this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2025
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I expect better of the rail network in America. This is a tiny network for the size country we are.
These poor people have such a bad rail network that even their dreams are limited...
I felt that one as a Brazilian (govt literally went "fuck trains, cars are the future!" for ~30 years starting in the 1950s)
The thing is the rail network was pretty comprehensive at one point. Only a few remain.
It still is, if you're a piece of rail freight.
Even for freight, it used to be better. My tiny rural town used to be serviced by a rail line hauling passengers, timber, and agriculture, but it was gone before I was even born. You can still see some of the old tracks if you know where to look.
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it takes me 24 hours to go by train the same distance it takes me to fly 1.5 hours. and the cost is the same. there are some problems.
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The REAL US Tylenol Map
Thank you. I was kind of offended with the other one for implying I would neglect a huge region.
Nah, Idaho can get fucked.
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why do all tracks lead to Florida?
Its the other way around, there needs to be as many ways to get out of Florida as possible.
One reason for this is hurricanes are more frequent, and sometimes the notice level is too short to have safe evacuation from Miami through highway systems. There has been anger over deaths from evacuation, when a storm warning did not destroy as many homes as was "hoped"/feared.
I think because it has large populations on both coasts?
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A bunch of individual reasons.
Chock Full-0-Sea ports
Nasa historically moved a lot of big stuff over rail.
Florida has a shit ton of Agriculture but a lack of raw materials
Tourism
It's flat as hell
Chock Full-0-Sea ports
Is really the big reason. Less and less portage is going through the traditional East Coast hubs of NY and NJ, mostly going to places like Louisiana , Texas, and Florida instead.
Historically Florida has always been pretty big on trains as well. In fact you used to be able to take a train from Florida to Cuba....kinda. You could take a train across the overseas rail line to Key West where they would ferry the whole train car over to Cuba.
We used to be an actual country that did stuff, and that's because we weren't afraid to do cool stuff with trains.
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The train tracks are extra support to keep Florida from floating away.
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Thats a weird way to spell Chicago? 3 out of 8 tracks is far from all of them
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I assume the gray gaps are due to red states refusing to get on the Tylenol/Autism Train, but I can't believe, if the Autist Party were in power, they wouldn't insist on connecting ALL the dots.
It's kind of weird too because logistically the northern border is the easiest place to expand rails: big flat great planes region, with both of the two largest rivers for ferrying in supplies, followed by a bypass around the bulk of the rocky mountains into Oregon or Washington State.
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I would think that Kansas City would be a bigger hub since it already has a lot of rail through there and is more central in the country.
for freight, not passenger rail, which is what high-speed rail is primarily designed for
But dood. Put a USPS fishbowl-connected car on the end with a sorter working inside and prepping for each stop, and watch FedEx sweat.
Why sort in the train when you can sort ahead of time and maximize storage space? The ZIP code system allows for a national radix sort.
Freight rail is a lot less than it should be as well.
It is also owned by Private Industry without clear rules on what they can charge in that more than it should be.
The rails were only made with eminent domain, Private Industry should not be able to screw people on it, or give preference to large companies over people and small ones.
As would I. There is an existing line from Kansas City to Tulsa to OKC that has been talked about being opened for passengers for a couple decades.
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The most efficient would be 3 major east/west lines, Boston to Seattle, DC to San Francisco, and Atlanta to LA, connected by a series of north/south lines to form a grid. On the east coast, just extend the Acela down to Atlanta.
You need to hit major centres and you need to consider common trips to be efficient. You’re talking about the most efficient per station but most efficient per passenger is going to look different. This image doesn’t see too bad and can still have branching lines.
The biggest concern with that setup is how inefficient it is to reach the Pacific Northwest region, LA is a serious bottleneck on top of being a common endpoint in and of itself. A line that goes straight to either Seattle or Portland from the Northeast simplifies things a lot.
The problem is that population distribution means that almost nobody is going to be getting on or off the train between Minneapolis and Seattle. The population of North Dakota is 800k, South Dakota is 925k, Nebraska is 2 million, Montana is 1.1 million, Wyoming is 590k, Idaho is 2 million. That's nearly a whole quadrant of the country with less population than the Houston metro area. If we're building trains, let's build trains in Houston and serve the same number of people with like a tiny percentage of track that it would take to serve the upper plains states.
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I don’t get it
Trains are a common special interest of people with autism.
Then I must be autistic then, because I love trains and dream of having high speed rail.
It's okay to find out new things about yourself. 🙂
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I know two neurodivergent people that love trains, one is into models and the other trainspotting. They are correct too, trains are awesome.
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