Am I the only one who finds it surreal to see long distance trains in the US? Don’t get me wrong - I know they exist. It’s just that I feel like they never get depicted anywhere in the media. I also don’t think I know a single American who has gone to another US city by train.
Media depictions are a hugely underrated aspect of public transport perception.
In japanese and korean media (my experience is with a ton of anime and k dramas, more in the former than the latter though) trains are very common casual and serious backdrops for a variety of scenes, either within the train, at the station, or just a train passing by on the bridge in the background.
In Hollywood/American TV, it's always cars, with the occasional airport/plane. It riles me up quite unreasonably that shows/movies set in New York fuckin city with 24-7 subway service, and characters are shown trying to catch a cab in Manhattan in the middle of the night to go 20 blocks away. At least Marvelous Mrs. Maisel acknowledged this directly as a class thing for some characters and other characters took the train, but most movies just assume the American viewer cannot relate to someone using the subway.
As someone both born and raised in Long Island and raised on lots of Japanese media, it seemed perfectly normal to see lots of people taking the subway. Granted, Long Island is still car dependent suburbia, but it at least made sense to me that if you were going into "the city", you took LIRR and the subway. So Japanese media depicting public transit or walking mentally registered in the same headspace as Manhattan.
I moved out of NY almost a decade ago, but car-centric America still feels more foreign to me than Tokyo does. On LI, if my family had to drive off the island, we treated it like Europeans treat driving to a foreign country. In SLC, it's entirely common for people to spend 10+ hours on the road as if it were nothing. Hell, I've done it myself. Still feels weird.
It's almost certainly less to do with location scouting and production design, and more about perceived biases. If studio executives think American audiences can't relate to trains or subways because they're less commonly used in real-life, we're going to see fewer of them on the screen. There's probably a cultural blind spot at play there, too; if writers don't ride trains--or even perceive them--very often, they're far less likely to write about them. It's a vicious circle.
As for locations, a quick Google search found a genuine New York City R17 subway car[0] that can be rented out in LA. The Sierra Northern Railway--a freight carrier in California--has rented out[1] its rolling stock, facilities, and tracks to film productions for nearly a century. They've got quite the roster, spanning multiple eras. There's also Amtrak, the various local/regional metro systems, other rental companies, and even private collectors if they need something specific.
As for stations, that's even easier. Various urban backlots have underground subway station entrances[2] where you could characters exiting the station. Or the station platform itself is just a long room; you don't have to show the actual tracks, or you could composite in a train moving across the frame, etc. Plenty of permanent sets can play that role. Set designers do far more with less all the time. Hell, you can just reference it off-screen for a sitcom. That's a huge chunk of Seinfeld (or any sitcom). Shit happens, everyone reacts...often poorly, with hilarious results.
A subway set is probably expensive, especially if you want a working train.
Almost everything set in London uses either the disused Aldwych Station on the Piccadilly Line, the disused Charing Cross station on the Jubilee Line, or the Waterloo and City line at weekends when it is normally closed — sometimes even when the setting ought to be a much larger train and style of station elsewhere.
Well, they also have huge apartments which--like many/most urban TV sitcom characters--are pretty much totally incompatible with where they could actually afford to live.
Yeah, the technical aspects of the subway shots in Seinfeld are interesting, and really give a sense of how hard everybody worked to make that show what it was.
The first scenes to take place in a subway (to my knowledge, anyway) were in the 30th episode, which was called "The Subway". And indeed, most of the episode takes place in a subway.
The subway set for this show was rented from Warner Brothers and was sent to the Seinfeld lot in several pieces on trucks. It was apparently a huge PITA and presented a lot of technical limitations.
They assembled it on springs and had a bunch of crew shake the car to simulate movement. They had to light it using stage lights, manually simulate the mechanical opening of the doors, etc. And it was apparently difficult to do anything but a closeup without it looking fake.
They redecorated it for each of the different subways that it was used to depict (in the episode, different characters are simultaneously taking different subways to different places).
After the episode, the set was disassembled and placed back on the truck to send back to WB, but the truck driver went under a low underpass, which the set struck and was destroyed. As a result, Tom Azzari, Seinfeld's Production Designer, led a small team within the show to design, engineer, and build an entirely new subway set, fixing all the technical problems while they were fresh in the team's memory. They even got actual subway light fixtures and pneumatic doors. This set was used for the remainder of the show, and went on to be used in other shows and films as well.
(There are a few interviews about this process on the Seinfeld DVD extras, Season 03 "Inside Looks")
Earlier this month I took a train Washington to New York, plenty of people on that.
I then went down to Miami, train was fairly full - not many stayed on the entire trip but I wouldn’t expect them to, they got off at various stations along the way. Everyone I head in the dining car was American.
When I visited New York (from the UK) last year I took trains up to Connecticut and Rhode Island. I was surprised at how regular and comfortable the trains were given the US's reputation for passenger rail. I saw that you could go south as well. Is it just that the each coast is particularly well connected compared to the rest of the country?
