Why waste a day in a train when I can drive for way less cost and stop wherever I please or fly and get there much faster?
Not to mention that if I drive some place Im not worried about transportation locally which would, in most places in the US, require renting a car or paying for ride shares.
I've done multiple 3 hour train trips this way, I'll NEVER choose driving over it.
I can sit down and order food from downstairs, it'll be brought to my seat. I've got a quiet spot to work in with an 230V outlet and working Wifi. I can do billable work every minute I'm in the train. I can even close my eyes and take a nap.
Compare this to driving, which would take an hour longer, I'd need to be 100% focused on the road all the time, I can't bill my hours, I can't relax.
[1] https://www.vr.fi/en/facilities-and-services/working-on-the-... [2] https://www.vr.fi/en/facilities-and-services/upstairs-of-the...
Chronically late trains, bad old seats (albeit better than planes), bad food, no WiFi or spotty at best, slower than a car, more expensive than a car.
Plus the most important thing of all is that if you don’t drive you will need to rent a car (which is even more money) or ride share (which can be extremely slow outside of cities or even non-existent)
I love public transit within a city but outside of dense cities it doesn’t seem to realistically make sense. My experiences with Amtrak don’t give me confidence in them.
I also don’t realistically see building out more rail in the US for any reasonable price so we are stuck with prioritizing freight rail over passenger rail on existing rail.
And yes, in most cases trains are faster than cars (Average speed between 100-200km/h depending on the route and train). They could be even faster but that'd require modifying the track so that fast trains don't fall of the tracks when cornering...
Amtrak just sucks and needs a complete overhaul, the technology is there, but people refuse to accept it. It's like trying to sell cars to people used to horses, they just want faster horses because they can't fathom the alternative =)
If it's a commuter train where people spend 30 minutes max and the trains go every 15 minutes on the same route, then no - it shouldn't have a restaurant in it.
But when it's a 2-10 hour trip, of course there should be a place to sit down and buy something to eat or drink.
I can't bill transit from all clients, but I can still do billable work on the train for other clients. No way to do that while driving.
