Show HN: Trains.fyi – a live map of passenger trains in the US and Canada

Wow, I don't know why I thought there would be... Way, way more trains active at a given time.

I suppose I overestimated passenger rail popularity in this country.. I knew it wasn't relatively huge, but there's several hundred miles in some cases between trains.

The site is incomplete, and there are way, way more trains active at a given time. For instance the Tri-Rail and Brightline (high-speed rail) in Florida each have 5-6 trains running simultaneously. Brightline is notable as the US's first credible foray into high-speed rail. Similarly most major cities in the US have either light rail, rapid transit, or both, which is maybe not included in this map. "Passenger rail" might have some highly specific semantic meaning that leaves these out of this map.

Obviously it’s not the first credible foray into HSR in the US-that honor is Acelas.

Edit: if you’re referring to Brightline West, construction hasn’t even started.

Acela isn't HSR, and Metroliner which came before had travel times from NYC to DC as low as 2.5 hours. Acela does the same trip in 3.5 hours. Metroliner lowered trip times primarily through faster acceleration.

Acela does the same trip in 3.5 hours.

I just rode it last week, and it actually took 3 hours, not 3.5.

Most of the NEC corridor from DC to NYC has a speed limit of 125mph; from NYC to New Haven, it's generally 70mph (!), from New Haven thence to about Kingston generally 90mph, and from there to Boston it's mostly 150mph. Given the density of the corridor, Amtrak should be trying for 150-220mph speed limits, but even 125mph is generally agreed upon to be the lowest end of HSR.

A surprisingly easy way to make the train go faster would be to redesign the switching sections before large stations to allow trains to go faster through them. You can probably cut around 10 minutes out of the entire length with an investment of less than $100 million just by doing that.

“Given the density of the corridor, Amtrak should be trying for 150-220mph speed limits, but even 125mph is generally agreed upon to be the lowest end of HSR.”

In the UK and Europe, 125mph (~200 km/h) is considered the top speed limit of conventional rail. Legally, operating speeds beyond that require full in-cab signalling, positive train control, upgraded safety and structural requirements, and whatever else is required for HSR. Further, all the trains operating on a section of line need to be upgraded to those standards if any of them are to run at speeds > 125mph.

The UK does have some sections of conventional line that are capable of > 125 mph running, and even have done so in the past, but this is no longer allowed.

I’m not sure if the US has similar rules, but it wouldn’t surprise me if so!

”A surprisingly easy way to make the train go faster would be to redesign the switching sections…”

Yes, generally speaking, fixing the low-speed bottlenecks will typically yield the biggest benefits for the cost in terms of overall journey time.

In the UK and Europe

UK is part of Europe. It's like writing "In California and the USA", or "In Mexico and North America".

No, it's like writing "Mexico and America". If you're going to add geographic qualifiers like "North", the equivalent would be more like "UK and West Europe".

Without such qualifiers, the meaning is clearly "continental Europe", which is a meaningful distinction when it comes to the rail, because they have two almost entirely disjoint rail systems.

Ok, yes, technically the European rail system does actually physically connect to the UK main lines at a few places on HS1 between London and the tunnel at Dover, but no public train uses such connections. Functionally, European and UK rail are essentially entirely separate in terms of operation, regulation and technology. Whereas on the Continent, trains regularly cross between countries and the whole system is much more-but far from entirely -integrated, politically and physically (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Rail_Traffic_Manageme...).

Uk does actually follow EU regulations and standards because all the technology is designed and manufactured in the EU. HS2 is being built to an EU standard loading gauge with EU standard electronic signalling, likewise crossrail. When routes are upgraded to electronic signalling they are upgraded to an EU standard signalling technology, likewise with electrification. Loading gauge is typically smaller but when new bridges are built they will try to aim for the largest EU standard loading gauge that’s practical. The reason why you can’t easily run a night train from Edinburgh to Paris is not technological it’s because the customs and border requirements necessitate an expensive building like an airport to house them. It’s not true that the EU rail system is homogeneous either, e.g Belgium, Germany and France all have electrified lines running at different voltages which can require bi or tri mode trains for through running.

is not technological it’s because the customs and border requirements

Probably why I mentioned political integration in the sentence then.

But at this point I'm akchually-ing an akchually to an akchually!

Whereas on the Continent, trains regularly cross between countries and the whole system is much more-but far from entirely -integrated, politically and physically

That's not true. There are some local connections and integrations, but outside of high speed rail which is generally built using the same standard, each country has their own load gauge, electrification standard, signalling system, etc. Cross-border trains are usually special traninsets built to multiple standards to be compatible.

There is progress on more integration and standartisation, and pretty much all new lines are built to the same standards, but the vast majority of rail is existing.

Quite right. I should have said “UK and continental Europe” to satisfy both the pedants and the politically sensitive ;)

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2023/11/24/curves-in-fast... is a good analysis for anyone who doesn't want to believe jcranmer or wants more detail. (what I linked is a second best approach, but it links to other low hanging fruit like switches)

I read that post, and I have been working slowly on a set of jupyter notebooks, with ipyleaflet (mapping) integration to make building train maps (with max speeds) easier. Looking for colaborators

https://github.com/paddymul/train-calculator

And the first link in that post goes to https://pedestrianobservations.com/2019/02/08/fix-the-slowes..., which more directly speaks about the impact of slow speeds in station throats.

Could cut it probably but this isn't a private company we are talking about here. The regulations and grifting would be massive, especially in New York which is quite like California with their wastefulness: half to the garbage can, half to their pockets, maybe a cent or two for the actual rails.

So maybe it'd be a few billion at least. Not to say they shouldn't try. But I expect it'll be over budget and behind schedule, it would never happen like Brightline where they broke ground ASAP and just kept building until it was done.

I don't share your pessimism, and that's mostly because I've followed a lot more of the research into why US infrastructure costs are unreasonably high. To put it simply, excessive costs tends to come from a combination of overdesign (in particular the need to add lots of goodies to buy off stakeholders who can otherwise arrest the project), extra overhead in design costs, extra overhead in the way contracts are let, and incompetent management of contractors. But this is the sort of project that doesn't have the design stages to let that scope creep come in--it is pretty much "order off-the-shelf part number 42341 instead of 23421, then do routine maintenance tasks to replace old parts with new ones".

By any definition but yours Acela is indeed HSR, it’s the fucking fastest train in North America!

That doesn't mean it's fast

It is though. On a trip earlier this year I clocked at it almost 150mph via GPS. That's HSR by any definition.

Acela is indeed fast for a short stretch. But the average speed is terrible, so it's only "HSR" on a technicality. It could be serious HSR if they had control and/or ownership of the entire route and made it as good as that short section where they can hit that peak speed.

Acela is like a Formula 1 car that gets to do one quick lap on a nice racetrack, then has to take another course through bumper-to-bumper traffic for the rest of the race.

It's substantially faster than Brightline, so claiming it isn't HSR but Brightline somehow is is absurd.

It's what the rest of the industrialized world calls "a train".

Acela qualifies as HSR in the most basic sense: it has sections that run at 125mph. This is also the sense in which Brightliner in FL is HSR.

(This doesn’t make the situation any less embarrassing.)

Peak speed is how HSRs are defined, and Brightline is 200km/h, which is really mediocre for technology past the 80s, this is the speed at high most upgraded lines run in France.

Brightline isn't HSR either. According to Wikipedia, the max speed is only 200kph.

Acela tops out at 150-160 mph (240 km/h-260 km/h) which is is above the 200 km/h bar for it to be considered HSR. Unfortunately, the route it runs on has several speed limits below even 100 km/h due to bridges and tunnels beyond the design life, so it's hard to call it HSR when it can't actually hit those advertised speeds.

NJTransit is also a notable omission.

As is the LA Metro (the rail, not Metrolink, the subway)

Not totally sure on this, just making an informed guess:

I think "passenger rail" implies passenger trains running on the "full/main" railroad lines that run all over the US. Something like light rail or local transit typically have their own discrete lines, in my experience.

Again, could be wrong, that's just how I interpret it.

Bright line isn’t HSR. The average speed is something like 65mph

How is Brightline credible? It seems to be really expensive and has a high fatal accident rate.

The passenger rail coverage [edit: service] in most of North America is basically pathetic, for systemic reasons.

Intercity passenger rail makes little sense over most of the USA, outside the existing northeast corridor.

In a sane world Amtrak would shut down most of the long-distance routes, fix the northeast corridor, and focus on gradually expanding that, but the politics of that are unattractive so it bumbles on with trains that only train nerds would ever consider actually riding on.

