Reminds me of my home city where people argued that there was no way to incorporate urban rail into the city, but luckily the town is crisscrossed by bike trails. The bike trails were literally the rail bed from our urban train system that got torn out in the 50s.

It was so widespread that I've never been to a small town, in the region I grew up in, that didn't have an old passenger rail station that was repurposed into something else. Your map starts well into the 1900s, my area started being built up hundreds of years before that. Shit my house is almost 100 years older, alone.

My current small town has THREE, ffs, but no, this rail can only be used for freight, because reasons

Another one I found:

Apparently this is a weak point for Europe, and even other rail systems like China's. The US has a relatively efficient cargo rail network, while more stuff is shipped across the EU in trucks than it probably should be.

I feel like many people oppose rails to trails because then there’s much less of a chance it will become rails again, so you have to let go of the hope of any sort of trains coming back. Though becoming a trail is certainly a lot better than the track land being split up and sold off to developers, since then there’s no chance.

I once heard of someone who had to go from somewhere in the south of England to London, and took a plane to Berlin and another to London because it was cheaper than the train.

I don't understand why plane tickets are so cheap compared to plane tickets. Part of it is that plane fuel isn't allowed to be taxed while other forms of energy are, but there's got to be more. The situation is insane.

Anyway, let's at least tax plane fuel.

At best it’s inaccurate. I see several missing lines that I know exist because I lived near them.

Old map, perhaps?

I think it's only Amtrak, the main Intercity passenger rail service. There's a ton more freight rail, and hundreds of smaller regional rail services.

Looks pretty similar to that amtrak map shown on Wikipedia

It’s worse than that, because it doesn’t show service level. The northeast corridor (Boston—>nyc—>dc) have great train frequency (even then they need to run more trains on holidays).

I believe the long distance routes are like one train per day. You’d have to be really dedicated or really desperate to deal with such slow unreliable trains which such low frequency. I do believe they’re there only to preserve track and collect votes rather than be useful. At this rate maybe in another century ….

Europe is not a single country.

Workin' on it

The biggest difference between the United States and Europe is their respective population densities. Trains are less of a convenience and more of necessity. If everyone had a vehicle, it would be nearly impossible just to drive down the road.

Honestly this is why miles of rail is a pointless metric.

Number of people moved, how quickly, how far, how affordably, and distributed by population matter more.

I've lived in the US and Europe. Growing up in the US, the nearest public transit, a bus, was about 9 miles away. The roads did not have sidewalks for the vast majority of that and the roads were not designed for bikes. Essentially there was no available transit. If I somehow made it to this stop it would be another 1.5 hr bus ride with transfers to the nearest amtrak station. This wasn't even the most rural part of the US. 8th most populous state in the country and about 20 miles from the 5th most populous city in that state.

I've yet to find anything like that anywhere in the country I'm currently in. Even going on hikes purposefully away from everything there's still closer public transit than growing up.

I've been to plenty of places in the US where you wouldn't find a bus stop for 50 miles.

And this isn't even getting into how expensive and slow US rail is. That's only talking about access.