The article briefly mentioned it, but the main reasons these are kept is maintenance and training. That's a far larger concern than the politics, but it isn't as interesting. Hence the nickname "parliamentary trains" -- people love to believe that it's some crazy bureaucratic reason behind them when they're usually very logical.
Some of these routes will probably never be viable on their own, but the segments of track might be needed some day as a detour. For instance if a bridge somewhere needed to be out of service for a year or something.
For example, one of the more famous "ghost trains" (since it's in London) is the daily Paddington to West Ruislip service. Since they're both served by the underground there wouldn't be much need for a mainline train between them. If long-term work disrupted that connection they might want to temporarily run a regular service on that line though.
If you just abandoned the track, you wouldn't know its condition when you needed it. Just as important, the regulators wouldn't let you run passengers using crew that hadn't been trained on that line.
So just running an occasional train and rotating staff through it, the line and the skills are always kept sharp. Then if you suddenly need that bit of track in an emergency it's ready to go.
And since you're going to run a train anyway, you might as well sell a few tickets if people want to join you.
Just like a back up link in a network that may be higher cost or a higher latency but you still route a small amount of traffic on it just to make sure the link is good in case the primary route is down or becomes congested, you want to make sure you know the health of the back up route.
The abandonment side doesn't really make a whole lot of sense.
There's plenty of train lines in the US that are kept on the books/maintained, yet don't see any regular service. Some brush cutting, an inspection train once a year, and that's about it.
There's also plenty which are entirely abandoned and overgrown in practice, yet are still kept on the books, which means the train company retains the right of way and can resume service at any time it wants even though a train hasn't run on it in at all in 30 years and it currently looks like a forest.
Training for emergency detours makes some sense, although unless the line is long you don't really need all that many people trained to be prepared for that. You can have a few people qualified and they can just get on/off the train (riding back and forth) in the section the normal engineers aren't qualified for. And if it's once a decade or longer planned work, it's going to be cheaper to qualify the workforce right before it rather than have to keep them all up to date all the time. (I'm also sure that not all of these lines are worthwhile detours)
I am from Brazil, and I wish our politicians were "bureucratic" as UK politicians regarding trains.
In the monarchy (yes, that long ago), the government believed railroads were the future of the country, and invested in them heavily (in fact half of current railroads in Brazil were built during the reign of the last emperor).
Later during the military dictatorship, the government again saw the point of railroads, and started investing in them again.
Then during our redemocratization, the federal government ended owning lots of railroad companies (example: The São Paulo railroads were given to the federal government as payment because of the São Paulo bank debts with the fedearl government), the federal government then went and shut down every single line that looked unprofitable, even ones that were unprofitable for obvious reasons (example: still under construction, thus zero revenue).
Now we need trains BADLY, but even to use old trains is impossible, for example 0.5% of the country area has 40 million people (out of 200 million in the country total), yet there is nowhere near enough trains for it, most of the transportation is by road (including all the issues of ever increasing absurd traffic, and accidents, one of the highest amounts in the world) or air (São Paulo has the dubious distinction of highest number of helicopters in the world, because road transport is so unsafe, because of accidents and crime, that people that can afford going by helicopter go by helicopter).
My parents live in Valinhos, I live near a train station in São Paulo, the train track near my home passes behind my parents home, yet I cannot do this simple trip, because not only the track is overgrown and unmaintained, but the government decided to repurpose some stations for other uses, and paved over or cemented over the tracks, the sad thing is we have the tracks there, we have the demand, and we have the trains (in storage, the military government bought lots and lots and lots of then bleeding edge electric trains), but everyone sees it as an almost impossible task to fix it.
note this map has some other whole cities in it (Jundiaí is a city, also is the city where the track is paved over... the Ruby track is the one that passes behind my parents house, if it was still in use).
Or Campinas (2 million people in the metro area, has several rail lines already built, stations in almost all cities of the metro area and in the biggest neighbourhoods, but has only a single train running, it is a coal train, and most people using it are tourists wanting to have a train trip, usually parents wanting to show their children how it is to travel by train).
