Why has burger rail been so neglected, relative to Europe and Asia, since the 1800s?

I've traveled on US rail, and it's not that bad. The only problem is you don't have direct connections between cities so you've to switch trains once in a while. But that's explainable because your population density is far lesser.

That didn't stop China, brainlet.

Go to Amtrak.com and type in a few long distance trips in and you'll get your answer.

First-class traincars used to be commonplace. Imagine spending a few extra shekels to have a respectable car full of fellow professionals, rather than spending hundreds per month for the privilege of being cut off by Paco's unregistered work truck before being rear-ended by Tyrone's stolen Suburban.

It's not neglected, we just use our trains for freight instead of people because we have lower density. Even with higher density automobiles offer much more flexible transportation and even in Europe transit ridership has been more or less stagnant while automobile use has gone up over the past two decades.

Chinese high speed rail is a meme GDP project, GDP includes construction, provincial governors are given GDP targets, provincial governors as such finance projects like these rail lines to make their region look prosperous. Rail is ridiculously expensive to both build and maintain compared to highways while also being less flexible. Most US rail projects involve large amounts of corruption and graft. Also true of highways, but highways tend to benefit the average person more while trains are usually built to support downtown job centers. In fact the only rail system in the USA actively gaining passengers is Seattle's rail system since growth management planning in the state has made suburban land expensive as fuck so Microsoft/Amazon moved a bunch of their shit downtown since it wasn't that much more expensive anyways. Unless you have a very dense concentration of jobs in a particular area within walking distance of a train station, trains are a bad idea.

If you want public transit, use buses. MASSIVELY cheaper capital costs and more flexibility.

>trains destroyed europe by letting migrants travel at high speed
You don't need a train to travel in current year, you autist. Nobody takes the train from Mexico City to Los Angeles.

>Is it autism?
Yes.
The autism starts early. As a kid I went to train-themed parks, watched Thomas the Tank Engine, built train sets all over my house, even as a college student I would hang out autistically by the railroad tracks enjoying the good weather.

it'd be easier to just have private bus systems but most cities have heavily restricted private entry to intracity transit wherever possible to protect their public monopoly. There are a ton of really nice intercity bus options along the eastern seaboard though.

Any luxury you can think of in a train car could be provided on a bus just as easily with maybe the exception of meal service or alcohol due to laws against it.

>create flyover country with the creation of the (((airplane)))
>depress the local economies so the wealth isn't spread evenly throughout the US
>keep all the wealth in the cities where they have "the best public transportation"
>wonder why these areas are so poor

For what though, where the hell am I traveling daily on the train? I can have an amazing office, for less, in a white office-suburbia complex, for example.

it's because conservative americans have this anti-socialism ideology that brings them into loony town, where they literally believe having trains is "socialism" and having roads is "freedom"

>it's not that bad
It's true that it's possible to travel by rail, but any inter-city transit rail is almost comically underdeveloped. It's often easier to fly even distances of 100-200mi, which is ridiculous because of the tremendous time waste involved in commercial flight (checking in, security checkpoint, waiting for boarding/taxi/deboarding, and so on.)

The East Coast may be marginally better, but the West and especially the Midwest are remarkably undeveloped in terms of passenger rail.

>inb4 muh cost of rail lines
Muh cost of 4-story freeway interchanges and constant lane maintenance closures

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>private bus systems
Like San Fran's tech giant Elysium line? kek.

that mommy in the front right
10/10

Thomas the Tank Engine is a show about being a good employee, and working.
Sorry to hear your caught the autism instead.

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>Any luxury you can think of in a train car could be provided on a bus just as easily
Technically, yes, but bus travel is far less pleasant for most adults than rail travel. Rail travel is very comfy, but even a nice bus makes many adults feel very carsick after a period of time. I can't point to why, but there's an enormous difference as far as personal experience.

A bus is also handicapped against trains in long-distance travel because a bus cannot realistically be built to travel at speeds of 200+mph. Not a huge deal in distances of 50-100miles, but traveling from San Francisco to Seattle would kill the bus option for most travelers purely based on time.

Our freight system is so lucrative that any other use of rails is considered a waste of track. That's why all the railroads switched entirely to freight and the government formed Amtrak to ensure that some passenger service would be available.

youtube.com/watch?v=uAWDtXoDmqg

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>Freight rail exists
It does more than exist. Our freight railways are better than Europe's

honestly we should create a interstate 2.0 thing with the passenger rails throughout the US, it can be done over the next 50 years or something but jeez some areas need coverage then we can finally stop having to use airplanes constantly.

it's actually because trains bring blacks and crime. There's little to no positive benefit.

North American rail companies have been engineers and conductors then anywhere else in the world.
We cover more terrain, elevations, conditions and distances than anywhere else in the world.
>T. CNR conductor in the Jasper Alberta mountains.

Because Airplanes Bomb.
Thanks for asking, good luck running loads of iron everywhere when you can literally make a road for automobiles out of ashes, sand, and rocks.

>where the hell am I traveling daily on the train?
Where do you travel daily in a car? For that matter, it's not entirely about daily travel either, because inter-city rail isn't really targeted at daily travelers.

