Man, I'd love to be able to get on a train to Tulsa or Springfield, or Kansas City. The problem is that they'd have to lay entirely new rails because the only ones around here are for freight and stay pretty busy all around the clock.
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
417 points (97.5% liked)
solarpunk memes
6369 readers
72 users here now
For when you need a laugh!
The definition of a "meme" here is intentionally pretty loose. Images, screenshots, and the like are welcome!
But, keep it lighthearted and/or within our server's ideals.
Posts and comments that are hateful, trolling, inciting, and/or overly negative will be removed at the moderators' discretion.
Please follow all slrpnk.net rules and community guidelines
Have fun!
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
As a Tor user, I will not patronise an anti-Tor establishment.
In light of all of Amtrak’s other problems, they have a looong way to go.
I would be tempted to try train-hopping on freight trains.
It is not only the AmTrack website. The rail line is really bad as well. In summer your train can be stopped because the rails are too hot. The rails expand too much and warp enough to make it unsafe to run the train on.
I think we need a new system from the ground up.
That's a problem that can be solved with an angle grinder
It's impressive how terrible the amtrak website is. I've used amtrak pretty extensively over the years and haven't been able to login in over a year. I know it's probably due to some verification code that my tech stack violates but the site certainly doesn't fail gracefully. I won't touch the app, of course.
I can still buy tickets, but I need to checkout as a guest and manually enter my rewards number for each transaction. I imagine at some point I'll need to transact by phone or in person.
The railway is good for staying relatively close to the railway. But if you want to go out and touch grass as people say you really need a vehicle. Maybe the Green Wave will fix all this in a few years. But they got to be affordable and they're not at all
Only in car oriented societies. In Austria it is certainly harder to get around with only public transportation if you are not along railway corridors or in metropolitan areas but it is still perfectly feasible to get almost anywhere with train and bus. If you have a Klimaticket it doesn't even cost anything other than the flat rate of that ticket, which many already have just for commuting alone. (Just for context a Klimaticket for entire Austria, almost all trains and regular bus service included for a full year is 1400 EUR.)
car industry would lobby any meaningful change to it.
I guess it's covered by 5., but the real, actual reason we can't have trains is the civil engineering firms can't extract infinite money from a completed railway.
Also, have you considered how any public works project that runs longer than a single term of the elected official who gets it approved, is letting the next guy get all the credit for it? That's much worse than having functional mass transit.
Have you looked at railway maps?
There's a huge sprawling ~~rainwater~~ railway network across America... It's just only used by freight cause the bastards that own it decided passengers are unprofitable
Assuming rail autocorrected to rainwater, agreed. There are interesting parallels between rail in the 1800s and the life cycle of the internet - successful network technology explodes in utility and popularity, then is cannibalized and constricted
It's the story of the USA in general, y'all seem to fall for it every time, gov makes something mildly socialist, corporate muscle their way in, cannibalise and constrict it, and then everyone's told "see, there's no way it could have worked! USA is just too big/different/free/wilddelete as appropriate"
I guess it’s covered by 5., but the real, actual reason we can’t have trains is the civil engineering firms can’t extract infinite money from a completed railway.
Actually, they kinda can. Railroad tracks need upkeep just like roads do. Maybe not to the same degree and maybe the costs work out differently but they do need to be maintained. So there's plenty of opportunity to grift the hell out of a railroad buildout.
I was assuming the repair would be done by a different firm, but that's fair. It probably ends the cost-plus contract that the construction firm had, at a minimum.
In seriousness the problem seems to be the contract doesn't incentivize the correct behavior, but I would love to hear from someone with actual knowledge on the topic.
Also, maybe there are too many opportunities to kill projects via zoning ordinances, and its inarguable that oil, auto, and other industries actively combat these projects.
Have you SEEN what the UK is doing? HS2 is at around 700 million/mile (about 900 million USD) now, you can absolutely extract infinite money from a rail line without even finishing it.
It is the entire English speaking world that lost the ability to built passenger rail without it costing multiple times of what it costs in other developed countries.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(4 replies)
It's a complicated problem. Part of it is that Amtrak is so broken that people wonder if it's even fixable.
I recently went to a concert in another city for my birthday. I looked into what Amtrak options there were, because I get panic attacks in traffic, and they only offer overnight service, with a middle of the night swap from bus to train. It also would have cost $250 round trip for two tickets vs <$100 in gas to drive, and taken 12 hours vs the 7 to drive.
So instead of taking the extra time off work, we wound up driving, and I had multiple panic attacks instead.
Another part of the problem is that the US likes to talk about whether or not people deserve transit options. Like, my local bus only comes by four times a day between 6am and 6pm, but because I live in a low-income area, I apparently don't even deserve a bench at the bus stop.
the worst part of Amtrak is how often it's late, making it not only more expensive than driving or flying but also less reliable.