Brazil is IMHO well suited for trains, much more than the US. Connect all the major cities on the coastline. Unfortunately, strategic thinking is something not well suited for a Brazilian mind. And the money - a country with one of the highest tax rates in the world - is much better invested in some corrupt politicians pocket than into infrastructure, be it trains, ridiculous expensive airtravel or roads. Brazil had a home run the last 10-15 years. My prediction: Won't be a home run the next 10-15 years.
I think many navies around the globe keep at least one sailing ship for training purposes. The Italian Navy, for example, keeps the Amerigo Vespucci veliero as a training ship for the Naval Academy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_training_ship_Amerigo_...
Also the United States Naval Academy has a sailing team, but a lot of colleges on a river or shore do. I assume they do well, as a matter of pride. http://www.usna.edu/Sailing/
As a Brit, personally, I reckon it's because the train system lost the ball significantly last century.
Train tickets now are often more than the cost of petrol to drive across the country. So if you'd spend more on a train ticket, why not drive?
Sometimes it even cheaper to get a flight from Glasgow to London than it is to get the train.
To get a ticket, a week in advance, to go from Carlisle (where I live) to London costs roughly 120 pounds (that's 180 USD, ish).
It's crazy expensive, and the benefit really isn't there any more.
Goods wise, trains could / should have taken the same kind of approach that the shipping industry did, with containers.
If our company (live events A/V stuff, mainly) is doing an event down south, we should be able to call a train company, have them deliver a container (or pick up one that we own) at our warehouse on a flat bed truck, we load it, they take it to the train station, it get craned on, and then we minibus down there the next day and have it delivered to the location. But no, it's easier and cheaper for us to run our own bunch of trucks.
Train tickets now are often more than the cost of petrol to drive across the country. So if you'd spend more on a train ticket, why not drive?
Avoiding depreciation of the car or the cost of having one in the first place; lower risk of accidents; you get to use the time to work, read, or take a nap; you don't have to worry about parking. It's not all downsides.
My car's TCO is £0.64/mile. Easily beaten by the train.
Assuming I'd have a car already, though, I'd already have paid for the car, insurance, MOT, tax, blah blah. So for a journey I'm contemplating taking, where the choice is car vs train, the train is competing against the marginal per mile cost: roughly, fuel+repairs.
For this my car's cost has been £0.28/mile - a figure that usually turns out to be pretty close to the cost of the train. (In fact, this comparison is being unduly generous to the train, because most of my driving is short trips. For longer trips the car is more fuel efficient, making the marginal cost more like £0.20/mile.) I'm also not taking into account the cost of travel to the station.
But then again, I'm also assuming there will be free parking at your destination...
Just as an example, Bristol to Paddington is 118 miles.
118 * £0.28 = £33.04 for the marginal cost of driving.
An anytime ticket is £98.50.
An off-peak ticket is £43.00.
UK train travel seems to only be cheaper if you can buy an advance ticket (restricting you to the one particular train you've bought for), or with a season ticket (where the price is regulated).
Going from city centre to city centre on business I find trains to be much more pleasant than flying or driving - even going to London from here in Edinburgh is worth it - the trip is fairly scenic (e.g. going through Durham) and not that much longer than flying.
Even there I think it depends on how you value your time.
If I take the train to visit my mother it's about a 3 hour trip, door to door, and costs about 50% more. But I have all that time available to work on other things that matter to me: homework, hobby projects, even pleasure reading. The net cost to me in terms of time I couldn't spend doing anything else is relatively small, and mostly consists of walking which isn't all bad since it counts toward the ol' daily 10,000.
If I drive it's only 2 hours' transit time, but in terms of actually getting stuff done with my precious time that's 2 hours of complete uselessness. From my perspective it's easily worth a measly 20 bucks to avoid that. Heck, I pay more than that just to get out of having to spend time cooking dinner more often than I care to admit.
There are audio books and podcasts, so it is not completely useless to drive. But compared to trains, you do lose the freedom. In a train, if I listen to an audiobook, it will be by choice, unlike driving. I guess there will be some point where time difference versus productivity would be worth it
I think that's a "you forgot Poland" response, though. I'm an avid audiobook listener. I particularly like listening to them while I'm exercising or doing housework.