There are plenty of locations in the US where fast intercity regional rail could easily be useful and work. Florida, Portland - Vancouver, Alabama/Georgia/Carolinas/Virginias, Midwest.

Yeah, few people will take a cross-country train outside of for the novelty and the attraction itself (which are still not to be dismissed), but that doesn't mean there aren't plenty of <4-5h trips that can be made via train if there was good, reliable and fast service.

If you ride them most of the people don't seem like train nerds. Properly done rail would be viable for most of the US. A cross-country trip not really. But anything from about 800 to 1200 miles could be competitive with commercial flights and have extrinsic benefits as well. A 1200 mile flight takes about 3 hours. Add in a minimum of one hour on each end for airport transit and moving about within the airport and your at 5 hours, and often times much more. High speed rail moving 200 mph with 6 to 8 stops may take a couple more hours in the most advantageous to air comparison. Also consider than many of those 6 to 8 stops would be serving places that may require connecting flights or where people are driving to the major airport from.

It has the potential to be nicer, safer, cheaper and more environmentally conscious. There's no good reason America doesn't have top tier rail transit.

Coverage is actually surprisingly wide, just the service level is something out of the 1870s for a lot of stations. The siting for a lot of stations is usually pretty poor as well with terrible/nonexistent walkshed considerations (see the Palm Springs station, try walking to your hotel from that).

Fair enough, I was using "coverage" for actual trips, not nominal rail extent. "Service" is a better description. Your point about siting is very true.

systemic

you misspelled "union"

If it were that simple, it would be much easier to fix.

Outside the northeast corridor and a few others, there are many Amtrak trains are only once a day, or less, and often with long routes. It's unfortunate. The network is pretty good in terms of coverage / states covered on the map (since it's optimized for that), but lots of places it's pretty much impractical to use because the one time/day doesn't work.

I really wish they could at least get to a minimum of two trains, a "day" and "night" train on every route. You'd think the marginal cost would be minimal considering all the track/stations are there anyway!

Isn't that mostly based on the fact that they share rail time? Its not like these tracks are unused in the other periods of time, they're just not Amtrak trains.

There used to be way way more lines forming more of a mesh than the skeleton we have today. Through a series of mega-mergers we are down to effectively a west-coast-duopoly and an east-coast-duopoly of companies that can run long-distance trains.

When railroad companies merge they tend to abandon one or the other's trackage in areas where the formerly-separate networks ran between the same market areas, keeping the minimum segments of track to cover the maximum number of customers (not even maximum geographical area).

Check out the 2023 North American Abandoned Railroad Lines map: https://www.frrandp.com/p/the-map.html

Yep, I really like the train from Vancouver to Seattle but you get two trains each direction each day, one in the morning and one in the evening. Because of how long the trip takes it doesn’t really work as a day trip sadly - you’d be spending as long on the train as you would at your destination.

It would be interesting to see a version of this for the UK, where there are approximately 24,000 train services operating every weekday. How well would it scale?

The data is available and open!

This is a similar site for the UK: https://www.map.signalbox.io/

Very cool! I think it just needs a stats page to answer questions like "how many trains are running on the network right now?", etc.

The only half decent fast railway (acela) in the US costs more than an uber+flight for the same trip.

I'm surprised anyone takes it at all.

US rail is starting at negative 100. Only a small group of masochists (raises hand) choose to inflict this on themselves.

This isn’t true, unless you’re doing something weird like booking the most expensive Acela the day before and comparing it to the least-expensive flight booked in advance. And even when you do this: taxi fare from NYC airports to downtown Manhattan is around $60, so I don’t know how you’ve worked this out.

US population can be approximated as relatively dense populations in California, the Northeast, a central portion of Texas, and parts of the Midwest, with rural Europe-ish levels of density (with some greater pockets of density nestled within) in the rest of the country ~east of the Mississippi (and a lesser degree in the Pacific Northwest), and truly empty regions basically everywhere else.

In terms of where there should be lots of trains that there isn't, it's largely the Midwest outside of Chicago, Texas Triangle, and the Southeast, all of which could probably support hourly intercity HSR trains if they were competently built (although especially in the Southeast, this is going to be restricted basically to a single corridor).

What about Florida and the general Southeast? Memphis - Nashville - Birmingham Atlanta - Charlotte, going north to Virginia, and south to Florida definitely look like decently dense and urbanised to merit high speed rail between some of them.

I regularly take Amtrak between Boston - NYC but this website is missing this. Just a single datapoint.

It would be a lot busier if cargo trains were added.

It's sad that even great potential routes like SF->LA aren't accessible by train, and we don't seem to have the state capacity to build HSR there.

I was just in Japan, and took the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto, which is a similar distance as SF to LA.

That train:

- runs every 10 minutes -- if you miss one, just take the next one!

- takes 2.5 hours travel time

- starts and ends in city centers on both ends.

- has better legroom and wider seats than economy

- free, fast Wifi on board, your cell signal still works, and you can use your computer the whole trip.

- has no security or boarding hassle. You can show up 5 minutes before departure and just get on.

- has no luggage limitations AFAICT

It's faster and far less stressful than flying SF to LA, with the security and boarding hassles, Ubers on both ends, and cramped onboard conditions.

High speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles isn't economically viable. California HSR will cost at least $30 billion to construct and California's own estimates claim it will cost $700-$874 million per year to operate.[1] Around four million passengers fly between SF and LA every year. Assuming every single one of them takes the train instead of flying, you're looking at $175-$218 per ticket just to pay for operations. If you wanted the project to pay for itself in 20 years, you'd have to charge $550-$600 per ticket. For comparison, airfare between the two cities starts at $80 round trip. Also the train will take 3 hours while flying takes 1.5 hours. Even including the time it takes to get to/from the airport and get through security, flying is faster.

1. https://hsr.ca.gov/wp-content/uploads/docs/programs/san_jose...

Assuming this is all true, what then makes the Japanese Shinkansen economically viable?

Many people who ride it have one of various train passes that reduce the cost, or have a plan with work that covers it. I usually use a JR pass, it's pretty expensive without it.

Unfortunately the JR pass literally doubled in price in Oct 2023, it's now 50,000 yen for 7 days and makes no sense unless you're planning to speedrun the length of Japan and back.

Note that 50,000 yen is $335. So that’s a ceiling on how much you’ll spend for 7 days of Shinkansen travel.

Yep, it is not worth it anymore. I got mine for my trip at the end of the year on literally the last day it was on sale :). End of an era.

They already have the land rights, favorable social environment for construction, more compliant population, less local/more federal legal zoning and land use power, more federal level direction to get things done, higher rate of engineers in population.

That CA is bad at all of those makes it expensive and hard

In addition to very low competence levels in gov't compared to Japan due to many factors. Sure Japan has financial corruption in construction but it's a known system and they build things treating it as a tax. In CA there are many more parties who all attempt to hold construction projects hostage.

less local/more federal legal zoning and land use power, more federal level direction to get things done,

Nitpick: this part isn't correct. There's no federal legal zoning or direction or anything federal at all. Japan doesn't have a federal government; like most countries, it has a unitary government. The US is unusual this way, along with Germany and Russia.

But otherwise, you're right. It's much easier to build stuff here for all those reasons.

Those factors aligned for the original Shinkansen when it was built in the sixties; now, not so much.

The maglev Chuo Shinkansen, originally meant to be finished by 2030 or so, has been stuck in limbo for several years now because the prefecture of Shizuoka refuses to issue the necessary permits.

https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14718670

I expect one of the biggest factors is population density.

California has a land area of 165,000mi^2. Japan has a land area of 145,000mi^2.

California population is 39M. Japan population is 125M.

Most of the people in CA are in the bottom left. No need for bullet train to Arcata. Though to Vegas would probably be profitable.

The distance between SF and LA (350 miles) is 50% greater than the distance between Tokyo and Kyoto (227 miles), making the time tradeoff favor trains to planes. The two cities are much bigger than SF and LA, so many more people travel between the two cities (85 million per year). Also Japan can build and maintain rail much cheaper than the US.

Funny how trains are expected to be profitable from day 1, but you can drive a car from SF to LA and not pay a cent for the highway infra that costs billions to build and upkeep.

Also, in what world can you reliably get from central LA/SF to LAX/SFO and through checkin & TSA in 45 min each?

I didn't say anything about roads, but it's not true that roads are unprofitable. Roads are paid for by fuel taxes and vehicle registration fees. California's gas taxes raise $8 billion per year. The state's registration and licensing fees collect another $12 billion per year. The state spends $18 billion per year on Caltrans, meaning that vehicles provide $2 billion in revenue for other state programs.

BART takes 30 minutes to get from Civic Center to SFO. Even without TSA pre-check, it takes less than 15 minutes to get through security. If you get through security 15 minutes before the plane leaves, that's 2.5 hours total travel time to LAX. From the same place in SF it takes 20-25 minutes to get to 4th & King. (Yes, Muni is that bad.) Let's say the train leaves 15 minutes after you arrive at the station. Then it will take 2 hours and 40 minutes to get to Union Station in LA. Total travel time: 3.25 hours. And again, the train cost is 5-10x that of a flight.

Edit: If you think my math about the long-term profitability of California High Speed Rail is incorrect, I'd love to see some numbers showing how it could be priced similarly to air travel. I was agnostic about CA HSR for a long time. I even voted for Proposition 1A back in 2008. But no matter how I crunch the numbers, it really seems like CA HSR is a boondoggle.

You might consider the climate and carbon impact of those flights vs rail.

Many of the rail lines are subsidized in countries with extensive rail travel. So they don’t have to be economically viable, it’s viewed as a public good, contributing to general economic development.

Air travel is 2% of global CO2 emissions. Making air travel carbon neutral (by capturing carbon) would increase ticket prices by around 20%. That would be much cheaper than switching from planes to high speed rail.

I'm not saying that countries with lots of rail are wrong. I'm saying that passenger high speed rail doesn't make sense in the US (at least, not outside of the northeast). We're too spread out.

I’m not an expert on this, but China seems huge and also spread out, and they have much better HSR coverage than basically anyone else.

Air travel is a problem when it comes to emissions because there really aren’t any viable alternatives, where as you could pretty much sub in nuclear + renewables for anything else energy/transportation wise and the math makes sense after a large investment. Knocking overland air travel out and replacing it with high speed rail cuts down a ton of air travel, and replaces it with something that is almost trivial to run on cleaner energy.

Another part of that comment you were responding to dealt with comfort and convenience, and having ridden HSR in Japan and Europe, I much prefer it to air travel. Air travel sucks and it’s only getting worse as fuel costs more. If you’re not flying business, you’re basically treated the same way livestock is treated, with a multi-hundred dollar or thousand dollar price tag to add to the insult. I’ll vote for my tax dollars going to HSR all day, “boondoggle” or not. I remember in Massachusetts the big dig was marked as such, but man has it worked. Tunnels under the city where you can drive 45 rather than elevated roads or no roads or surface streets, yep it was expensive but it’s so much better. I’m willing to bet with my tax dollars and ballot measure votes HSR will be the same.

China is the same size as the US but has four times the population, and most of them are in the east. This means they have much higher population density. Another important difference is that they can build rail for much cheaper than the US because their government doesn’t have to respect property rights or follow stringent environmental regulations.

About the 2% figure: many things are insignificant in terms of climate change if you narrow down on them. Also, this 2% figure of the share of air travel is projected to increase, because the number of revenue passenger kilometers flown is quickly increasing (doubled in the last 10 years), cf https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/airline-capacity-and-traf....

And unfortunately carbon offsetting is rather unreliable (companies buying offsets don't have any incentive for the offsets to be actual savings). I'd be wary of climate change solutions that consist of continuing business as usual and assuming that decarbonation will happen in some other sectors. I also suspect the 20% price increase estimate works for a specific price of carbon, but that price could increase if carbon offsets started becoming widely used (and the demand increases).

Anyway, I don't know what's the right way for the US to reduce travel emissions, whether that's electric coaches, cheaper rail, taxation to increase prices and reduce demand... But I don't think the solution can be "just keep planes and add carbon capture".

So in your best case scenario, it's taken you 2.5 hours to get to LAX, how long from there to LA itself? What if you checked bags and need to wait for them to show up? (Not a thing on trains, just take your suitcase with you.)

Also, your best case scenario of 1 hour from SF to plane is hysterically optimistic. BART headways are 20 minutes in theory and often delayed in practice. If you have bags to check, that'll chew up another 15 min easy. TSA is 15 min on a good day but many days are bad. Gates close 15 minutes before departure, so you need to get through TSA another 15 min earlier so you can walk to your gate. I would leave at least two hours before my flight, and most airlines recommend arriving at the airport two hours before.

I've never gotten to an airport two hours ahead of my flight, not even for international travel. For a short, frequent flight like SFO-LAX, I arrive at the airport 15 minutes before boarding starts. I'm not at all worried about missing my flight. Worst case I'll get on the next flight.

The reason I didn't add travel time from LAX to Union Station is because LA is incredibly spread out and most destinations are not downtown. To get to where you want to go in LA, you'll need a car.

And don't forget that this is a comparison of a trip you can take today versus a hypothetical train that will cost you several times more. In real life the train is unlikely to run as frequently or to be as fast as claimed. Honestly, I'm not sure if anyone will ever take high speed rail from SF to LA. The current plan is to finish Merced to Bakersfield some time between 2030 and 2033. Will the political willpower to continue the project still exist a decade from now? I don't know.

We can go back and forth arguing about which is faster all day long, but the real problem is the finances of CA HSR. I've yet to see any figures that show it being financially competitive with air travel. Is the plan to increase taxes on everyone to subsidize ticket prices? Considering the clientele of high speed rail, that seems rather regressive.

What would change your mind about this? I'd be in favor of CA HSR if costs were significantly lower. (I naively assumed government competence when I voted for prop 1A.) It looks like that's not an option, so the best course of action is to stop wasting money on this boondoggle.

Sorry, it takes at least an hour to get from lax to central LA. Once it even took two! You also woefully underestimate airport bs. 15 mins haha ha. Just an unobstructed walk to/from the gate takes that long.

Last time we arrived it took an hour to (get bags, wait for shuttle to rideshare park two miles away, and get paired), then another 45 minutes drive in heavy traffic to east Hollywood.

Train to union station would have been much more comfortable.

To make this a fair comparison you need to look at the average price per ticket, not the “starting at” price, and include the government subsidies of airports/security/atc/ etc that enable this system.

I would also add in a cost for carbon. I realize that’s more controversial but it seems like we will have to pay to remove co2 at some point.

I don’t know what the numbers look like when you do that.

Regardless, I do agree the amount per traveler to make a train work seems depressingly high.

Also that Shinkansen trip was about $250 and worth every penny. Didn’t even need rideshare or taxi.

Even including the time it takes to get to/from the airport and get through security, flying is faster.

I highly doubt that, since you have to board 20 minutes before take off, plus the time it takes to get through security, as well as getting to the airport which won't be in the city center.

The current airfare also doesn't include any sort of fee to ease the ecological impact of burning jet fuel.

well if you're assuming the same number of passengers - given the logistics and hassles of air travel, one is likely more inclined to travel with hassle-free HSR, not to mention the secondary economic benefits

Part of the allure of trains is much higher volumes of passengers. Part of the value prop would be many more people willing to take a train then fly.

Flying has huge friction to engage in, as OP indicated Japanese trains have almost none.

That's the upfront cost and profit, but think of the economic opportunities created once people can travel between the two largest cities in California with no hassle and regularly.

flying is also not ecologically sustainable. We need alternatives, even if we can't eliminate long distance flights, to reach zero emissions quickly.

Why do you assume the project will replace all airplane passengers and zero car or bus passengers on the same route, and why do you assume a complete absence of intermediate stops?

And that’s before even considering induced demand.

The attempt at analysis here is just nonsensical. Not even wrong.

I like the Shinkansen but it's also very expensive - that journey is ¥14,170 one way, and the discounts for return tickets or advance booking are vanishingly small. Even with the incredibly weak yen I can see same-day SF-LA flights cheaper than that.

This is starting to change, the discounts for early booking and/or slower trains can be up to 50% these days: https://livejapan.com/en/in-tohoku/in-pref-miyagi/in-sendai_...

They have a tiny number of those 50% discounts that are always sold out even if you apply as soon as ticket sales open, IME. And note that even then they're only on the less popular lines - you'll never see a discount like that for Tokyo-Kyoto.

Puratto Kodama is available basically always (for slower Kodama trains only, of course) and around a third cheaper at Y9,800 for Tokyo-Kyoto.

https://nihonshock.com/2010/02/puratto-kodama-cheap-shinkans...

Do your flight costs include parking, the costs of getting to and from the airports, the value of your time, the mental hassle of airport security theatre, the costs of additional luggage and so on?

