.
Also, The US is really big, so everything isn't a short train ride away from everything else. If I wanted to visit the Grand Canyon from where I live, it's over 2,000 miles away. That's 30 hours of driving just by car.
With 300mph trains instead is highways that's 7 hours, k, let's say 10 hours of leisure, dining, sightseeing.
(vs 2h airport + 4h flight + 1 or 2h airport taxiing & stuff again)
The railroad infrastructure seems expensive just bcs it is presented that way (and planes & roads arent).
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Also, The US is really big
There's absolutely no good reason why you shouldn't be able to take a train from LA to Seattle or Miami to El Paso. The US coastline is plenty dense, with highway exits every five or ten miles state after state after state.
I have heard that China has made significant efforts in this area, but that really is a massive change in just over a decade.
Meanwhile, the UK will take as long to build a single high-speed line.
UK deliberately defunded their HR connection between Manchester and London. The Tories sold off the land in a rapid auction, just to make sure Labour couldn't take over and finish the job after the next election.
The secret is slavery.
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The secret to it being affordable, doesn't mean it can't be done any other way. Authoritarian government also helped a lot in getting it done this fast but still doesn't mean it can't be done. Just not as fast and as cheap as China did.
freight carriers usually get priority.
They're not supposed to. Passenger traffic on Amtrak should be getting priority but the rail lines basically say "fuck it" and do what they want.
Some asshole Mba/lawyers figured out that if they made the trains physically too long to fit onto the pull outs, then they could just shrug and say "golly, we'd love to pull over for you, but we just can't lmao" and it's perfectly fine. It's called Precision Scheduled Railroading
Seems like an easy solution would be fining the shit out of them for that. Or requiring an expensive permit for overly long trains.
Well, see, for that to happen, you'd need politicians who aren't complicit in trying to rip the wiring out of the walls. Also, regulating railroads is hella complicated in the US because we've got a bunch of ancient laws that give the railroads more rights than God, to the point where you almost stop being a citizen when you step onto railroad right of way. We COULD deal with that, but it'd be almost as much of an almighty fucking lobbyist shitshow as when we try to regulate oil.
Lmao, money concentration wins over all the things human.
We deserve ourselves as a species.
Not sure if the rest of the species do.
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Because they like TSA fingering their assholes?
I'll sometimes go back & go through TSA multiple times, they love that, makes them feel appreciated!
I heard that their is two issue for massive train transportation : -1. Public fund : to make every city more attractive for tourists, kerosene is take free for company. Which lower the price of the ticket -2. Freight : in order to not use massively truck, train freight need to have some span.