Old story. That happens when so much of the tracks is owned by freight rail, so little proper passenger rail infrastructure exists and laws that would require passenger rails to be given priority being so weakly enforced and largely ignored, never mind that the infrastructure is maintained as freight rail needs it, which is really bad for passenger rail purposes.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(1 replies)
Spent a couple of weeks in Japan and got to take the shinkansen twice. Of course Tokyo's subway system was awesome aside from shutting down at midnight but I had no problems getting around in Osaka or Kyoto either. The shinkansen is so dope it's hard to describe. They provided the best views I got of Fuji on the way down to Osaka and back from Kyoto. I tried to get a picture of a passing train but it was over in a blink. I took a train from San Francisco to Chicago and it took 3 days. The scenery was beautiful but the roomlette was like trying to sleep in the Disneyland Star Tours ride. 3 days proved too long to rely on edibles and sublingual distillate and I ended up with CHS. The southerly route back was awful, nothing but the drabbest of views and I didn't get a roomlette for the trip back and trying to sleep in economy was very difficult and uncomfortable.
If only people tended to live together in big conglomerations this would be so much easier to solve!
What I don't get is why people are okay with all-day drives that could be comfy train rides. Not to mention commute traffic jams of everyone going in the same direction at the same time every workmorning and workevening.
Ive heard maybe a dozen or so people whip out the ol "if everyone at the light hit the gas at the same time, at least 3+ more cars could get through the intersection"
If only there were some way to connect these many single cars into one vehicle... And if only it were cheaper... And faster... And didnt have to stop as often...
I also can’t comprehend all-day drives over all-day trains. If I take a train on my own or with my family, those are (partially) actionable hours. I can read a book, grab a coffee, work on my laptop, draw with my kid. If I go by car, best I can do is a podcast.
Since I don’t own a car, my point of view is also biased by not having to make sense of a large investment. But if you factor is the costs of having the car, gas and tolls… I’d rather go by train. If necessary, I can rent a car at my arrival destination.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Honest answer? Partly because I can operate on my schedule and not the train’s schedule. And the rest of it is getting to have adventures along the way that otherwise would mean getting off the train, finding a bus, taking a long bus ride to the thing, taking a long bus ride back to the train, getting on the train again…
Sometimes I drive to Seattle, sometimes I take the train. There are times when I like the relaxing ‘let someone else get me there’ vibes, but there are times when the train schedule doesn’t work with my schedule, or I want to check stuff out on route, like fun restaurants I’ve read about, cool educational places, silly tourist traps…
I remember seeing a sign for ‘World’s Largest Egg!’ one trip, so I just took that exit and went to find the World’s Largest Egg, because why not?
And another reason is sometimes I just don’t want to be around a lot of people. One crowded train trip up I was treated to a child that felt the best way to pass the time on the 3.5-hour journey was to scream. A lot. It was also a trip where I’d forgotten my headphones. Not fun.
Because public transit is for poor people/minorities, and if they used it they'd be around a bunch of poor people/minorities.
load more comments
(3 replies)
load more comments
(3 replies)
I thought this was going to annoy me but it was hilarious
My brother bringing the receipts!
If NYC and LA were the only cities, trains would be amazing. Just one HSR sleeper line straight across the empty desert, trains leaving every 5 minutes to meet demand.
With the amount of passengers and the lack of stops along the way, a state-of-the-art 500-600 km/h maglev like the L0 series shinkansen would be able to bring the travel time down to 6-8 hours while being a lot cheaper, more comfortable, more spacious, and with much better access to the city.
My god, it could even be worth trying to build a hyperloop.
hyperloop
Hyperloop are a scam
Yes, so it's a testament to how ridiculously ideal for public transit this fictional scenario is that in this fiction, hyperloop might be a worthy investment.
One of the reasons hyperloop was a scam is that they never really tried. There were some very public-facing stunts, like the design competitions, but they didn't do the SpaceX thing of throwing a couple billion dollars worth of government subsidies at failing prototypes until they started working.
Another reason is that high-speed rail makes a lot more sense when you have regular stops like a real-world HSR line would. Accelerating and decelerating take distance, so the faster you go the longer you need to go between stops for a top speed to matter.
And another reason is that high-speed rail didn't exist yet, and this was presented as a better alternative. If you already have the best open-air HSR money can buy, the next logical step is to stop having it be open-air.
Though, saying that, an atmospheric pressure pneumatic tube where the surrounding air is brought up to the same speed as the maglev train would probably make a lot more sense than a vacuum tube.
HSR existed long before hyperloop
load more comments
(4 replies)
Fits more with c/fuck cars, but solid meme and welcome here
I live on a hill in Alaska, am I qualified to be an urban transpotstion person or do you need to live in the denali mountain range?
view more: next ›