this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2025
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I want trains so people can have cross country road trips on the weekend and not have to stay in their small hometown for the rest of their lives
That's just not reasonably possible in the U.S. If I wanted to go Orlando to Detroit on a train that averaged 100mph without stopping it would take 12-13 hours, not including the trips to and from the train stations boarding etc. To California you'd have to throw another 1,000 miles on to that, so an extra 10 hours. 26-44 hours of travel on a weekend trip sounds horrible. If I were going for a week, sure. (Also a train without stops is hypothetical, it would take longer even if the train could go 150mph)
That’s not even a fair comparison.
That train would be well worth having
Every time someone brings this up they don’t seem to realize that the full distance is made up of many segments of many lengths. Even here in the Northeast, it’s not especially common for people to take Acela the full distance Boston to DC. However trains are full from the segments. I would never again travel Boston—>NYC another way. Someone else feels the same about Philadelphia—>NYC, or Philadelphia—>DC. And you can say similar about all the other stops. There’s a huge value in serving a long route, even if it is to serve all the segments and few people go the distance
A commonly used rule of thumb is high speed intercity trains can be the most convenient choice between cities up to 500 miles apart. For longer distances flying would be faster. However most cities are within 500 miles of another city and the “network effect” of connecting the dots is huge
The train would be great. The prompt was cross country for a weekend trip. All of your responses fail to realize the prompt. If it isn't over 1000 miles, there is no way it's cross country in our country. The weekend is 2 days.