Well I got an Uber from my office to Union station, as the metro in DC isn’t great. Obviously no need for an Uber in New York as I could get the subway.
Had I flown to Miami I’d still need a taxi to my hotel, just like I did from the train station. I don’t get that argument.
Why not? Maybe a vicious cycle of insufficient demand.
There are three rental car locations close to Copenhagen Central Station. (Not within it, but within the distance you'd walk around an airport terminal.)
Miami station has car rental, I haven't checked any others.
Damned if I know; best guess would be a consequence of (a) in decently busy cities train stations tend to be in dense areas where it's not economical to stick a car rental, where airports tend to have some acreage around them where you can stick a rental lot and (b) small towns only get a few trains a day and fewer non-residents detraining, so it's neither worth keeping a rental office open just for the train station or even considering its location, since the fraction of rentals from the train station is small compared to eg people getting a rental while their car is in the shop.
The US actually has a handful of pretty nice passenger rail corridors, with decent schedules and nice trains. Washington DC to Boston is one such corridor. Portland to Vancouver is another one I've taken that also worked pretty well.
The with respect to Amtrak, shorter line trains on the east coast and CA capital corridor these trains are commuter trains and often have more ownership/priority on the rails so they are more frequent and punctual. If you took metro north, it’s a pretty extensive commuter line as well.
It’s so funny that this all came up today, last night my partner showed me the episode of Sex and the City where Carrie and Sam travel from NYC to San Francisco by train, though it’s mostly depicted as being an annoying hassle (imo their expectations of what train travel would be like were too high).
I've done it, or at least several long sections. I found that I met more interesting people on long distance buses than Amtrak and VIA. Younger people, more diverse, less moneyed. But the experience is much less comfortable, and the places they drop you to get food are utterly abysmal. My best memory was pulling over at some rest stop in who knows where and everyone is grabbing fast food trash because that's all there is, and I noticed some vegetables on the counter in the gas station, asked about them and the guy says they were free, dropped off by a local farmer. So I got some fresh tomatoes and they tasted glorious after days of stale motel bagels and Burger King.
Another awkward thing about bus travel in the US in particular is if you get off anywhere that isn't a major city, you're often stuck on the edge of a highway miles away from any accommodation that might be available in the town the bus is supposedly servicing. Most people get picked up by friends with cars to get where they're actually going, so if you hitch your pack and walk to town you really are gonna look like a hobo.
To be honest, if where you're going is on the train line, the train is better in almost every way. Much more comfortable, nicer views, somewhat better food, sometimes (but not always) more convenient stops. But there's a lot of Turtle Island the trains don't go and you'd miss so much if you didn't take the bus. Unfortunately even bus service is getting rarer. I remember wanting to visit a town of around 25,000 people and was shocked to discover there was no way to get there at all. I would have had to walk 20km from the closest Greyhound stop, which is absurd. I emailed a local museum and the curator offered me a lift back and forth, which was kind, but holy heck. Imagine being a kid stuck in a place like that! Just bananas.
Subtitling for the non-americans (things I had to look up):
- Amtrak: "national passenger railroad company of the United States" "receives a combination of state and federal subsidies but is managed as a for-profit organization"
- VIA: Canadian rail operator (and a ton of other things, but this is my best guess)
- Turtle Island: "a name for Earth or North America" (heh)
- Greyhound stop: greyhound is a bus company
- hobo: poor person traveling by train hopping. (My dutch brain wanted to read it as "hol-bewoner", cave-dweller, since the word stress works out to emphasize the same sounds and given the context of perhaps arriving disheveled or so, but good that I looked up the right connotation)
Amusingly, I am also non-American, although I have lived and traveled there quite a bit.
I use Turtle Island as a shorthand for "the US and Canada", since it is/was a term used by indigenous peoples who lived in the area that's now split by that border. It feels a bit less inaccurate to me than saying "North America" when you are not including Mexico.
You’d probably spend a lot of time sleeping overnight in a bus station waiting for a bus for the next leg of your journey. Coast to coast by bus sounds miserable.
Certainly does sound miserable - worse than in a seat on amtrak, let alone a roomette or bedroom.
However you can take the 1310 from LA to Phoenix, then half an hour wait before the 2245 to St Louis, and a 1h25 wait at 0720 for a St Louis to New York.
66 hours with 64 hours on the actual bus, miserable for both you and your fellow passengers.
I was thinking that making a trip of it and taking your time and doing it slowly would probably be the only way to make it enjoyable. As a utilitarian means of travel though, miserable.
One can also book seats in night trains -- which I've never understood, btw. That only seems logical as a last resort when you need to be somewhere but got no money to get there, when you're planning to sleep the day away at your destination, or enjoy the prisoner's dilemma where you hope the potential co-passenger decides not to "defect" (buy a ticket) such that the seat next to you is free and you can lay down and sleep at night. But anyway, more on topic, I am wondering if the laying down is what you mean or something else in addition
The seats on long distance Amtrak trains are not at all like you're imagining.