If not, it’s not a fair comparison.

"Fair" depends on what you're using it for. Parking at airports can be expensive, but parking at Tokyo or Kyoto station is more so. The stations themselves are more confusing and less well-signposted than an airport. And if you want to take oversize luggage (e.g. a surfboard) that's a moderately priced upgrade on a plane but completely impossible on the Tokaido Shinkansen.

No comparison is perfect. The best you can do is talk about both the positive and the negative so that people can understand and make the best choice for their circumstances. Price should absolutely be a part of that conversation.

but parking at Tokyo or Kyoto station is more so

That's just dumb. No one actually drives to these stations; that's what public transit is for. At worst, people might take a taxi.

The Shinkansen pitches itself as broadly price competitive with flights, but more convenient and more comfortable. In that sense it’s not expensive, it’s greater value.

(¥14,170 is approximately $95USD)

Cheaper for the same seat size, allowed luggage amount?

Tickets from SFO to LAX can be cheaper, but that's usually not for optimal times. Sure you can get a round trip ticket for $80, but you'll be leaving at 6 in the morning or something like that. Additionally, you'll have to go through security, not be able to bring your own beverage (or water), sit on a much smaller seat, and not have Wi-Fi.

In other words, I think $95 one way on an extremely punctual bullet train with high availability is a steal.

Same experience on my first Japan trip earlier this year. Why can't we have nice things over here?

But if there were nice things then other people would profit from that too. Especially those people [gestures vaguely]. /s

In the country of individualism, options that are better but would also help other people who haven't directly contributed to it aren't very popular.

it's funny that there instances of collectivism in the US when there's either a monetary incentive or the desire to keep the "others" out

for example, the restrictive residential permitting systems in many urban areas, which just happens to be another thing Japan gets right

Small correction: every 6 minutes, not 10! And each train has 16 (sixteen) carriages and can seat over 1,300 people.

The Shinkansen is FASCINATING. I recently went and was amazed by Tokyo's infrastructure and how they have a city under a city. The fact that there is a bullet train at tokyo station every 10 mins or so is mind blowing

I went into a Youtube rabbit hole the other night...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdJwAUdvlik

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFpG3yf3Rxk

Agreed, Boston to NYC on Amtrak is only marginally better (sometimes) than flying and thats only ~200 miles

The HSR route between San Francisco and Los Angeles is under construction. It’s not gone perfectly but it is starting to pick up momentum.

I just spent the summer traveling Europe, visited 17 cities where 14 were by rail. 3 were day trips.

Got so used to how easy it it to literally walk into a station and be on a train in a few minutes that I almost missed Turin->Paris when a tram to the station was five minutes behind schedule. Average connection was 5 hours of travel time, but factoring in getting to/from the airport, early arrival, etc, it was mostly a wash in any time saved. All in all, total cost for transport was about $900 (not including going/coming back from Europe, which obviously exceeded that).

I believe there was a quote from a railroad exec that Passenger rail traffic accounts for only 3% of the overall rail traffic in North America. If true, the map would be covered with Locomotives if freight was included (GP-40's are my favorite).

That would be a curious comparison point. I feel like every discussion of rail in the US always turns into pointing and laughing at how bad the US is at rail because it's viewed through a passenger lens, completely ignoring how much rail is used for freight.

My impression is that a lot of the rest of the world has much better passenger rail, but uses freight rail quite a bit less. I wonder if part of it is due to the inverse reason to the US. Amtrak often complains that it gets sidelined (literally) because of freight usage of the same track. Is freight rail usage in, say, Germany, lower than the US because of the dominance of passenger rail?

It is actually a problem in Germany that high-speed trains too often share tracks with slower passenger and freight trains. Other countries like Japan put their high-speed trains on completely separate tracks.

This is also a problem with IIRC the Acela and other Amtrak routes between Boston and New York, and probably on other routes too.

Amtrak owns most (all?) of the NEC track between New York and Boston. Most other routes are freight train owned and Amtrak has issues. Though the freights claim the issue is Amtrak is late for their assigned times and once that happens they lose priority, if Amtrak was on time they claim that they would let Amtrak through on time. (one fright that doesn't let Amtrak through on time will cascade to being late for all transfers, so the freights can overall be right and still wrong just because of the one exception) I don't know how to evaluate this claim.

My understanding is that the freight trains now are really long, and there's few places to pull off the tracks for such long trains, so the timetables are really tight for when trains can pass each other.

This goes to what I was talking about in my initial post. Right now, part of why Amtrak is bad in the US is because we're getting pretty efficient use of the same rails for freight purposes. The ways around this would either be to somehow legally force freight to fully be lower priority than passenger, which presumably raises prices/lowers efficiency of freight on the rails or to build a mostly disjoint system of rails for passenger only.

The costs required to build a passenger only system is high and the density of the US makes me question if it would get the use needed to be viable. In the meantime then, is it net positive for the US to prioritize freight use over passenger? Even if we gave passenger traffic maximum priority, would it defer enough flights to offset the freight efficiency losses?

Passengers and freight have different constraints and so don't mix well on rail. We should build separate rail for each. Make them compatible rail but that is for emergencies you can mix not normal operations. (2am maintenance windows count as a good reason to mix)

Don't be fooled by population density, the western states and Alaska have a lot of nothing and bring the density down. You can find overlays of France and the Midwest that have similar populations. Overall there are lots of potentially great rail routes east of the Mississippi, and along the west coast. (But of course only if you invest in local transit, otherwise everyone may as well drive as they will need their car when they get there.

I'm not getting "fooled" by anything. I've spent most of my life in various parts of the Eastern US. The problem, to a big degree is that the parts of the US with the density for rail are both already big freight areas with major ports (LA, NYC, Baltimore, Boston, Savannah, Seattle) and have the good land already taken for freight rails, and also, because they're dense areas, are exceedingly difficult to find space to run new rails in that go to places people actually want to go.

We're past the era where we could just put a highway or rail line through the poorest neighborhood of minorities we can find, pay them all $10 for their land, and pretend it's a net good for the country. Without some truly insane government intervention that is both unlikely to happen, and probably shouldn't happen, I don't see how we'd add a full new rail system.

Amtrak pays $145m a year to freight rail companies like CSX and UP to use their rails for passengers. This was the bargain struck for allowing deregulation and privatization of rail in the US. They own the rails between NY and Boston but everywhere else, they have to pay the toll booth.

If you want to see the real Railways of North America, check out these interactive maps [1]

[1] https://www.acwr.com/economic-development/rail-maps

It's arguably the problem with any attempt at high speed rail in the US. Or even low-speed passenger rail. There's so much freight moving on the rails that there's just not much slack in the system for things not running on time.

As the parent says, the solution would be to add dedicated high-speed rails, but then you loop back to the US density issues. How fast would the Acela have to be for it to justify the price you'd have to charge to ever come close to paying back the cost to add a whole dedicated train line between Boston and Washington DC?

How fast would the Acela have to be for it to justify the price you'd have to charge to ever come close to paying back the cost to add a whole dedicated train line between Boston and Washington DC?

No faster than it already is, I would think. The experience is SO much nicer than taking an airplane that a little extra time is worth it. Don't forget how much time is wasted in airplanes just getting to and from the airports and waiting for security checks and sitting on the tarmac waiting to taxi. Trains travel directly between city centers with almost no waiting time.

The Acela doesn't really need to be much faster, though it'd be nice; it just needs to be cheaper and more frequent.

I think Japan only does that for weird legacy reasons- freight and slower passenger trains run on 1067 mm gauge tracks, while the Shinkansen network is standard (1435 mm) gauge.

I don't think so. There's simply too much traffic on the shinkansen lines to be able to mix slower and/or freight trains on the same lines. On the Tokaido line between Tokyo and Osaka, trains run every 7 minutes (IIRC); you can't have a freight train sharing a track with a bullet train service that has trains that close together.

No, France does the same thing, it has much more high speed track than Germany, even though TGVs ride on classical track as well in the periphery.

I assume it would be less about the dominance of passanger displacing freight and more about scale/distance. Germany is smaller than Texas (half the area). How often is it economical to put stuff on trains before loading them on trucks again for distances sub 1000km?

Oh sure, but the "haha the US isn't even a third world country with its train system" people already are ignoring scale/density when they're laughing at the US rail systems. I'm past even bothering dealing with that bad faith take.

