spades-king:shawnathan55:mothraesthetic:fandork:dorksidefiker:iandsharman:sebpatrick:m
spades-king: shawnathan55: mothraesthetic: fandork: dorksidefiker: iandsharman: sebpatrick: merseytart: eddus: lostinmiami: eddus: mapsontheweb: A map of about every primary passenger railway in the USA for 2016, commuter rail included. Surely there are more trains lines about than this ?! Nope. We’re animals. I’ve only trailed by train twice in the U.S., and it was the same line, once DC to Philadelphia, and once DC to NYC for work once I discovered the train was two hours faster than flying and cabbing back into NYC. I do forget though that you guys fly everywhere and trains might not be practical. I live on an island the size of one of your states ! Fun fact: the busiest railway station in America (Penn Station in New York City) gets fewer passengers than Liverpool Central. I knew the US had a much less extensive rail infrastructure than us, but bloody hell, the fact that there are ENTIRE STATES that literally don’t have passenger rail is madness. I’d still love to travel on it some time, mind. Just imagine the jobs you could create by building a decent railway system! Behold, the end result of graft and political corruption. I had no idea most of the US had no regional lines? Like, I live in tiny little MA with one of those clusters of red. Does everybody else have to DRIVE??? yes. we drive. and it’s terrible. Oh wow I didn’t know it was that sparse and i live here Someone put up here the train system of the Philippines please Okay everyone, keep in mind that this map is of 2016, this is current passenger routes. There are rail lines that run through most of the US, but there aren’t really any passenger lines anymore; back in the day you could hop on a rail and get to almost anywhere you need to go, but we ended up phasing the passenger lines out. And the major reason for that is its too expensive to maintain all of that; not to mention that its a logistics nightmare. We have cargo trains running all the time in the country, its the most efficient way to transport foreign goods from one port to the other side of the country. There’s just not enough space on all the rails to accommodate cargo and passenger lines. On top of that building and maintaining highway systems is much less expensive and time consuming than maintaining rail lines and passenger trains. Something a lot of people, even people from the US fail to understand is that we’re a big fucking country. For you folks over in Europe and Brittan let me give you some perspective. The US from east to west is almost 3,000 miles across. The whole of the EU from the Balkans to Portugal could fit in there. And we are not as densely populated as the EU, the west is actually still pretty rural. So it financially and logistically makes much more sense to use cars and highway transport than a train. Now is this system harsh on the environment? Yes. But if we had passenger lines that kept running all over the country, the environmental impact would be just as harsh. The fact is, highway systems are just easier and less expensive to work with. Now if we could make cars affordable and have them produce less or no emissions (have them run off of hydrogen, it burns water vapor) then there wouldn’t be a problem. -- source link