"Going anywhere for the holidays?"
"Yes, upstate."
"Plane or car?"
"Oh Jesus no! Train."
"How long will that take?"
"9 hours. But my vacation starts when I get on the train, not when I get off the plane. It's much less stressful."
"You know... I can see that..."
Folks, I may have a made a convert today. Let's be real. Driving is work, and flying is torture. A train ride, might seem "long" but did you count all the time you spend getting to the airport, the security checks? The silly rules?
People who think "flying is faster" are falling for airplane propaganda. Take a day to travel. It gives you time to think, you can watch movies on your laptop and read. You can have a nice sit down dinner. Your ears won't pop and your legs won't cramp. No security people will yell at you for having too big shampoo.
The last time I flew was a decade ago. But I've been all the way to Alaska and beyond nonetheless. Travel itself should be part of the "vacation" not what you do when you get there
@futurebird an airship/dirigible would be neat if they could ever become “economically viable”. You’d get the comfort of a sleeper train with the views of air travel, and without sea sickness and weather hazards. Obviously trains win over land, but we’ll need some way to cross the ocean without fossil fuels someday.
@futurebird They say everything’s bigger in Texas but geez…
Austin -> Oklahoma City: 12h (incl. 3.5h transfer in Fort Worth)
Austin -> El Paso: 20h
Austin -> New Orleans: 27h (incl. 8.5h transfer in San Antonio)
@bk1e@futurebird Last I knew Amtrak in Texas had even worse reliability problems than airlines. A disruption in Chicago throws things off all the way to LA. Multiple family members who tried Amtrak from Texas to Cali were offloaded to buses before they got there.
But my info is old. Please tell me things have improved and I'm completely wrong!
And I'm not anti-train. The solution is more trains not fewer - starting with a loop connecting the biggest TX cities.
@pzriddle@bk1e@futurebird same reason I rarely take the train up and down the west coast -- 32 hours for PDX-SNA on Amtrak versus 2h20m flight.
I can absorb a lot of flight delays sitting at the airport (and have) and still come out a full 24 hours ahead of the train. ;_;
If they ever finish the California High-Speed Rail that'll take a few hours off, but government/industry corruption or whatever has delayed it for years.
We need more trains, and better trains, and to actually build them
@futurebird Aside from a trip to Japan, everything I know about rail travel is from old murder mysteries and horror movies, so I’m afraid I would spend the whole trip looking out for Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo appearance. 😉
@futurebird I really can't fly any more, or not without problems. Once you've had DVT, you're always at risk. Plus, flying has gotten RLY vile. And, I love trains.
@futurebird I would happily take a train/boat as I loathe flying. But to go from one European country to another would realistically take days rather than hours and cost far more including hotel stops etc. and I have limited days off.
@futurebird i want a world where trains are the better option and they could be. Unfortunately decades of underinvestment and lobbying by airlines and car companies will take decades to fix.
I've always been envious of the people whose vacation in Europe meant crossing the ocean in a steamship, and being able to just relax on a boat for the journey (except I guess when the weather was bad 🤢 ). You had all that time to acclimatize to the idea of traveling.
It means less traveling, more saving up, but as I've said many times, I want to go to Borneo to see the Giant Forest Ants, (and well everything) someday. I plan on sailing.
Sailing ought to be a bigger thing than it is in these days of excellent GPS and satellite phones. This project will take so long to plan I've decided to start studing Bahasa Melayu and the history of the country. I think 15 years of planning will do it.
@futurebird my buddy in North Carolina wants to come visit. Train station is 3 hours away. Train leaves at 3am. He's going to fly to another city where he can catch a train at a decent hour. It's so backward, but that's what we're stuck with for now.
I took a train from Boston to Minneapolis, loved the ride, but then the return trip would have forced me to wait 10 hours for my train. Just a little too much time.
A hundred years ago we had trains that were twice as fast. Let's be better.
