dal

Dude if I could take a train 400 miles anywhere I would pay 14 dollars just for a seat, never mind all those amenities. Jeez.

While this is super cool in and of itself, I’d also like to remind people that modern high speed rail (most of which is in China these days) operates at around 200 miles/hour (China’s fastest train actually operates at 370+ mph but that’s an absolute state of the art maglev, the 200 mph number is average rail speed). If we actually invested in these train systems, you wouldn’t even need an overnight ticket to make a 400 mile trip. To put that in an American context, it would allow you to get from New York to Los Angeles (the famous Cannonball Run taken by car enthusiasts for decades) in about 15 hours, which is 10 hours better than the current Cannonball Run record. With that kind of speed, you could take an evening train halfway across the country (Boston to Chicago would be ~5 hours) for a weekend trip.