My curiosity is if the US has just traded off having better passenger rail for better freight rail, and if that's maybe a somewhat environmentally justified choice. How much more freight is going by truck in Europe because of the bias towards rail for passengers, and how does that compare to US people traveling by car when train would be better?

Looks like 73% of freight is moved by truck in the US vs 77% in the EU. Not a big enough difference to really matter I think.

https://www.trucking.org/economics-and-industry-data

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1068592/eu-road-freight-...

The usual metric is ton-kilometers of freight, not gross tonnage. Going by gross tonnage alone overweights the impact of last-kilometer freight, which is almost always by road.

Measured by ton-kilometers, the EU moves about 5% of freight by rail, whereas the US moves about 28% of freight by rail.

But the density in the US is not _that_ different. Sure if you take the average over the whole country or states like Texas or Arizona then you end up with numbers. But the north east of the US is comparably densely populated to Western Europe. And even parts of California/the west coast are similarly densely populated. Albeit with larger separations between population centers. Which, as a German, does not sound so bad, given that our high-speed rail has to stop every 30mins because the next city just isn’t that far away.

Really it is a (maybe unintentional) decision not to use trains for passenger rail.

On the other hand. The density of population (and thereby logistic) centers in Western and Central Europe makes freight trains much less useful. From Germany you can reach all of Europe in basically 2 days. And that’s already stretching what you’ll need to reach in practice. And then you add the expense of getting the load to a train station and away from it again and you basically never end up with an easy or obvious advantage for the rail system. What you see here quite often is that a single company/factory fills up a whole train (think car carrier or chemical transport). In these cases at least one end of the journey is typically directly linked to the rail system and the other end is probably a port. And that’s before you take into account that a useful expansion of the rail system requires coordination between multiple governments (there was/is a plan to link Rotterdam to Venice by high volume train connections. AFAIK this is still limited by a lack of expansion of a short part in northern Germany)

So yes. There is a bias towards passenger rail, both for operational (passenger rail is much faster to accelerate/decelerate) and political (passengers sometimes punish politicians for delays, freight doesn’t) reasons. But even without that. The geography and industrial makeup doesn’t produce the same kind of advantages as in the US. So it would still be used less

How much more freight is going by truck in Europe because of the bias towards rail for passengers, and how does that compare to US people traveling by car when train would be better?

Europe moved lots of freight by rail. But building of motorways shifted a lot of freight to roads. If your company moves just a few trucks of goods per week across Europe, road will be faster and cheaper.

Rail is now used mostly for bulk goods, but increasing conterisation is enabling easier use of rail even for smaller shipments (less than a full train length, which in Europe is max 700 m).

That argument would only be valid if Germany was an island, though. But it's not. Lots of traffic coming through from all directions.

Sure, but the size scales out. Texas isn't an island either.

It's that, but there are also many lorries driving over several countries in Europe.

Europe does have more favourable rivers, so some bulk goods (grain, coal, fuel, chemicals) are transported by barge. Other freight can go by sea.

Looking at the speed of the trains is a bit depressing. USA had so much potential to built the best high-speed railway network...

Speed would be nice, but speed is not the problem. If the trains just ran on time, 50mph would be just fine. The problem with Amtrak is frequent multiple-hour delays that stack up. The schedule is totally unpredictable.

High-speed rail typically excels when it can get you somewhere in a few hours because you wouldn't want to hop on a plane for that. At 50 mph, that gets you…basically nowhere. If you're doing 200 then you can cross most states in that time.

For me it's also cost. I have family in the Boston area and often traveling from NYC on Amtrak is at least as expensive -- and usually more expensive -- than flying.

But I'd also love if we could go faster than 50mph. TGV in France, which launched 41 years ago, travel between 167mph and 198mph [1].

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV

"On time" is a metric that is focused on heavily, but to me it's meaningless. The LIRR is "on time" via schedule padding; a 50 mile trip to Ronkonkoma takes 80 minutes on the fastest express train. With line speeds largely 80mph throughout the route, commuters are robbed of an hour every single day. But hey, at least the "on time performance" metric is at 99%. Easy to do when your average speed is 37mph on 80mph track.

The LIRR Today has a great article, that I cannot for the life of me find, where the author used train speed data between stations to figure out what speed "most trains" accomplished (so accounting for curves, station stops, etc.) and redid the schedules according to that data. Without padding, everyone that uses the LIRR would save hours a week in commuting.

Incidentally, the LIRR has been moving away from higher train speeds and better connections to reduce travel time in favor of arriving at terminals within 6 minutes of the scheduled time. Schedule padding, replacing 80mph switches with 60mph switches (for the Elmont work), and removing all scheduled connections at Jamaica. I think it's crazy and I'm glad I don't commute to the city from Long Island. The connections at Jamaica disappearing is the most sad to me; that station has a really unique setup where 3 trains arrive at once, and you can transfer through the middle train to get to the other two destinations. It used to work like clockwork, but obviously if the middle train is late, the OTP for 3 trains decreases. Since that's the metric they care about, and not "can I get from any city terminal to any destination easily", that's what gets optimized out. I don't think it's good. It's nice if the trains run on time, but I'd rather be 20 minutes late once a week than spend an extra 5 hours on the train every week. But, not what the agency values.

it already has something much more sophisticated - a high-speed air network

think your train is efficient? a plane can fly in a straight line between any two points in the US! beat that! ever see a train cross one of the great lakes? no challenge for a plane! rerouting a rail line can cost billions...but only a tiny bit of fuel to reroute a plane...not to mention I can go coast to coast in five hours on a plane but the world's fastest train would take much longer...

in the northeast I still prefer to take acela over being dehumanized by the TSA

TSA can screen people the same for rail, they just tend not to. Ideally we’d go back to pre-9/11 screening for everything.

High speed rail is most competitive with short and medium range air. Say you want to go from SF to LA. That’s a 90 minute flight. Plus a few hours of getting to and from the airports plus faffing around within the airports. Or it’s a 6 hour drive. Or, with a top-quality high-speed line it’d be a little under two hours on the train, handily beating any current option.

High speed rail wouldn’t be all that competitive for going coast to coast in the US, definitely.

Most of the states are too big to be economical. I think the biggest disappointment with US rail is that it doesn't get enough trucks off the highway. There should be no reason for trucks to venture more than a couple hundred miles from the nearest rail terminal. Not only is it wasteful, but it's more dangerous having trucks driving across the entire country.

Even in the densest areas of the country (NYC metro area), it's abysmal by developed world.

I got caught in probably the 2nd worst traffic driving to/from my parents (70mi away) this weekend I've had in 20 years. And yet it was still about 30min faster, each way, than if I took Metro North.

HSR only makes economic sense in the northeast. Everywhere else is too spread out for rail to compete with air travel. The most popular air route in the western US (SF-LA) isn’t worth making high speed rail between. The project is expected to cost over $30 billion. Assuming 100% of air passengers use rail (4 million per year), at $150 per ticket it would take 50 years to break even… and that assumes zero maintenance costs. Also it would be slower than taking a plane.

Requiring freedom of movement to operate for profit is such a needlessly self imposed limit. This would be a solved problem if our government truly operated for the good of the people instead of for Continuity Of Government. The Department of Defense budget was 1.52 Trillion for FY2023 alone while we're arguing over an order of magnitude smaller: https://www.usaspending.gov/agency/department-of-defense?fy=...

They already own most of the necessary land anyway: https://www.blm.gov/sites/default/files/docs/2023-07/BLM-Adm...

That’s what I noticed! An Amtrak train in the middle of nowhere Montana is going 49MPH…

The train situation in the USofA is depressing on so many more levels than just speed. Availability is even worse. I'm in Dallas, but to get to Denver, I have to go to Chicago first and involves a >2 hour bus ride along the way. WTF?

I’d kind of like real-time tracking of freight trains. There’s a BNSF grade crossing between my home and my parents’ and it would be nice to know whether I should take the 1 mile detour to get to the tunnel beneath the rail yard if there’s a train going to be blocking (I suppose it would also help to have info on the length of the trains so I’d know if the train in front of me is almost clear or if there’s another mile of train behind it).

That sounds like something a three-letter agency would get all stuffy about.

If it's ok to see real time location of planes and cargo ships, how come it wouldn't be ok for trains?

way more attack surface?

If you want to blow up a train it's already pretty easy. Find a track and wait.

don't even need a bomb, its not hard to cause derailments. a shovel and some time is enough

Perhaps, but at the same time, it probably wouldn't be hard to research what sorts of trains would be good targets, and then physically go check them out.