Hardly anybody flies on a daily basis, but we still have tremendous infrastructure supporting commercial air travel, as painful as it's become (before 9/11 it was much comfier and less prone to delays/cancellations/full flights.) There is plenty of demand to run passenger trains on existing rails between large American cities, it seems. America is just no longer set up for inter-city rail transport.

get rid of blacks and start building trains

The roads have to be replaced every 5 years because they get destroyed by all the traffic. And the 90% of the damage is done by 16 wheeler trucks, who are shipping goods along the roads in giant conga lines, basically like a train without rails. I've had arguments where conservatives explain how much more efficient it is to ship goods along asphalt roads with individual trucks each with their own individual engines, instead of gliding it across a rail

I wasn't aware of that, although I knew we had a fairly developed freight rail industry. I do know our nation has a tremendous history with freight rail starting with the Transcontinental, but I didn't know it remained that developed.

>Even so, how has inter-city public transit in the 20th and 21st centuries been so underwhelming in America in contrast to other wealthy nations?
In this case, it was the privatization of Tax funded lines that removed urban rail in most cities. The Detroit Auto Manufacturers bought up city transit in privatization moves, promising new and upgraded transit. Then they shredded the rail lines and put in buses. Again, in some cases this isn't terrible. San Francisco, for instance, is faulty ground, and transit ceases while lines are repaired. Buses just go around the holes.
But large subway systems for heavily populated areas are a benefit, and a smart use of 3D.
It is too bad that we're not getting the high speed rail tech, but we do a pretty good job with most of that in Aerospace.
Capacitor tech would be one area we would be likely to gain that we're gonna miss.

business.time.com/2012/07/09/us-freight-railroads/
>neglected
The US rail system is the best in the world at transporting everything except for people. As planes transport people long distances better than trains, this isn't even an issue.

if you think USA is bad go to UK and use their trains. complete shit.

That's all thanks to Warren Buffet. It was pretty bad at the turn of the century. He's put alot of good money into solid upgrading.

>it's actually because trains bring blacks and crime

>charge money for train tickets
>blacks don't like paying money
>???
Car culture creates a lot of crime, too, both with easy getaways as well as letting anyone with an unregistered 1993 Civic drive into the most isolated neighborhoods.

That's a good point on resource scarcity, but materials are a drop in the bucket financially when it comes to rail construction. On that note, if rail is used to its potential, the load it takes off the highway systems will drastically reduce cost of road maintenance.

Population density. This has been posted a thousand times.
Christ, try harder with your slide thread spam.

I don't know what you're even talking about. UK trains are bad today by a UK standard but better than US trains. Britain is much smaller than the US and it actually makes sense to build trains here. You can get from London to Paris in like an hour today.

Trains have worse commute times. If you live in a dense city (ny, chicago, sf) you already have buses and subways, and they fucking suck and people only use them because they have to once humans are packed that tight. Living in those cities is hell.

>building high-speed rail over the rocky mountains for a slower trip than flying

good luck with that

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Niggers and public transportation 101. Don't worry it will happen to you if your not busy firebombing the railways from the bullet train bigger invasion.

>As planes transport people long distances better than trains
They can, but especially post-9/11 air travel has been getting much more difficult and time-consuming for anyone who doesn't charter/own a private jet. A major part of why modern rail takes so much longer than air travel, even with all the time spent on the ground and even in layovers, is because America has so little high-speed rail.

Modern rail can safely travel a third to half as fast as a modern jet liner, and often approaches speeds of regional jets/turboprops. The benefit here is that there is very little time spent in the terminal, virtually no delays, much more space to sit while you're traveling, and a much comfier ride as well.

To be fair, if we didn't use air travel, it would have been a lot more work to convince the public that a bunch of sandmen had hijacked a taxicab and destroyed three WTC buildings and the Pentagon to give us an excuse to go throw bombs at them again.

We drive cars like free non communists.

>take loads off
It's never been shown to do this, anywhere. Any time transit is put in, it only attracts people who aren't in a car, and where it attracts people who might have otherwise bought a car, that lack of their car attracts someone else to move there who has a car.
It literally has the opposite effect of reducing traffic in the long run. The more options, the more people want to live there, ipso, more traffic.
Not a bad argument for getting one though.

is that way

>Trains have worse commute times.
In my city, any commute that can be done on the train might be a few minutes slower with no traffic. Traffic is a real shoah and the train still moves at 50 or 60mph, so any regular commute is far better on the train if possible.

>scared of rail through the mountains
Most rail wouldn't be going through the mountains anyway, most inter-city routes are mostly or entirely non-mountainous terrain.

I grew up in the mountains and I think only once or twice was the rail closed for any reason other than weather so severe that the highway was also closed. Even so, very few took the passenger rail because it simply wasn't set up realistically - pretty much Point A -> Point B with no stops in between, and very limited schedule. It's a shame because the mountain rail is a really beautiful journey.

>It's never been shown to do this, anywhere.
I don't think you understand how this works. A rail line doesn't overnight, instantly take half the cars off the road or prevent any population expansion - which, in any area located near healthy industry, is a fact of life.

This is the same pants-on-head argument the NPR libs are taking in my town against expanding the highway, I constantly hear lines like "Adding more lanes to the highway doesn't reduce traffic, so we should just do nothing" which really triggers my autism. I can't even take the highway from my house to work in the morning, as multiple times a week some retard manages to crash and block the entire 3-lane highway. Trains don't experience traffic.

I wanted someone to tell me about the j00z though

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High speed rail would bankrupt the saudis. Cant have that, now can we. That would be anti-semetic.

*semitic

US government recently approved European style trainsets, as well as the Brightline service.