The State of Train Travel in the United States

I, somewhat recently (okay, back in July) took the train from where I grew up to where I live now, after visiting family for the 4th of July. A day that should not be celebrated, but I digress. When I say “the train” I mean THE train, as there is exactly one that covers the trip between the two locations.

Ultimately, this is about that situation. I don’t want to dive into how long train travel is, why high speed rail is a necessity here, or any other matters regarding Amtrak’s funding and how its treated as a private business that happens to receive government funding instead of as a proper public service to the people. I could go on for pages if I dove down that topic, which I may or may not talk about in the future. Let’s be real, it’ll probably happen one day, when I take yet another train trip south towards Los Angeles or say “fuck it” and go out east towards Chicago.

But for now… let’s talk about routes and timetables.

Amtrak Routes

This is primarily about regions farther west from the many cities east of the Mississippi river. Because those areas have far better rail coverage than most regions west of the Mississippi, they’re generally well served. Not perfectly served, mind you, as there’s still a plethora of cities and regions that lack any train service, but it’s nowhere near as bad there as over here.

There are exactly four routes that link the West Coast to the rest of the United States - three of which share one end point in Chicago, Illinois. There’s the Empire Builder that runs from Chicago to Seattle and Portland, going through Minnesota, North Dakota, and Glacier National Park, before splitting in two in Spokane, Washington. There’s the California Zephyr which runs between Chicago and San Francisco, routing through southern Iowa and Nebraska, northern Colorado, central Utah, and the northernmost part of Nevada. There’s also the Southwest Chief, connecting Chicago and Los Angeles via north Missouri, central Kansas, New Mexico, and the northern part of Arizona before carefully avoiding Las Vegas. And we simply can’t forget the Sunset Limited, the only long-haul east-west route that doesn’t end in Chicago - instead it connects New Orleans to Los Angeles, traveling fairly close to the southern border the whole way.

That’s it. Those are your four major east/west lines. Hope you like starting or ending in Chicago.

The west coast does have a few north/south routes connecting the states. The major route route west of the Rocky Mountains is the Coast Starlight, connecting Seattle down to Los Angeles with stops in Tacoma, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Sacramento, California; and several other major cities along the way. The only other north-south connection that covers the entire nation west of the Mississippi river is the Texas Eagle, which if you guessed that it starts in Chicago you’d be correct - because it connects Chicago to San Antonio, Texas, with extra stops in St. Louis, Missouri; Little Rock, Arkansas; Dallas, Texas (and Forth Worth); and Austin, Texas. Do you live in Denver, Colorado? If you want to take the train north or south, you have to go extremely out of your way just to get to a different city - effectively forcing you to either take a random bus, drive yourself, or deal with airports and flying places.

There’s also several shorter, more “business” oriented routes that focus on connecting specific regions instead of the entire coastline. The one I might take one day is the Amtrak Cascades, which routes from all the way up in Vancouver, British Columbia down to Eugene, Oregon - stopping in Seattle, WA; Tacoma, WA; Portland, OR; and Salem, OR. There’s three shorter haul routes in California that connect North/Central California and Southern California together. North/Central California is in part covered by the Capitol Corridor, linking Auburn, CA to San Jose, CA; making sure to cover Sacramento, San Francisco, and Oakland along the way. The San Joaquins links the Bay Area to Southern California - starting in San Francisco and Sacramento (another one of these “split in two” trains, I think) before linking back up in Stockton, CA and traveling south towards Fresno, CA and ending in Bakersfield, CA - an area also known as the Inland Empire. Finally, connecting the southernmost part of California is the Pacific Surfliner, running from San Luis, CA down to San Diego, CA via Santa Barbara and Los Angeles - and Anaheim too, if you want to go to Disneyland.

So, in total, we have one major north/south route in the Coast Starlight; one route that covers the west side of Washington and Oregon; and three covering parts of California - the northernmost parts of California are solely reliant on the Coast Starlight themselves, as is the southernmost part of Oregon. Do you live around the Rocky Mountains? Fuck you, you can’t easily go north to south. Do you live in Boise, Idaho? No train for you, period - Amtrak doesn’t provide any service there.

This is, in my opinion (and from what I see, many others) as a serious disgrace. There is so little rail connecting our gigantic nation, and especially those of us who have the “disgrace” of living west of the Mississippi river. There’s a reason many folks deal with the mess that is air travel - it’s simply the only option many have to go from Point A to Point B, even if both are major metropolitan areas.

Amtrak Timetables

While this problem is, in my opinion, less of an issue than the fact that there just aren’t routes linking our nation, it still plays into the reality that makes folks rely more on driving long distance or flying in planes. And that’s how frustrating the timetables are between major stops.

The stop that the Empire Builder splits in two or merges together at (depending on whether you’re going to or from Chicago), has arrivals and depatures around 1 AM or 3 AM. Want to take the train to or from Spokane, Washington? Fuck you, you have to deal with these ridiculously late (or ridiculously early) times. The same applies to if you’re arriving in Fargo, North Dakota whether you’re going east or west, or getting off at St. Paul-Minneapolis after departing from Chicago. I imagine it’s a very, VERY similar story to the California Zephyr, Southwest Chief, and Sunset Limited for our east/west routes, and the Coast Starlight as the lone north/south long-haul connection.

There isn’t a whole lot that can be done about this, unfortunately. While it’d be lovely for Amtrak to run more trains along these extremely long-haul routes, it simply only makes sense if there’s the ridership to warrant it. Something that just won’t happen unless air travel becomes so inconvenient that trains are routinely filled to the brim - or at least close to capacity between its various stops. Even though I think rail travel should be treated as a public service rather than a weird government private business, all of this travel would require significantly more stock than Amtrak currently handles, and would increase maintenance costs as a result. Again, this is a cost the government should burden, but that just ain’t true as of today.

This is a problem that high-speed rail could somewhat alleviate, but there would still be awkward timetables for various cities, and high-speed rail can’t cover every single smaller town or region that could benefit from rail access in the first place. You also run into needing to build high-speed rail across Native land, and potentially having no choice but to cut through a reservation due to terrain difficulties along other potential stretches. Even if you did manage to avoid high-speed rail cutting through at least the reservations, you would still leave plenty of cities that could benefit from rail out from the improved faster routes because it’s difficult to financially justify serving them due to location - requiring more smaller routes to operate to try and link them to more centralized high-speed hubs.

The hell can we do?

God, I wish I had an answer here. I don’t think there’s anything that can be done, because it relies on getting the federal government to properly fund any public service in the first place, before acknowledging Amtrak’s existence and re-prioritizing rail as a necessity for our nation. Which, given the direction the United States has been on for decades now, simply won’t happen without some drastic changes to the entire government in all aspects.

Hell, they want to fucking defund the United States Postal Service and turn it into a private enterprise - while the USPS is not legally required to exist (though it is certainly interpreted as such courtesy of Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the Constitution), so long that it does exist it must serve every citizen of the United States - even the most rural, out of the way locations must get service. Service that commercial providers probably don’t bother with, because those rural areas cover so much land for so few people. There just ain’t no way they’d spend the hundreds of millions of dollars to merely update the Amtrak fleet to modern stock, let alone the hundreds of millions to connect the nation together with new low-speed routes… and that’s before we get into needing to re-develop the massive rail network to somehow accommodate high-speed tracks, which functionally require separate rail with a different gauge that can handle stock traveling at speeds well in excess of a hundred miles per hour.

So… unfortunately… we’re stuck with the system as it is today. Maybe one day we’ll get proper national rail coverage that benefits us all, instead of the few areas that happen to have good access and routes available.

A day I can only dream of… and fight to make happen.