It'd be great. My understanding is that there's basically no live data for freight trains unfortunately

there definitely is, but the roads aren't going to share it.

and tracking trains ain't like tracking planes, where they're easy to see up in the sky and constantly transmitting -- train X takes a turn around a mountain and it's in a radio/cell deadzone and that's it.

plus unless you have high-end SAMs you're not able to impact most planes overhead, but shady individuals could certainly impact trains.

Since the implementation of Positive Train Control (PTC) there is live data but the RRs don't make it publicly available. Real time GPS data is transmitted to the Computer Aided Dispatching (CAD) system and combined with consist data they can determine where any one car is located at any time.

By the time I left the company several years ago that data was being restricted to only certain employees. As noted below, hasmat is likely the reason this kind of data is not publicly accessible. It is shared in a limited fashion with shippers, etc.

There has to be data because often passenger rail shares railway with freight rail and have to schedule things to avoid accidents.

Also hazardous chemicals

Live data would be great, but I'd be interested even in historic data. Not like 1880s but a timeseries of 15-minute granularity of train positions for last year. It'd be interesting to see what the bottlenecks were and what other routing possibilities there could have been.

I didn't know there was a trans-Canadian railroad. Did anyone try it?

It's a big part of the country's history; the project was a key bargaining chip to get BC to join Canada. Development started with the first prime minister and the actual construction was incredibly expensive and filled with controversy over bribes and exploding construction costs, causing gov turnover and bringing the federal gov into significant financial risk a few times. But they did push onward to completion and it became the core pathway for the further settlement of western Canada, which was instrumental to the country's expansion. Nowadays it's primarily a freight railway, the passenger traffic is very minimal and tickets are very expensive; it's more of a tourism attraction than practical method of passenger transport.

The cross canada rail trip is that deadly combo of exceptionally expensive and exceptionally slow.

That pretty much describes long distance North American rail generally. At least in the US, I'd add that it's not only slow but could be delayed by a day or more. I've occasionally toyed with the idea of taking one of those trains for at least part of their route but I have a feeling that it's one of those things where the idea >> the reality and it would get pretty old once the novelty wore off.

Later this year I'm going with a more luxurious version instead (ocean liner).

Nowadays for sure. But before the trans-Canada highway and before commercial flight, it was a pretty great deal!

Relevant: Canadian Pacific Railway's Rogers Pass Project (1983–1989, 1hr27m) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zepXkTPvqA

I haven't tried it, because it's outrageously expensive to get a cabin with a bed, and I don't want to sit in a chair for a week.

But it's pretty famous - we even have a song about it! [1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Railroad_Trilogy

Taking the dome car through the rockies and a bit of the prairies would be awesome but flying out there just for that is hard to justify.

I took Via east to west a while back. It takes a few days, but just like Amtrak the regular seats are more spacious and comfortable than airplane seats so it's not too bad. No internet most of the way, so you better have some books or something to entertain yourself. The food is terrible because of course it is. Bring snacks. The train also stops for a couple hours in Winnipeg which has lots of places to get a good feed.

The scenery is pretty great, especially through northern Ontario where it feels like you are traveling through an alien planet where the only thing that exists are rocks, trees and eerie, pitch-black pools of liquid that you could imagine isn't water. You fall asleep at night then wake up the next morning and the view out the window is exactly the same. It's wild.

Crossing the Rockies isn't really worth it if you're only going for the views, imo. Lots of tourists get on the train at Jasper, but I imagine they'll be disappointed because the epic vistas are fleeting and most of the time your line of sight is blocked by trees, cliffs or tunnels. Unlike the route out of Denver on Amtrak, you don't get an awesome desert on the other side either.

Either way, the main point is that it's pretty much the only way to get from one side of Canada to the other if you don't want to use a plane or zig-zag through the US. Greyhound is gone, STC is gone, stringing together a bus route with a hodge podge of local operators is tough and in some places just leads you back up to Via anyway. If you're lucky enough to live along the CN line then Via is all there is, and it's better than nothing at all, which is the situation for a huge chunk of rural Canada.

I took it around 5-6 years ago when I was moving to Vancouver from the east coast. It was a great way to see the country and meet some other travellers - such a strange travel option attracts some interesting folks!

The highlight though is the Jasper-Vancouver leg going through the Rockies - if you don’t have 3 days to burn that’s a good choice. Rocky Mountaineer line goes through there as well iirc.

It would be cool to see an equivalent map for freight rail.

These threads always focus on the lack of passenger rail service in the US but ignore that the US also has one of the largest, safest, and most efficient freight rail systems in the world[1]. I'd love to see it live!

https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-network-development/freight-r...

I did a bit of a deep dive on this over the weekend and left feeling more confused than when I started. From what I can gather, outside of CN's holiday freight train, most of the tracking is done by community members with SDR antennas and Raspberry Pis. They report to centralized servers (which I've yet to find), and the data indicates where trains are in signalling blocks. I'm the least knowledgeable person on trains, so I don't know if this is all accurate, but that's my best understanding.

I'd love to build some sort of service that takes this data, references a DB of signaling blocks, and establishes an estimated lat/lng - but that's a huge project of its own.

Ya, looks like it goes to a privately run server and the client that accesses the data requires membership. Seems like there should be something like Open ADSB (aircraft) but for trains. I might be interested in working on something like that too.

Define efficient. Profitable? Maybe. Good at moving an array of goods from anywhere in the country to anywhere else? Not so good.

The Class I's and their obsession with operating ratio and PSR have strangled freight in this country for decades and pushed costs onto the public by means of increased truck traffic (and the congestion, pollution, and roadway damage that entails). Unless you're shipping bulk chemicals or coal, you're probably gonna use a truck.

http://tracker.geops.ch/

https://atcsmon.software.informer.com/

https://www.rail.watch/rwmon.html

It's quite hard to see those sadly due to how freight operators handle traffic - you often have to use word-of-mouth and FB groups to track them. I know there's a lot of railfans that have this data, but I'm not sure it's in a format one can actually use.

PSR would like a word with your categorization. Indeed the Class 1s are the mortal enemy of decent intercity and commuter rail.

I love these maps. Here is one from Switzerland: https://maps.vasile.ch/transit-sbb/, just a tad bit busier than the US

https://rasp.yandex.ru/map/trains/#center=37.63999999999997%...

Yandex has it for (mostly Russian) trains that it has on schedule.

I love that the map doesn't show any borders

In many Russian policies, the concept of a border is definitely lacking.

We've got too many of these in 1991 and think we can spare a few now.

Sweden: https://1409.se/

UK (not a map, similar view to what the signallers see): https://traksy.uk/live/M+58+STIRLNG

Australia and New Zealand: https://anytrip.com.au/

(although it also includes some buses and ferries, and you can only look at one region at a time)

In contrast have a look at a snapshot of air travel the other day.

https://x.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1729195110888620057?s=20

If we're looking for some low hanging fruit around how to possibly lower CO2 emissions, well folks here it is.

The solutions to our climate problem have been staring us in the face since the 1900s.

If we're looking for some low hanging fruit around how to possibly lower CO2 emissions, well folks here it is.

I'm not really sure how you can call it "low hanging fruit" when its overall contribution to global emissions is only 2%, and how hard it is to build HSR projects in the US.

[1] https://www.iea.org/energy-system/transport/aviation

In 2022 aviation accounted for 2% of global energy-related CO2 emissions

It's low hanging fruit in that everything involved is well understood with very seasoned technology and a deep amount of suppliers and engineering knowledge. As I said, we were doing this stuff in the 19th century, and have kept doing it (in some countries, just not NA).

This sort of solution doesn't require any sort of technological breakthroughs, or technologies that do not exist.

Trying to solve climate change based on working on new technologies that don't currently exist and may not ever exist seems harder to me, and yet remarkably we see people pointing to this approach instead of well understood solutions we already have.

Accordingly I'd call implementing proven technology relatively easy. One could get started on it tomorrow.

It's low hanging fruit in that everything involved is well understood with very seasoned technology and a deep amount of suppliers and engineering knowledge.

This sort of solution doesn't require any sort of technological breakthroughs, or technologies that do not exist.

You can say the same for solar panels and/or batteries? After all, they exist right now and can be mass produced. Moreover the electricity grid actually accounts for a significant chunk of global emissions, unlike aviation. The only thing really stopping them is cost, but then that's basically the same issue that HSR has, which is cost/delays/political issues.

As I said, we were doing this stuff in the 19th century, and have kept doing it (in some countries, just not NA).

"[trains] in the 19th century" aren't a serious competitor to airplanes in the same way that ocean liners aren't a serious competitor to airplanes.

