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Comment by NoNameHaveI | Hacker News Reader

This is worth your 8 minutes of time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbEfzuCLoAQ I love trains, but the economics of rail travel in the USA can't be overcome. Until robot trains.

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I have seen that and agree that country-wide train service is indeed expensive, but there really should be better offerings on the east coast that could compete against bus service. Being on a train with plenty of room has a huge quality advantage over buses and the scaling of their carrying capacity means that companies can be more free in allowing luggage and seating space than the economics of planning the layout of a bus.

Train service in the US Northeast is pretty good at least for the cities it services. It's not price-competitive with Megabus but is train anywhere competitive pricewise with discount buses?

at least for the cities it services

And that's the catch. I've been told that years ago it was better, but try to catch a train to a secondary city in New England and you'll often find that the only offering is an occasional Amtrak branded bus.

Fair enough. It's mostly the coastal corridor that's good with a couple on inland spurs from NY/New Haven up to St. Albans and Montreal that aren't terrible. But otherwise, there's something of a gap between commuter rail systems (which are pretty hub and spoke in any case) and what Amtrak covers.

As a former vermonter... The St. Albans service is terrible, trains go into Essex Junction (basically, Burlington) once a day and the train leaves NYC at 11:33 am and gets in at 8:18 pm, eight hours for what is a five hour drive with a single train a day.

I don't disagree that some other services might be alright, but that's clearly not one of them.

I haven't kept up on those services. I know they've come and gone over the years but I was being charitable. I used to semi-regularly take the train from White River Junction to Philadelphia but I pretty much only use the Acela/Northeast Regional these days and that's really the "good-ish" part of the service I'm aware of. (Where good-ish is defined as preferable to driving, the bus, and plane--so long as not doing the whole length.)

New Haven? Ugh. Connecticut fucks with Amtrak relentlessly. Take a look at how Acela slows to a crawl out there.

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