> Along the Mississippi River we wait in a siding for an approaching freight train
Good grief. With all of that big country and having had more than a century to make rail routes 'broad way' with four tracks, it beggars belief that so many U.S. rail routes are this third-world, poverty spec. single track arrangement.
Plus the options for delays are comical. You could understand a train being hours late if it was on its first outing as a prototype but really? Hot air balloons have a more predictable and reliable service.
Plus the heritage of U.S. railroads and the fantastic loading gauge mean that U.S. trains should be the best and the most stylish in the world. Those double deck carriages with observation domes and the potential for cool end carriages and comfy sleeping arrangements are just not so easy in other countries. Plus the scenery is spectacular in much of the U.S. Why the reality is people driving for hours with attention focused on the road the whole way - is this not a waste of human potential? You could be reading or doing your knitting on the train rather than holding that wheel.
I think that the rail network in the U.S. is not to be given up on. There could even be a whole new approach to it. I often wonder if you could build vastly lighter trains that used active suspension and other gizmos that you might find in a deluxe German road car to put some magic back into rails. Plus speed is a problem on U.S. rail. Even in the UK there are trains that slightly terrify you with a genuine perception of 120+ mph speed. In the U.S. you can be crawling along at 12 mph and that is if you are not stuck in a siding waiting for a mile long freight train to crawl past at 12 mph.
Recently I learned the PRR T1 trains in the days of steam would be doing an estimated 140 mph if behind schedule. Those streamliner trains from almost a century ago were just so cool. For the 21st century America needs trains that suit post Covid, post-boomer lifestyles that hark back to the majesty of times past.
This. America is huge. We could be doing so much cooler things with trains, and the experience can be SO nice. It's a beautiful country to watch going by from the window of a train.
Even if we didn't end up with trains that went way FASTER than other methods of transport, we could be doing so much better. I saw someone advocating for a line along the Northeast corridor departing every hour in both directions.
Where I live we've got the Vermonter, stopping at a (admittedly charming) antique station in my town. It comes through once a day, in each direction. That requires that any trip has to include an overnight stay. If that train ran like a metro train and came through hourly, I'd be constantly travelling to places like NYC and Philly or even Baltimore, to do stuff, because I would be able to come home again once I was done, even if it was late.
That's nice... Might as well let private companies operate land cruises the way they do in other countries, and to own and operate their own rolling stock in cooperation with the host railroads.
NOrtheast Corridor, and some of the west coast trains as well as some routes around chicago serve a real transportation need, but long-distance cross-country travel is best handled by the private sector.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_Railroad_class_T1 says "there was a drawback of the metallurgy used; the poppet valve could not withstand the stress of sustained high-speed operation (meaning over 100 mph (160 km/h) on production T1s)."
The Mallard record was a bit of a stretch. One way, down a hill, not in service but testing new brakes. It needed repairs after that. The previous record was 1.5 mph slower.
At least it didn't have the wheel slip that the 4-4-4-4 PRR train had or that poppet valve problem.
Size was also very different, like comparing a 737 to a 747.
Beautiful that the Mallard was, the U.S. trains had something to them and the expanse of the U.S. gave opportunities that were not possible in the UK for some truly fast trains. The mountain ranges of the US are vast compared to the mere hills of the UK, if you wanted a downhill run for top speed then the U.S. should have had options. But planes came along.
edit: Btw. taken from the german wikipedia, and put into DeepL because I'm lazy:
After several test runs with trains with a mass of about 250 t and speeds of up to 195.7 km/h, the 05 002 reached a world speed record for steam locomotives on May 11, 1936, in front of a train made up of four cars (train mass about 200 t) on a level stretch between Hamburg and Berlin. The fact that only four cars were used in this test run instead of the five cars normally attached to the train happened by chance due to a hot-box on a car the day before. The record run thus took place without any special preparation and almost by chance.
(Diz iz verry good tränntzläyshn! Äm DeepL(y)impressed with DeepL!)
>You could be reading or doing your knitting on the train rather than holding that wheel.
You can also brush shoulders with a diverse cross section of America and see and meet all sorts of interesting people. You can get pretty lucky in the dining car if you're traveling alone being sat with cool people with interesting stories to tell, or passing a covert bottle of whiskey back and forth with a stranger. There's a camaraderie you get on the train you never get in a car or on a plane, something more and more important the more fractured and divisive we get. People of all classes and backgrounds, mixed in a comfy tube with nothing better to do than to talk to each other.
US rail network doesn't need 4-track mains. We run gigantic freights (3+km) on huge loading gauges, so we have many fewer trains. There's also nearly no passenger traffic because it takes 2 full days to go from Chicago to Seattle.
Adding 3 more tracks would be a gigantic capital investment in never-used capacity.
Good grief. With all of that big country and having had more than a century to make rail routes 'broad way' with four tracks, it beggars belief that so many U.S. rail routes are this third-world, poverty spec. single track arrangement.
Plus the options for delays are comical. You could understand a train being hours late if it was on its first outing as a prototype but really? Hot air balloons have a more predictable and reliable service.
Plus the heritage of U.S. railroads and the fantastic loading gauge mean that U.S. trains should be the best and the most stylish in the world. Those double deck carriages with observation domes and the potential for cool end carriages and comfy sleeping arrangements are just not so easy in other countries. Plus the scenery is spectacular in much of the U.S. Why the reality is people driving for hours with attention focused on the road the whole way - is this not a waste of human potential? You could be reading or doing your knitting on the train rather than holding that wheel.
I think that the rail network in the U.S. is not to be given up on. There could even be a whole new approach to it. I often wonder if you could build vastly lighter trains that used active suspension and other gizmos that you might find in a deluxe German road car to put some magic back into rails. Plus speed is a problem on U.S. rail. Even in the UK there are trains that slightly terrify you with a genuine perception of 120+ mph speed. In the U.S. you can be crawling along at 12 mph and that is if you are not stuck in a siding waiting for a mile long freight train to crawl past at 12 mph.
Recently I learned the PRR T1 trains in the days of steam would be doing an estimated 140 mph if behind schedule. Those streamliner trains from almost a century ago were just so cool. For the 21st century America needs trains that suit post Covid, post-boomer lifestyles that hark back to the majesty of times past.