Think of them as more like a lounger/recliner. Not the most comfortable you'll ever sit in, but it's reasonably easy to sleep them in, and even more so if you're young. Someone next to you matters only if they snore or smell.
It's possible, but IME, people really do not exaggerate when they say it's bad. It's bad. I don't consider myself a super pampered traveler - I fly budget airlines, I take overnight layovers, I've slept in Amtrak coach - but Greyhound (which, AFAIK, is pretty much the main long-distance bus service in the US, outside of a few regional lines) is the bottom of the barrel. There are some fine Greyhound routes, I'd say on average they'll usually work as expected and get you to your destination. They're often even comfortable. But they fail often and when they do, they fail HARD.
The most annoying normal, happy-path thing for long-distance travel on Greyhounds is the periodic stops for driver changes. They happen without warning - it doesn't appear as a layover when booking, it seems like a normal stop right up until you get to it, when all of a sudden everyone is asked to get off the bus for an hour or so. You have to decide at the start what stuff you want to take, because you won't be let back on the bus in that hour. During that hour, you'll wait in the bus station, which is pretty much always a run-down, filthy building in an awful part of town. There might be a store if you're lucky; there will at least be a vending machine and a (nasty) bathroom. I don't know if they do these stops overnight, but I have had them happen pretty late when I was trying to sleep.
And yeah, that's just a bit of an annoyance - under normal operation. If something goes wrong? That's the really great part - Greyhound has effectively zero customer support. As far as I can tell (or as far as they make it seem), no customer-facing employee actually has the power to do anything, or any special visibility into the system. The agent in the station, if there is one, will refuse pretty much any question and just tell you to call the customer support number. Once, at one of those driver-change stops, the new driver just... didn't show up? The station agent refused to talk to anyone beyond periodic updates every few hours (which were little more than "the driver might be here by X time", as X kept increasing) and yelled at people to call the customer support line, who also seemed to have zero idea what was going on - and of course, you guessed it - told us to talk to the station agent. It's kind of beautiful, in a Kafkaesque, Catch-22 kind of way, if you ignore all the human suffering it inflicts upon its riders, who are generally the poorest people in society.
A new driver did eventually show, after ten hours of overnight waiting for what should have been a one-hour stop. Obviously, everyone missed their connections, but thankfully at the next major station, the agent helped us out- just kidding, she told all of us to call the customer service number. (I'm still mind-boggled by what the actual purpose is of a station agent if not to rebook people.) Based on some of the interactions we had, I suspect the customer service agent just sees the exact same "change your ticket" UI you do from the booking website. And obviously, as far as I know, nobody got any sort of voucher or refund; nobody was put up in a hotel.
A different time, I had my luggage go missing from the cargo area from under the bus. The driver told me it might have mistakenly been offloaded at an earlier station (cool. thanks.) and told me to talk to the agent inside. You can probably guess what the agent told me to do.
And there's all the issues the others mentioned - mainly the thing with them closing their actual station buildings and just picking up and dropping people off on the roadside or at random gas stations.
I didn't mean for this post to be this long, but it truly kind of depresses and amazes me how bad of a system it is. It is falling apart at almost all levels. People talk badly about Amtrak, but as mentioned elsewhere, they'll at least put you in a hotel if you miss a major connection. Budget airlines are uncomfortable but at least have actual gate agents, and even the worst airport is vastly cleaner and more comfortable your average Greyhound building.
There are some redeeming factors. The buses themselves are usually comfortable and decently clean, and most if not all have power outlets, although often not at every seat. The "weird/gross passenger sitting next to you" thing is exaggerated, though I have had one bad one. The Wi-Fi exists but is generally completely unusable, but if you have a hotspot, it'll generally work pretty well since you'll be on major highways the whole time.
But the punchline to it all? It's not even that much cheaper. It's, like, maybe half the price of an airplane ticket.
If you have a Spirit Airlines route near you, flying will actually be cheaper than a bus.
For the route I take it's around $30 for the plane, and $70 for the bus. The bus takes around 8 hours, the plane takes around an hour and a half but then you have to factor in extra time at the terminal.
It is also worth considering that Spirit will charge you an arm and a leg to bring any kind of luggage, while buses and trains are generally pretty lenient with their baggage allowances.
Of course, as I found out recently, sometimes your baggage will just get lost or stolen and there's not much you can do about it. So that's fun. (At least on Amtrak there's a proper checked baggage option for some routes, and the overheads are big enough to put airplane-sized carryons in.)
That's true, I guess on some routes their prices aren't too bad. I vaguely recall it being more.
But yeah, it is pretty ridiculous. Like you said, pay the same price as the plane ticket, if not more, for the privilege of getting to wait in rundown station buildings and the excitement of knowing nobody is there to help you if your bus breaks down or just doesn't show. Honestly, I have to imagine that one of the only things propping up Greyhound on routes like those is the fact that you can ride it without ID.