But the occasions when the thing I'd most like to do is just sit there and passively listen to an audiobook while staring off into space are few and far between. And I don't feel that doing it while sitting in a car is a significant improvement over doing it while sitting on the sofa.
Last year, I went to Edinburgh from Oxford. It was slightly cheaper for me to:
* Drive to Birmingham airport
* Pay for airport parking
* Fly to Edinburgh
* Get the bus to/from Edinburgh center
...than to get the train, booked about a month in advance. And of course, I got the best part of a whole extra day in Edinburgh with the time saved.
Oxford to Edinburgh takes about 6 hours on the train, going via London. The bulk of that is on the London - Edinburgh train (a nice 4.5 hour block).
Oxford to Birmingham is about 1hr15 if everything goes to plan. Parking, going through security, boarding, etc is, generously, at least an hour. The flight is about 1hr15. It takes 30 minutes to get from the airport to the city centre (but you'll also have to navigate your way through the airport to get to the bus.
Adding that up comes to at least four hours, and could well be closer to five. So you actually saved at most two hours, and possibly as little as one. However, you probably had a pretty miserable journey (whereas on the train you could have relaxed for four hours with a good book and a nice cup of tea).
Well, OK not technically a day, but practically speaking it bought me around 7 extra hours in Edinburgh, which felt like an extra day in comparison to having to spend 8 hours+ on the return train journey.
There are many other practical factors about my specific journey your comparison doesn't include, such as the fact that I don't actually live in Oxford, so I need to get the bus to Oxford station (in which time I can get 90% of the way to Birmingham Airport by car), the times of day I was travelling, connection times, and travel time at the other end of the train journey. (And if you factored in Oxford's marvelous road works, that's probably another 4 hours saved right there ;-)
As for a miserable journey... last time I went to Edinburgh by train it was so overcrowded they simply cancelled all the seat reservations altogether, because people couldn't get to their seats. So I stood/squatted/sat on luggage in a crowded hot train for hours. Not fun at all. I knew would be busy. That's why I bought a "reservation"!
While in Germany, I found it cheaper to do a 1-way car rental on a Mercedes, a 2nd driver premium, and pay for gas (not diesel!) than to buy 2 train tickets from Munich to Berlin.
Our rail network just doesn't have the capacity to support significantly greater passenger volumes. A large proportion of peak-time services are severely overcrowded. Inherent signalling limitations mean that we can't fit any more trains into the schedule on those services, and we can't make the trains any bigger without spending billions on infrastructure improvements. Building more lines in a country as densely populated as ours is astoundingly expensive, as we have seen with HS1/HS2; the IEA estimates that HS2 will cost £670m per mile.
Demand-based ticket prices accurately reflect the availability of seats. The cheapest advance fares from Carlisle to London are £24 each way; the most expensive open single is £239. It doesn't make sense for rail operators to offer cheap fares on trains that will be filled at a higher price.
I think that UK is not that densely populated. Like at all. If Japan and China are expanding their rails networks (in their densest parts) the UK could probably do to.
>Goods wise, trains could / should have taken the same kind of approach that the shipping industry did, with containers.
In the US, containers are transferred from ships directly to trains. A train may have hundreds of cars, each single, double, or triple stacked with standard shipping containers.
That's nuts. Double stacking doesn't seem viable with Central Europe's more thoroughly electrified rail network. Not that it's inherently incompatible, just that we'd have to rebuild it all. Also, the tunnels.
A curious case of technological leapfrogging (in a sense; I rather prefer the electrified network even at the cost of no double stacked freight trains).
The presence of overhead equipment for electrification is orthogonal; the real issue is loading gauge, a cross-section profile that defines the minimum car size that the most restrictive segment of a line must support. Usually, tunnels end up being the limiting factor, since these tend to be much costlier to design to accommodate larger cars. For instance, CSX carries double-stack containers on Northeast Corridor between Philadelphia and Washington under catenary, with a vertical clearance above top of rail of 5.54 m [1]. Compare with UIC G2 gauge, which only offers 4.65 m ATOR [2].