I'm not actually sure what the solution you're proposing is?

Even if you completely eliminated air travel (with no replacement - which is not realistic), you'd just reduce emissions by a mere 2%. Not a trivial number given the scale, but it's far from a "solution to our climate problem". (For comparison, the larger transportation sector including cars is is 16% of emissions. Cars alone are 12%.) [1]

It also turns out to be a very hard problem to solve. We don't have the tech to build an electric airliner yet, and given how hard it's been just to get a single high-speed rail line from SF to LA I'm not betting trains are going to be in a place to practically replace aviation in the US anytime in the next few decades.

[1]: https://ourworldindata.org/ghg-emissions-by-sector

Pretty much just proposing giving people some options. Right now they have few.

Right now in North America on an enormous amount of routes there's pretty much no real alternative to driving or flying and on many others where a train does exist it's so poor in quality that few use it.

If rail was a real option then more people would use it, and that would be transferring people from a relatively much higher CO2 emission form of transport to a lower emission one. That's a win.

Every where I look I see data that shows that the CO2 emissions per user are dramatically lower for train than air travel.

Now clearly on some big routes flying is a must and train would be so incredibly lengthly that it would be a misery, but there's tons and tons of shorter routes where train would work really well, competing well against car/bus and air travel.

If one wanted to get aggressive about it, once the infrastructure as in place, one could do what France has done and to ban short haul flights.

If we just made train travel an economic and logistical alternative to air travel, it’d make such a difference.

No NJ Transit trains?

I'm currently on the wait-list for the API. Took me 2 days to even figure out how to register.

NJ Transit’s data operation is sub-par. The developers of the “Transit” app have been sparring with them to get live bus data restored https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/transportation/2023/1...

The NJ Transit website/app looks ramshackle compared to the MTA.

The MTA also has a really neat railroad tracking tool: https://radar.mta.info/

This feels like an internal app that somehow got a public URL. It has neat features like being able to make the same departure board they have in their stations, and it has a departure view that shows how many people are on the train: https://radar.mta.info/countdown/GCT

That is a very unsurprising experience for NJ Transit.

It shows the sad state of the public train system in the US. For comparison, here is a similar map for the UK:

https://www.map.signalbox.io/

When I look at the map for UK I see far fewer trains than the map for the US. Am I missing something? I thought maybe it was because you posted earlier in the day, but your comment was posted around 0100 UTC--not that long ago. I do not think we have the best public rail system in the US but if all o had to go on was how many trains there were on each map I might think differently.

That's surprising. I see maybe under 30 trains shown in whole California.

Anyway, according to [1,2]: US: Ridership 549,631,632 UK: Ridership 1.738 billion

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transportation_in_the_Uni... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport_in_Great_Britai...

Very few overnight trains in the U.K. there used to be more in the days when trains ran at average speeds of 50mph but not now

Love this project! Can you tell us a bit about what stack you used to build this? Were there easy-to-use APIs to get this data in realtime?

thanks!

I did a quick write up about it here: https://rydercalmdown.com/projects/trains-fyi/

The hardest part was learning about GTFS-RT, which was a data format I wasn't familiar with until now.

Very nice, thanks for the write up :). I was thinking about how you could get route maps, without actually having to source shape files. Given you are tracking trains every minute, you could probably build up your own route maps by dropping a point every time you get one, and connecting them with straight lines. Over time the route would become closer and closer to reality.

I can comment on Caltrain only, the location is available via the 511.org API.

I built a project that predicts how late trains are based on their current location vs historical averages and posts the data to Mastodon. https://caltrain.live.

I am looking at this while sitting on Amtrak. It is about 14mi behind my current position, but still very cool!

Yeah, I'm going to add a disclaimer about this. I've been watching the GO trains from my window this morning and they lag about a minute behind. My site grabs data on a minute interval, and I know some of the API's say they purposefully add GPS lag.

I've made something similar in the past and my experience with the specific API was that it was surprisingly well considered but the actual data it returned was unreliable at best. Not just "slightly obfuscated for paranoid physical security reasons" but actually missing trains and reporting incorrect names.

For Amtrak only you can use the official source https://www.amtrak.com/track-your-train.html too (it shows route and also delay)

Here in India we have an app named "Where is my train?". Local people use this app a lot when traveling by train. It's not government owned either and has no ads. Just throwing in here for some inspiration since I don't know the inner workings of that app.

Edit: It uses nearby cell towers to estimate the location of train

and In 2018 , Google has acquired Sigmoid Labs Pvt. Ltd, the team behind the “Where is my train”.

and integrated to Google Maps

this map seems only show a portion of all running passenger trains ?

I just drove by a train station, one train passed by, not on this map, haha

Was it an in-service passenger train? A freight train or out-of-service passenger train wouldn't show up.

Sadly, there's very little data available for most trains on US rails. For example, there's no way (AFAIK) to see what freight trains are active on the network. It's a little frustrating in comparison with how rich our air traffic sources are.

If anyone on HN knows of any richer sources for train network data, please let me know. I'm highly interested!

yes, it is a passenger train. which started operation within one year, that might be why.

Busses would be soo much better if there was real time location of busses and trains that you could view on a map. Probably the lowest hanging fruit to pick for public transport improvement.

The MTA has this: https://bustime.mta.info/#B63

The CTA has this: https://www.ctabustracker.com/bustime/wireless/html/eta.jsp?...

Those are the only two cities I've lived in, but the ability to track buses seems widespread to me.

The MBTA in Boston has this as part of their API [0].

[0] https://www.mbta.com/developers/v3-api/streaming

Here's one more for your list: https://southshore.etaspot.net

Southshore Line - connecting Chicago, IL (Millennium Station) to South Bend, IN, via East Chicago, Gary, Chesterton, etc

Added to the list - thanks! This is different from metra yeah?

Yes, it is the Northern Indiana Commuter Train District. Inside Chicago, they run on Metra track. To avoid competition with Metra, they do not allow boarding on "inbound" trains inside of Illinois (except the Hegewisch station that is on the Illinois/Indiana border), and do not allow people to get off "outbound" trains until the Hegewisch station [1]

Funny thing, is that Chicago has direct rail access from downtown to 4 airports in 3 states - Chicago O'Hare and Chicago Midway via the CTA, Milwaukee Mitchell (via Amtrak), and South Bend Regional (via the South Shore).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Shore_Line

Here is THE MAP for France ! https://carto.graou.info/46.90174/1.83822/5.4455/0/0 Shameless plug : we are developping Trainscanner to travel accross Europe https://www.train-scanner.com/?u=hn-c-38434574 Do not hesitate to leave us some feedback :)

Nice map for France! But it seems to include only SNCF and subsidiaries, so no RATP suburban services (RER A and RER most of B) nor partnerships operated by other companies (RENFE SNCF or DB operated by RENFE or DB).

As for Trainscanner, it looks promising, but it's a bit weird having buses show up on Trainscanner, and as the first and only option on most of the first trips in the default search (trips from Paris, today). A UX like Trainline's where it shows trains and buses in different tabs would be nicer, IMO.

Interesting. Are there open APIs that you use for train-scanner or do you have to reverse engineer some apps?

This is cool, but you are missing NJ Transit which has passenger trains separate from LIRR and Metro North. You are also missing Septa and MTA internal city light rail and subway lines, which are technically passenger trains.

If the NYC subway gets added, don't forget PATH trains!

Which MTA light rail lines are you referring to? Last I heard construction hasn’t yet started on the first one.

Similar for Great Britain: https://www.map.signalbox.io/

Looks like there are more non-metro trains currently running in London, than in all of Canada & US

That seems believable - the UK saw 390 million passenger rail journeys in the last quarter [0]. Amtrak saw just under 23 million in all of FY22 [1]. That’s before accounting for the UK having a population around 1/5 that of the US.

[0] - https://dataportal.orr.gov.uk/statistics/usage/passenger-rai...

[1] - https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/p...

Very cool. Please add SMART! https://sonomamarintrain.org/

added to the list - thanks!

ACE (Altamont Corridor Express) appears to be missing as well?

This is pretty cool. I hope you'll add MARC and Brightline trains as well, as your app evolves.

looks like it's at least possible! https://www.mta.maryland.gov/marc-tracker https://www.transit.land/feeds/f-brightline~trails~rt

I'll add them to the list and investigate; thanks!

Thank you!

