People IN THE US still use regional flights because all sorts of public transport in the US are literally third world crap. EU and parts of developed Asia use a lot of inter-city trains.

Munich<>Frankfurt (400km) is 3 hours with ICE, much less than going to the airport, wait for check in, boarding, flight, off the plane and to the city centre. It's around 110e too for returns

Interstate rail in Europe is still very far from optimal, and long-distance rail service has been declining due to cheap state-subsidized air travel. Overnight service, a natural mode of longer-distance transport, has been scaled back in recent decades, but is now making a comeback due to climate concerns.

And yet Europe has all those discount airlines that people apparently use. A Munich-Frankfurt route is a lot like a Boston or DC to NYC route, which is indeed popular by train in US. (Though traveling that by plane is also popular for reasons I don't understand outside of some fairly specific circumstances like an early morning meeting.)

Borders. That's the problem in the EU. Cooperation for massive infrastructure project beyond a single line or a tunnel is very hard to achieve.

Discount airlines are discount mostly because of tax incentive to develop small local airport around the EU. Of course they are popular. In the UK, from London, it is basically cheaper to get anywhere in the EU than anything north of Birmingham.

A country in the EU and a state in the US are equivalent (for discussion on transport - in other contexts there are significant differences). Nobody flies between cities in one state, just like nobody flies between cities in one EU country. When going to a different country things change - the distances are now large enough that you fly because it is faster.

Remember, Chicago to New York City is almost the same distance as Munich to Moscow! (Note that rail advocates will tell you that Chicago to NYC is just barely in high speed rail range, anything farther even rail advocates don't pretend to be competitive. Chicago to New York City is not very far on the scale of the US, so of course we fly.

Yes I will agree that our rail system in the US isn't great, but flying doesn't compete with the rail system, driving does. A good rail system in the US would only negatively affect some short flying routes, it would however mean less people drove.

NYC to Chicago is also through one of the continental divides in the US (as well as some fairly densely populated areas). You're only going to get so fast. And even if you could get a trip down to 8 hours or so (which is less than half of the current time), how many people will routinely do that vs. a couple hour flight?

>Nobody flies between cities in one state

With some exceptions. Probably most notably SF to LA although there are probably other smaller in-state city pairs that are a long drive from each other especially in the western US.

There is no technical reason NYC to Chicago can't be done in under 5 hours. Getting the land rights and building tunnels is probably too expensive to pull off, but there is no technical limitation. The continental divide is just an engineering problem to deal with. The cities are actually a good thing as you can make a 1 minute stop in each for more traffic (indeed most advocates suggest that few people will ride the whole route)

NYC to Chicago is over 1000km in linear distance (I-80, a decent approximation of the shortest distance you can route it, puts it at 1200km). Making it in 5 hours requires an average speed, including stop penalties, of over 200km/h. And that's bypassing any other major city. A more reasonable route, that goes via Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia, runs you closer to 1500-1600km, requiring a 300km/h average speed. With the top speed of conventional trains being about 350km/h, that is impossible.

If you bypass every other city between NYC and Chicago, and basically go through a state-long tunnel in Pennsylvania, you might be able to do it with a conventional railroad, but it definitely won't be cost-effective. To hit the other cities, you have to switch to maglev, which makes it cost-ineffective as well.

A final note: the city pair you're trying to link up is Chicago-NYC. Given the relatively diminutive size of the other cities en route (Pittsburgh is #27 and Cleveland #33, compared to #1 NYC and #3 Chicago), Chicago-NYC is going to make up the bulk of your traffic, so partial portions of the route aren't particularly effective. This is one of the issues CA has as well: the full SF/LA connection is where the market is, and the HSR can't justify its costs until it connects those two cities.

>A final note: the city pair you're trying to link up is Chicago-NYC. Given the relatively diminutive size of the other cities en route

One of the reasons that the Northeast Corridor works so well for Amtrak is that people by and large are not taking the train from Boston to DC. (It's doable and I've done it but it really doesn't make sense versus flying in most cases.) In fact, it's usually a longer stop in NY Penn because most people are either getting on or getting off in Manhattan.

Rather, people are going Boston-NY, NY-DC, or otherwise between cities that make up about half or less of the total route.

But that's because the route of Boston-DC contains the following major cities en route:

DC (#6)

Baltimore (#21)

Philadelphia (#8)

NYC (#1)

Boston (#10)

You're connecting 4 major cities, and 1 in-between city, along the Boston to DC route, and the largest city is smack dab in the middle. In fact, as route pairings, it's less a Boston-DC line and more a DC-NYC and a NYC-Boston line that is through-run. Chicago-NYC only has the in-between cities of Cleveland and Pittsburgh en route (excluding the already-connected Philly).

The NEC is, quite frankly, extremely unusual in being a very dense, very linear corridor. The only other corridor in the world with similar circumstances is the Tokaido Shinkansen.

>The NEC is, quite frankly, extremely unusual in being a very dense, very linear corridor. The only other corridor in the world with similar circumstances is the Tokaido Shinkansen.

It's too bad the Amtrak NE Regional (and the very slightly-faster Acela "Express") are so horribly inferior to the Tokaido Shinkansen. Riding on an Amtrak feels like a bad joke after riding on any Shinkansen line, in many ways, including both speed and price.

>DC-NYC and a NYC-Boston line that is through-run

Exactly. Frankly, if the northern and southern legs of the route split to different rail stations as is the case in Boston, I'd guess that would inconvenience relatively few people.

