I live in NYC and have family in Boston, so Amtrack has been my main mode of transportation. I purposely take the slow train (not the Accela), as it is both cheaper, and easier to work while traveling (restaurant cars).
For people that live in the midwest, I can see how Amtrack is this old rag-tag thing, that serves no purpose, but for the North Eastern Corridor, Amtrack is a life saver.
I wish this country could invest more into rail routes, and make them faster, instead of spending trillion of dollars in sensless wars.
With half of that 2 trillion dollars that we spent on Afghanistan, (and whatever we did in Iraq), we could have had high speed rail in most of the larger cities, at least 10 major routes, making it almost a national high speed rail system.
Right now we have 0.