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I remember looking at US train ticket prices once, and finding that they cost nearly as much as plane tickets for the same journey. Is that still true?
An airplane trip across Canada is $200 (almost - yvr-yhz) , and you're pressed in like cattle for 8 hours.
A rail trip across Canada is $18,000, and you're lucky if you're in a little stateroom for 7 days of a 14-day trip because the bulk seating is torture.
Yes, like the post office majority republican fascists have worked diligently to kill it. One result of that is the high price.
Depends on where you are. There are areas on the northeast corridor that (if bought in advance enough) are a pretty good deal. The other major thing is that in some instances you're going from center city to center city, meaning no transportation to/from the airports.
That being said, it's no guarantee the train will be cheaper.
The cost problem for medium or long distance trains is the cost of human labor.
In a given 10 hour work day (apparently common for airline flight attendant) how many flights can that worker work? Let say New York to Los Angeles flights. So the answer is about 2 flights per day. Compare that to the time it takes by train for the same distance, which is about 77 hours. Because of this length this means you also have to have more than one set of crew available to the train passengers.
The staff have to be paid significantly longer on the train to transport far fewer people simply because of more elapsed time. It may be worth it for a nation to subsidize long distance train travel, but understand that that is the problem with profitability vs airplanes that can simply move more people in less time, requiring few paid human hours of labor.
I haven't run the numbers, but I feel like that discrepancy is made up for by the number of passengers trains can carry, considering trains can carry way more people than a plane.
In the USA at least, apparently the Amtrak Auto Train is one of the largest passenger capacity trains and can hold about 692 people.
A single Boeing 777-9 can hold 426 passengers.
So yes, a passenger train can carry more, but only about half again as many. So because of how much slower it is, the plane can carry more in the same amount of time.
That matches the last time I checked as well. A cross country basic ticket was the same cost as a plane ticket, but if I wanted anything more than a basic chair then the price quickly skyrocketed.
Amtrak works best on two routes: the Northeast Corridor between Richmond, Virginia, and Boston, Massachusetts, and the car train between DC and Florida, where they'll bring your automobile so that you have it at your destination.
I just looked at ticket prices on the Northeast Corridor. The very popular DC to NYC route is between $25 and $55 per way if purchased at least 2 months in advance, depending on the popularity of a particular time. A plane ticket would be probably $150-$350.
Plus the actual seat experience is akin to business class on an airplane, so maybe the better comparison is $400-$1000 for the equivalent airplane.
But that's basically the only route where downtown to downtown is faster than airplanes (because both DC's and NYC's train stations are in a much more convenient walkable/transit friendly location than their airports).
Oh, and children under 12 can travel at 50% fare and still take a full seat. So for families, the train might be much cheaper.
Then again, passenger rail is a disaster for the other 85% of U.S. residents who don't live in the Northeast.
Much to my surprise, the daily Amtrak Floridian (Chicago-DC-Miami, a recently combined version of Capitol Limited and Silver Star routes) is like $18 between Tampa and Orlando. That's 1h45m by train or by car. Cheapest car rental I found was $62/day. Must be a popular route... or they already made their money in the first 40 hours and feel generous.