(Of course, Amtrak has limited service going north out of Boston anyway so the fact that the Downeaster doesn't directly connect to the NEC is less of a problem there than it would be in other cities.)

Shinkansen in Japan regurarly does 320 km/h and 360 km/h is being tested, with the main issue being running noise and tunnel boom.

These speeds are really not theoretical and we regurarly made use of them during travels in Japan. For example back in 2017 we traveled 1100 km from Beppu to Tokyo in about 8 hours. This contained a normal speed express train segment from Beppu to Fukuoka (1:30 h, max speed 130 km/h) and two train changes.

Also a maglev based line between Tokyo & Nagoya is under construction, which will be 80% underground with a running speed of ~500 km/h.

Most of the traffic is expected to be between those small cities, which is why you go through them. The full trip only competes with flying if there are enough trips that you don't have to plan ahead.

There is no technical problem getting a train to average 300km/h across the entire stretch. There are lots of political problems though. If we committed to building such a track in 10 years we could get the price of maglev track down a lot - and 10 years is what it would take the get the right of way and dig the tunnels.

> Nobody flies between cities in one state

Jesus, you say that with such confidence, Bravo! I’m afraid to tell you how popular the Houston/Dallas route is...

Hey? We certainly do, unfortunately. It's still quicker to fly Berlin -> Stuttgart (for example) than it is by train (and much quicker than car - 1:15 plane, 5:40 train, 5:30-8:30(!) car).

Another, more extreme, example: Oslo -> Tromsø: 1:50 by plane, no options for train on Google Maps, and 21:10-22:20 by car.

The real point is how do you get to Moscow? (odds are you never have even though it is about the same as distances Americans tend to fly)

> Nobody flies between cities in one state

The second most popular route in the US is LA to SF.

And Barcelona to Madrid was the busiest route in the world before they built the train.

LA to SF would be an excellent route for HSR, but sadly modern politics and entrenched land interests make this incredibly difficult.

There are two sets of huge mountains in the way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Coast_Ranges

That's the core issue. CHSRA never had a credible funded plan for building either crossing, and instead chose to tackle the easy part in the Central Valley first. Unfortunately, HSR in the Central Valley is effectively useless without a mountain crossing at at least one end.

Giant mountain ranges didn't stop the Shinkansen.

Japan doesn't have the utterly broken politics and lack of interest in building infrastructure that the USA has.

Or all the 30 - 60 long base tunnels finished or under construction in Switzerland and Austria going under the Alps.

The Pacheco Tunnel already goes through the same section of the Diablo Range they are planning to run one of the tunnels. That was built in the 1960's to carry water from the San Luis San Luis Reservoir to Santa Clara County.

I recently took a round trip flight from Edinburgh to London and back. If I could do it over again, I would have just taken the train.

I had been doing a similar trip (100km from London) very often in the past and always took the train, over the years the journey time has gone down to a little over 5 hours. I took a flight once two years ago and when you add all the waiting, security, getting to and from the airport it works out almost exactly the same, except you're more tired and can't take as many suitcases. Now, imagine we had fast trains in the uk.

I was furious when I read about the government subsidy/bail-out of FlyBe last month.

Many of their routes are very easily done by train -- Birmingham to Glasgow, London to Exeter, London to Newquay, London to Newcastle.

Faster trains would make more places in Scotland a reasonable travel time away from London and Birmingham.

London to X sure

Southampton to Leeds, Manchester to Cornwall, and of course Belfast to anywhere isn’t easy or fast by train

The poor state of the UK railways is due to a massive lack of investment for most of the second half of the twentieth century. A huge wasted opportunity where the costs of the closures were never properly considered.

Don’t conflate the majority of the beeching closures with a lack of investment. The problem was during the 80s when Japan and France were building new high speed railways, we weren’t.

We’re now trying to catch up with HS2, which is sorely needed to free existing tracks for more and reliable services, but we need to use that as a springboard for 50 years of investment. HS2, npr, midland connect, then high speed Birmingham to Bristol/Cardiff, Cambridge, and Leeds-Newcastle-Edinburgh-Glasgow

The key is to ensure we have schemes ready to go once construction winds up on the first parts, so the skills and equipment aren’t lost.

It takes 5 hours to go 100km? what route is that?

He goes from a city 100km from London, to Edinburgh.

e.g. Cambridge to Edinburgh (I haven't checked the connection time for this).

Was obviously including the 2 hour walks at both ends in the total travel time.

Curiuos how this changes for you if say you're carrying 2 pieces of large luggage.

Reasonable point. I'm usually traveling to Europe with carry-on or, at most, one piece of check-in wheeled luggage. Even dealing with the single big piece can be a bit of a pain on a crowded train and going beyond that would be pretty inconvenient.

I don't like checking luggage on planes for various reasons but the system is at least set up to accommodate it straightforwardly.

Thanks. I’m in a situation where I might be doing this trip annually with a large amount of luggage so I wanted a local’s take.

I took that train a long while ago. Walked to the train with our luggage. Got on. Sat in wide seats for 4.5 hours and then got off in London and walked to our hotel.

If when California finishes it's high speed rail line all they need to do for it to be a success is keep the TSA far far away from it.

I'd be quite happy to take the train if it wasn't routinely twice as expensive. Even allowing for the absurd cost of parking at Edinburgh airport.

That line became incredibly cheap since LNER took over from Virgin. I've taken several next-day return trips from London to Edinburgh for less than £100 return.