this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2025
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It also doesn't acknowledge that a lot of that is just empty space. The US is ranked 180 of 242 nations in population density.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density
The US rail system has been bastardized since its inception, but this map is basically useless. The UK has 7x the population density as the US.
That's a problem that is easily solved by building less trains in places with no people and more trains in places with lots of people.
To be clear, the U.S has plenty of places that could easily support rail transit, and High-speed rail. That they are not getting built is just good old political failure.
Also I read that in the US Amtrak gives priority to cargo trains even though laws exist expressly forbidding that, so that a 200km trip with no stops ends up taking 4 hours.
That's true - they do this by making their trains longer than the sidings.
You'd think they'd make that illegal, but no. Political failures are incredibly common in the world of rail
Ah. That's why the US trains are always stupidly long. It's not economics. It legal.
Its also so they can use less crews to run trains. A 2 person crew can run a long train that otherwise would require 2 or even 3 crews.
It's a mix of both, really. They would not be losing significant time by actually going to the sidings and letting passenger trains go by, and time is less significant in freight anyway. The longer trains let them do some (fairly questionable) optimizations in their freight delivery though, and since they go unpunished, they go for it.
That's not Amtrak's fault.
Most of the rails are actually railroad company property, they're not government property like the highways are. On most rails, you're on the property of CSX, UP, BNSF etc. And they give their trains priority over that interloper Amtrak.
it's important to stress that rails only work in densely populated areas. it's very economically stupid to build railways in thinly populated areas. unfortunately, i see way too many idiots advocating that public transport be built everywhere, which smears the reputation of the whole public transport system, because it is then perceived as economically stupid and inefficient. public transport needs to focus on the cities and inter-city rail.
The USSR had like half the US's population density. They ran trains even to remote villages. Sometimes there wasn't even a platform, just a dude with a locomotive and a car who would stop if anyone looked like they needed a ride or to take their animals to market. Today, Japan maintains unmanned platforms in places with daily ridership <10.
China runs HSR to towns even as small as 120K (probably smaller, but that's the smallest town I've stayed in), the primary way to get between cities in Vietnam is by bus (or motorbike, but those aren't allowed on highways).
What's stupid and inefficient is prioritizing cars over public transit.
In principle I agree with you, but I want to nitpick some things because I'm an asshole.
Not the greatest example, because a lot of human lives were lost in building the Siberian railroads. I've read reports of 300k people, though of course with it being Soviet Russia... Nobody knows for sure.
This sounds stupid inefficient, but it's actually not. Build a railroad to a destination with daily ridership <10? Very inefficient Build a railroad with actual usage, but also serve stops in between that have nearly no daily ridership? Actually a good idea, because you already build the railroad for the most part and those people also need transport.
Lol to me that's a medium sized city. Second biggest city of my country is fewer than 120k. We don't have high speed rail, but we will eventually, between the capital/biggest city and the rest of Europe. For now, rail still exists for most towns above 20k.
Buses actually suck for inter-city transit, trains are way better (and at these speeds and distances, cars are OK too). Are you sure motorbikes aren't allowed on highways at all? In most countries in the world, they are. Mopeds are not, though - since mopeds can't go as fast as highway traffic usually does.
The records were opened in the 90s, any reports before that were little more than SWAGs. After the 90s, they had the names of the workers involved so you can have very exact estimates.
OK, but there's 100 cities in America bigger than that. But also it's simply the smallest Chinese town I've spent time in, I'm certain smaller towns have trains. The density was somewhat greater than the average American town, but it meant you could take a public electric scooter or bike across town in 5 minutes instead of 10 minutes.
Yes and no? As far as I am aware the JRs don't build platforms~~ anymore.~~ in towns with small ridership, but due to japan's rural population crisis, they simply have platforms in shrinking towns, and if it's already built it's cheap to maintain. Low or negative interest loans with regulations to punish companies for providing substandard service could facilitate the construction in theory, but I am not aware of any specific location where that's occurred.
Vietnam has some political, social, and geographical issues that make building both city and intercity rail very difficult.
Except for CT08 and I think CT10? outside Hanoi, you 100% cannot take a motorbike on a CTXX. There's other major roads you can take bikes on, and I've taken my bike on a highway that was under construction, but don't take them on the other CTs.
Presumably those countries have a minimum speed limit. VN just bans anything with <4 wheels. I can tell from personal experience and word of mouth, even if you're doing 100+, you will be stopped and lucky if they let you off without a shakedown. I was lucky enough they believed I got forced on by traffic and was trying to find an exit.
This kinda sucks because it increases the time to get between some places by over 2x
So what was going on before the 1960's?
cars are more complicated and took a longer time to develop, which is why trains were the only option before that
More like we decided to invest billions(trillions) into building freeways instead of our rails. And then air travel became cheap.
There's also a lot of benefit in connecting different densely populated areas by rail, and those rail lines can then serve some of the less populated areas in between. E.g since we're discussing the US, there'd be value in having high speed rail between NYC and Chicago, because people need to travel between those cities, even if in between there are a lot of sparsely populated areas. Sadly right now it's not a real option because the train is slow af compared to just taking a plane, but if the system functioned well and they had actual high-speed trains like we do in Europe or Asia, there'd be a LOT of benefit in connecting densely populated areas through sparsely populated areas and adding a few stops in between. Fewer people would be driving cars from small towns to the cities, etc.
Yes, we have a lot of empty space, but we have very few N/S passenger trains out west.
For example, a train from Albuquerque to Denver is a 45 hour one way ride because you have to go to Chicago from Albuquerque, then back to Denver. This is a 6 hour drive. There is also nothing from El Paso to Albuquerque. However this does not show the train from Belen to Santa Fe that goes through Albuquerque.
Ok... so why isnt the east coast covered in rails? The western states pulls the average way down.
The East coast is covered in rails. There's an Amtrak station within walking distance of my house. We have a high speed rail line in the Northeast Corridor and have for decades.
Are we looking at the same image?
Actually, I realize we're not looking at the same map. Those are the passenger routes. I'm thinking of railways. We've got more rail than that, we just don't run passenger trains on them.
Yes, theres a lot of rails. Though, even that has declined as more freight is being moved by trucks...
You've got "precision scheduled railroading" calculating extremely long freight trains with the absolute minimum amount of engines needed to pull it, and thus the absolute minimum crew, constantly stalling on hills. Gave us that video of 4014 pushing a stalled train.
I live here. I know where the train tracks are. They're all over creation.
Only what is vestigally left. This is what it used to look like