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.
D: This is actually distressing.
to be fair some cities do have good bus systems
but….yeah.
what the shuddering fuck? That’s IT?!
actually we used to have a lot more, but as far as i’m aware i’m pretty sure the car companies bought a lot of railways and then destroyed them to force people to buy cars
Also some of those states that don’t have rails also have more cows than people.
Also our trains are slow and it’s usually much faster to drive than to take a train. We don’t have those speed rail things.
When you suddenly understand Sheldon’s train enthusiasm
And then there’s Europe:
And because that looks a tiny bit cluttered (and because we’re a German blog), here’s a railway map of Germany:
In red are the high speed InterCityExpress lines, blue are the InterCity lines and the grey ones are smaller regional lines.
And for Americans who don’t know how large Germany is: It is half the size of Texas.
Consider that this map does not show local lines, for example: This is Hamburg
This is Berlin
This is Cologne
And this is Munich
(Aesthetic.)
Munich’s network deadass has more lines than the entire state of MA
These are the basic maps of rail lines in Canada.
Note that nothing goes to the north.
There are three rail companies in Canada. Canadian National (CN, hauls freight), Canadian Pacific (CP also hauls freight) and Via Rail (passenger).
I believe Via uses the CN (and possibly some of the CP) lines provided they don’t hold up the freight. Via can go from coast to coast but there aren’t a ton of route times. The major corridor for via is the one in blue in the first map; Windsor to Quebec city with the majority of users going from Toronto to Montreal. Please note that you can’t go from Calgary to Edmonton or Regina to Saskatoon by rail.
Larger cities (Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal), all have commuter rail systems. But they don’t extend onto the established Via or freight lines.
I would kill to have high speed rail at least between cities in this country. I would go visit friends on weekends if that was an option. Hell, I’d use it in a couple of days when I have to drive 2 hrs to Calgary to catch a flight to Toronto.
It’s also why deceptive headlines like this drive me FUCKING NUTS:
