Train travel is by far the most pleasurable way to travel, in every aspect. The scenery is (usually) amazing and you meet SO many different types of people. I don't know what it is about trains that attract anarchists. I took a 2 week train trip around China a couple years back, long haul jawns, each leg ranging from 20-27 hours. We'd stop in a city for 1-2 nights and then keep moving on. It was amazing and one of the best things I have ever done in my life. And I met like 5 anarchists.
I love and hate Amtrak. It's great when it's working. I wish it was a little more affordable and that there were communal sleeping cars, so that the long haul routes would become more popular.
On a side note, sometimes I wonder if U.S. culture is compatible with an efficient and graceful long haul train system. This is from the top comment, "Drunk woman staggers through train shouting 'Goddamn it, has anyone got a Budweiser and a Cigarette!'" I don't know if, in general, we U.S. Americans are respectful enough to make train travel work.
I think the challenges to American train travel are less cultural and more geographic. Train systems seem to work in small countries with dense populations, and in fact we see in the northeast that trains are effective and widely used. I live in Boston, and people use the subway in the city, commuter rail near the city, and Amtrak to get to places like New York. But flying just seems so much more practical around most parts of the US.
China's hardly small, but is pretty dense in the east.
Trans-continental travel is nowadays without question the purview of air travel (though I was surprised when I looked up the classes of air travel across the US — a flight from the EU to the north east of the US gets you so much more than a trans-continental flight, despite the lengths of the flights being near identical!). That said, a quite look at a population map it look like a fairly comprehensive network as far west as Chicago should be viable, extending down to Virginia on the coast. Otherwise, Houston–Austin–San Antonio seems doable (possibly with a spur off that from Austin to Dallas and Fort Worth), as well as most of California (and probably Phoenix from there).
That said, don't take this as carte blanche support for any proposals for HSR in those areas — I know at least the Californian proposal is pretty ridiculous.
There are other challenges, but ones that likely aren't insurmountable. Most notably, you almost certainly want for many travellers the destination to be the central business district, but in many cities this makes it hard to have large car rental places — necessary given most of these cities don't have good, comprehensive transport networks.
I love and hate Amtrak. It's great when it's working. I wish it was a little more affordable and that there were communal sleeping cars, so that the long haul routes would become more popular.
On a side note, sometimes I wonder if U.S. culture is compatible with an efficient and graceful long haul train system. This is from the top comment, "Drunk woman staggers through train shouting 'Goddamn it, has anyone got a Budweiser and a Cigarette!'" I don't know if, in general, we U.S. Americans are respectful enough to make train travel work.