Whoa, Canada is so sad and empty

All the passengers routes I was on as a child are gone, replaced by industrial transport. Used to be able to get to a lot of places - at least on the West Coast (ie Vancouver to Prince George, Vancouver to Calgary etc).

I know the Royal Hudson (BC coast, Vancouver to Whistler (at least) retired years ago and is a museum just in Squamish. I rode that one as a child, too...

It does look like this is missing the West Coast Express in the Lower Mainland - but that’s strictly a commuter service with a number of trains into Vancouver in the morning, and out of Vancouver in the evening.

Are you sure this is complete? There are really few trains and most are driving at a very low speed.

There's also lots of track included that hasn't seen passenger trains in 30-50 years. The only passenger rail in Idaho is in the panhandle. I'm not sure if Helena has any passenger traffic either.

Congrats on the launch! Very nice project.

Do you have any estimation of what percentage of passenger train traffic is currently displayed vs. still to be implemented? As others have mentioned, I also was little bit surprised of the (small?) amount of trains on the map.

Similar map for Finnish trains: https://www.vr.fi/en/live-train-tracker-map

This was my first reaction as well. 'This can't be all, right? Must be just a tiny fraction of the trains on that continent'.

Here's the map for Belgium btw https://trainmap.belgiantrain.be/

A lovely map — thanks for using Leaflet and keeping that little Ukrainian flag in the corner! Probably needs an attribution for the map added too (looks like it's Carto with an OpenStreetMap-derived basemap).

thanks - done!

This is so cool! I just happen to post my own project about train maps in HN like an hour ago!

Coincidence...??? I think not!

Because I was curious (and others may be as well): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38434010

Any plans to support Denver's commuter trains (RTD)?

I rode it a few weeks ago and completely forgot about it! I'll add it to the list. thanks!

Super cool! I love this. Makes me yearn for a day when this map is way more full of activity.

Just a little feedback: the color for Amtrak and for Chicago's Metra trains are so similar it's hard to see at a glance where the Amtrak runs are amongst the many Metras that are out at a given time. Would be awesome to differentiate those marker colors a bit more.

Very cool! Didn't know this was even technically possible with the available data feeds. Great work!

this bugged me too. I tried to keep the colours respective to the company logos. Any other recommendations for a metra colour?

Very cool. Why are NJ Transit trains unreported?

It appears to be primarily pulling from Amtrak data feeds

What was behind the decision to include just commuter rail and long-distance passenger rail, but not local rapid transit? Is it a resource issue drawing that many vehicles? I love this map, but I'd love to see it with more modes of transport.

mostly just because this was a weekend project and I needed to draw the line somewhere. I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but I reckon it'll take a good amount more time.

I don't think it's working properly. Most (if not all?) trains are going at around 40-20 km/h. Why would they all stop in the middle of nowhere like this ?

Slow orders abound on US freight roads. This time of year maintenance of way crews are being cut off to protect budgets and only the bare minimum of maintenance is being done until after the first of the year when the crews will be brought back.

In Finland I've been using a similar tool for years now when picking up family members from railways stations and when getting out from the station and out to the platform to board a train: https://www.vr.fi/en/live-train-tracker-map

It's incredibly more helpful than timetables (printed or online) or late train announcements and trying to find the right train names and numbers. Instead of identifying the right train, then checking the latest changes for that train on the schedule board and wondering if "3 minutes late" really means "3 minutes" you just look at the map and see, oh there's my train half way here from the previous town, I'll go have a cuppa.

For Austria you can see them all here: https://anachb.vor.at/ ("Kartenoptionen" -> "Livemap" -> "Alle einblenden"). Even covers buses, subways, trams and local trains as well as public transport ships.

We have something similar in Hungary:

http://vonatinfo.mav-start.hu/

Pretty cool, it's a shame that the actual (state-owned) trainlines are in shambles.

I guess this is only Amtrak?

Because it doesn't seem to show the active passenger light rail systems in several cities and metro areas.

Looks like the Alaska Railroad doesn't have any publicly available location data on their site - https://www.alaskarailroad.com/

Which is a shame, because I actually worked on a live train map internally when I was an intern there a decade ago.

Here's a cool one for Tokyo in 3D: https://minitokyo3d.com/

Nice work. A small thing, are the marker icons aligned to their top left corner? Seems like they'd be better aligned to the middle of the icon.

Really cool idea. Would be neat to also be able to click railways as well. I think openrailwaymap provides some cool details like owner, max speed, electrification.

I also noticed the map makes it look like the trains are travelling slightly south of the track. It seems to converge once you zoom in though, so I think the data is probably accurate, but somehow the map is distorting things.

Cool! Super cool!

Would love to see where the data's coming from -- with enough detail that I can spin up my own instance and shove the geo data in a database. (Unless you plan on making money from this, that is. The fact that you're aggregating a dozen random feeds with their own format into one schema is 100% "all the work")

I wanted to do this for ADSB data, but couldn't figure out how to get any quantity of data without paying money.

Nice project. It looks like there are a couple of map layers? Because if you look at Truckee, California (near Reno), it looks like you have two text blocks trying to both show Truckee.

This is so cool! It'd be nice to get some more info on the info windows. Like a photo of the train would be awesome (similar to the plane trackers)!

Are there missing trains on this map or are there really states with no active trains ?

How very convenient! I'm on this map. My train is in the right position, but I don't think the name is quite right: I'm on the Silver Star but it's labelled as the Northeast Regional. Excellent project, though, thanks for posting.

Nice! Is there a way to track every freight train as well?

Netherlands: https://treinposities.nl/ , and for buses https://busposities.nl/kaart (zoom in).

The most shocking for me is ... the small amount of trains on that map

Is there something like this project but for cargo trains?

Kind of underwhelming. Superb work, but the average distance between trains is, like, at least 500 miles? This is what the opposite of public transportation looks like, unfortunately.

What would that map look like if even 5% of the annual military budget of the US would be invested in trains?

I love it! I made a mashup of video feeds and live train locations to show you video feeds from trains that are about to show up: https://train.api.connelly.casa/

This gives me lots of ideas of additional agencies to include! Maybe we should join forces :)

Meanwhile, Europe: https://mobility.portal.geops.io/world.geops.transit?layers=...

love the UI! So easy to understand

This is very cool.

For US inter-city rail there is also Amtrak’s official Track Your Train: https://www.amtrak.com/track-your-train.html

There is also TRAVIC (https://travic.app) by the University of Freiburg, Germany which visualizes transit data worldwide, both live and interpolated from timetables.

Would you please add an OpenStreetMap attribution[0]? It looks like you're using OSM data via OpenRailwayMap (which also requires its own attribution[1]) and Carto basemaps (which I'm not terribly familiar with, but at first glance appear to be based on OSM data[2])---each of which detail their respective attribution requirements.

Leaflet makes this incredibly simple; just add the suggested text to the attribution field when you initialize the layers:

        L.tileLayer('https://{s}.basemaps.cartocdn.com/light_all/{z}/{x}/{y}{r}.png', {
            maxZoom: 19,
            attribution: '' // here!
        }).addTo(map);
        var railwayOverlay = L.tileLayer('https://{s}.tiles.openrailwaymap.org/standard/{z}/{x}/{y}.png', {
            attribution: '', // and here!
        }).addTo(map);

[0]: https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright

[1]: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/OpenRailwayMap/API

[2]: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1P7bhSE-N9iegI398QYDjKeVhnbS... via https://carto.com/legal

This is really cool and I've already found a couple of lines that went further than I realized. This is going to make me use trains more!

On that note, one feature that would be really helpful is if I selected a particular train, that it would show me where the stations are on that line. Maybe the train company would even give you a commission if I clicked through and bought a ticket.

I was honestly ready for this to be one sad train icon chugging its way across the United States. I'm really pleased to see it's more than that.

But not much more, and it makes me so sad that we undervalue real public transportation here. I wish we could do better.

Still! This is something! And this website is cool!

Does it show all 5 daily trains at once ?

Similar but for the London Undergroound:

https://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/ https://traintimes.org.uk/map/tube/schematic/

There is a very nice french version which has been running for years: https://carto.graou.info/

It would be neat if you could include the West Coast Express trains in Vancouver that are part of Translink. They're weekday commuter rail trains.

India http://railradar.railyatri.in/

You will be baffled by the amount of trains.

Very nice! A companion to Rachel Binx' Amtrak Explorer, which shows routes. https://amtrakexplorer.com/

Neat. Is there anything like this that shows freight?

If you want to add the Chicago transit train location data, the API documentation and API key request form are available here:

https://www.transitchicago.com/developers/traintracker/