Train Travel in the US – Is A New Day Dawning?

Amtrak train routes in the U.S. as of January 2023. Click to view the source page on the Amtrak website.

As the granddaughter of a railroad man, it pains me that my grandmother Miss Edith had more rural Texas transportation options in the 1920’s than I do now. Train travel in the US is a shadow of what it once was, but the situation is looking up. WAY up.

There used to be almost 500 miles of electric (yes, electric) interurban trains servicing the state. As long as Edith could catch a ride from her tiny hometown of Itasca TX over to nearby Hillsboro, she could get into Fort Worth or Dallas for shopping or visiting friends or seeing museums or whatever she wanted to do. She could also have had a fast, quality meal during the heydey of the famed Harvey House railroad restaurants.

As the automobile and the “call of the open road” (plus relatively affordable airfares) rose in popularity, train travel in the US began the decline that we see today. Yes, of course, we still have passenger rail networks, especially in the northeast, even in Florida, but it’s nothing like the frequent, dependable, extensive train travel options that you’ll find in Europe, or the amazing train journeys in Asia, which for me includes the budget-friendly overnight sleeper train from Beijing to Shanghai that I took a few years back.

The trains that we do have are often problematic because there are dependability issues. Freight traffic has priority on many rail corridors. That means that passenger trains are often delayed, usually without notice, and there aren’t that many runs offered through the day.

No one wants to deal with a transportation option that isn’t convenient or reliable.

I’ve ridden the Heartland Flyer train from Fort Worth to Oklahoma City. It was a fun experience, but rather anti-climactic in that you arrive in the lovely Art Deco OKC Santa Fe depot, and that’s it. The train doesn’t go any further.

Amtrak is a pretty good conversationalist on social media, too.

Two things are combining to make more and more people consider train travel in the US, and not simply to see if they can survive 53 hours in a coach seat on the Empire Builder from Seattle to Chicago.

First is the general misery of air travel these days, made even more painful during the recent Southwest Airlines holiday meltdown at the end of 2022, and the nationwide ground stop from a NOTAM glitch in early 2023.

Second are the long-needed improvements coming to Amtrak thanks to the bipartisan Infrastructure Act passed in late 2021.

From the Amtrak 2022 – 2027 Service and Asset Line Plans PDF:

“Within the next eighteen months, Amtrak and its state partners plan to add service to Roanoke and Norfolk, Virginia; to Burlington, Vermont; and between New Orleans and Mobile, Alabama. We also hope to finalize agreements and initiate construction of capital investments for new corridor service between Chicago and St. Paul, Minnesota.

We also plan to continue our work with state partners on other service expansions, such as the development of the portion of the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor between Petersburg, Virginia and Raleigh that will link, via a newly constructed, direct, and higher speed line, North Carolina’s successful state-supported Charlotte-to-Raleigh Piedmont Corridor to Virginia’s Petersburg-Richmond-Washington corridor and the Northeast Corridor.”

There are also sweeping improvements coming to train stations, dining cars, and railcar interiors, plus new locomotives and passenger cars.

It is the biggest investment in U.S. passenger rail in 50 years, and I for one cannot wait to try new routes and upgraded service.

I am so ready for good food in a proper dining car (salad photo courtesy Amtrak)

It is a greener transportation option than cars or flying, but we need to remember that train travel in the US can’t escape the ongoing climate crisis any more than the rest of us can.

My daughter in Los Angeles would love to take the coastal Pacific Surfliner train more often, but there are ongoing issues with track stability and washouts. The same flooding and erosion probems are going to crop up more and more often on Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor, and there hasn’t been train service along large parts of the Gulf Coast (New Orleans to Jacksonville, Florida) since Hurricane Katrina.

Still, the outlook for passenger rail in the United States is brighter today than it has been for a long time.

Miss Edith would be pleased.

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