I agree but also think it's important to note that the expectations we have for train safety are much higher than for any other mode of travel and trains are safe enough that this isn't really a travel consideration since all other alternatives are worse.
Makes sense. You got me googling to learn more that's for sure. - "A 10-year study of fatalities occurring in train, plane and automobile accidents concluded that the best way to be safe while traveling was to leave the family car at home. The report compared deaths per one billion passenger miles for each form of transportation and came up with the following results:
Automobiles:7.28 deaths
Trains: 0.43 deaths
Planes: 0.07 deaths"
@Mikal@futurebird@jhavok
You're on the right track. It will take #leadership#money and #politicalwill with people such as yourself who care enough to dedicate to the task and keeping it front and center. But it's completely doable. It's just work.
Oh, I agree, but when you live in a faux-gressive state like California and they spend billions on new freeways for new cars but can't seem to get even basic public transit right...well, I don't even know where to start.
@Mikal@iamcanehdian@futurebird@jhavok I mean, we have one high-profile rail initiative in the state, it's mired in bureaucracy, and powerful people are trying constantly to get it canceled altogether. By the time it's open from San Jose to LA (if it ever gets there) I'll be too old to travel.
@GustavinoBevilacqua@futurebird There's a Cartrain from DC to Florida, very popular with the. East Coast snowbirds. I would bet that something similar would be popular to just about any tourist destination. But the car rental companies would hate it.
@futurebird There's a long-time bureaucratic precedent for this. My dad earned some R&R time during his WWII posting in Europe. He opted to spend it in Scotland, the farthest spot he could go, because his leave didn't begin until he got off the train at the destination.
I didn't intend an insult, my apologies. I like NYC people, they have a particular energy to them that I love. It's a city that - to quote one New Yorker - is so diverse it makes the UN look staid, and it has a rich sense of its own history.
Hey, I live in London, the city that literally defined time itself as being centred there. I get the city-centrism. I think a lot of big cities have that sort of brain.
There are a few metro north stations in NYC where Amtrak trains also stop, so you can step off the commuter train, and wait a bit then step right on the long distance train. Takes a little planning, but very very slick move IMO.
Helps to have an SO obsessed with train schedules. I'm kinda spoiled. A plans everything for us, and he has this whole system worked out to minimize wait times with all sorts of odd transfers.
Once we went from NYC to Philly all by local and commuter rail lines. No Amtrak... it was like ... magic.
@futurebird Travelling by train is so much nicer, than plane or car, and I do it whenever I have the option.
Just get in, relax, see the country side. Nice.
Live in Germany, and here travelling between large cities is always faster by train. But I've also taken a train several times when plane would have been longer, and I have zero regrets. I got to see and be places I would not have been without a train.
@futurebird For international travel I work with a travelling agency who have specialised in train travel for 30 years. A train goes there? They know it, can get you the ticket and also help you out on the ground if something unexpected happens. And of course https://www.seat61.com/ is just the go to for international train travel.
So far I've been across the US, Japan, Egypt, Europe. At some point I want to take a year off travel to Oceania without flying.
@futurebird Here in Austin, TX we unfortunately do not have great train options, but in the past few years, a bus line popped up that travels between Austin, Dallas, San Antonio and Houston that is wonderful. Hop on, be pampered like first class (at cheap airline rates) for 4-5 hours, and not have to worry about driving.
@futurebird going to portland by train is faster than driving; going to vancouver (BC) by train is not faster (thanks to the trestle bridge) but is dramatically more pleasant.
@jabberati@futurebird Much, much more legroom than any plane, and also you can, and are pretty much expected to, get up and move around. Go for a walk to the dining car. Some trains have sleeper cars. It’s nice :)
(As for time, the journey is part of the vacation, like the OP said…)
@wannabemystiker@bbaugh@futurebird Yeah "Cascadian" is the name of the train, runs twice a day north to BC from Seattle, like five times a day south.
Those are the cars and engines we paid for, it's faster, newer, and just better. Amtrak does operate it, but it's Washington State and Oregon money and equipment.
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