I don't know why parent is talking about triple stacking containers. That's completely infeasible; the tallest common loading gauge in America (AAR Plate H, or 6.3 m) doesn't even come close to fitting 7.8 m = 3 × 2.6 m (about the height of a container).
The American rail network is optimized for freight. Outside of a few lines in the Northeast it's not really an option for intercity travel. If you want to take a train from Los Angeles to San Francisco (a 6-7 hour drive) there's only one train per day, it's expensive, and it takes twelve hours to make the trip. It's more of an amusement park ride than a way to get somewhere.
But if you want to get something shipped rail is cheap and reliable (if not particularly fast).
They don't have to be double stacked and often aren't. However, I have seen a number of double stacked trains and I'm sure it is highly dependent on the route (no short tunnels, etc) and shipping demand.
Deutsche Bahn actually runs train services in the UK (as do Dutch operator Abellio and French operator SNCF). Sadly, their arrival hasn't brought with it the cheap, reliable travel that we view enviously on the continent. Instead, we get the same expensive, poor-to-mediocre service as every other train operator.
From the article: A similar inversion has been taking place in the transport arena, which is now dotted with fiefdoms carved out by state-owned European bus and rail operators whose domestic governments lock up their own markets to outsiders while availing themselves of opportunities here.
Great research by the author there. Private operators have a market share of 25% urban/regional transport in Germany, ie. those railway routes that are co-financed by the public. The biggest private operators are French and British. As long as I don't have to buy a special ticket when I ride their trains -- and I do ride them all the time --, it's all the same to me.
Our rail system is set up to be mediocre and expensive. Much of it was built privately long ago, then it was nationalised, cut down and improved. Then is was 'privatised' - I use quotes because the train operators don't really have a say in what they do. The banks own the trains. The network is run by a non-profit. The government funds it, decides on the rules but takes no responsibility when it goes wrong.
Really? I live in Munich. Whenever I want to travel to other large German cities, I've found flying to be much cheaper than going by train. The only reasonably priced tickets seem to be the local ones. I don't understand how people can afford train prices unless they have a discount or someone else paid.
A BahnCard 25 gives you 25% off journeys, can be combined with saving offers and costs ~60€ per year. A BahnCard 50 gives you 50% off journeys but cannot be combined with savings. I think it costs ~200€ per year. A BahnCard 100 gives you 100% off journeys, i.e. the only extra cost a journay may occur are either seat reservation costs or the "Sprinter" extra for the fast train Frankfurt<->Berlin, which is not included (and technically a seat reservation anyway). This option costs ~3600€ per year or some such.
The point is, if you want to take the train, either book ahead (and maybe get a BahnCard 25), or get one of the other two. I used to do a mere 2h journey a bunch of times a year (as returns), and the BahnCard 50 easily paid for itself in just 2 or 3 trips, while also offering fantastic flexibility, since it's always 50% off the regular price, which is static.
That's how people afford trains. Also, with the BahnCards, you usually get a free ticket for central public transport zones at your destination, for example for Zone A in Berlin.
Just for your example, a single from Munich->Berlin costs 65€ with a BahnCard 50, i.e. 130€ return, booked right now. The booked ticket lets you ride at any time within the next two days, so you are also not tied to a specific train and it's no big deal if you arrive later at the station etc. (which is not the case for special offers, which tie you to a specific train). 130€ return from München Hbf to Berlin Hbf is really not that bad.
Great advice .. I used my DB50 card for many years to do weekend trips all over that part of Europe from the Ruhr area (okay, mostly to Amsterdam, I admit), and it was definitely a good investment.
When I lived in Germany I just purchased myself a DB card, which cost at the time about 200Eu and gave me so many discounts on train-rides it paid for itself in a month. I was very happy to see Germany by train - very comfortable, fast, efficient, clean trains with a beautiful country rolling by outside .. not so in England, where I have had the worst rides in my life on crappy, unmaintained, overcrowded trains run by rude conductors and full of unhappy people. Was really shocking, to be honest ..
According to thetrainline.com you can get a train from Carlisle to London a week from now (Thu 30 Jul) for £35 if you are prepared to go at one of the less popular times (e.g. depart 14.49 and arrive 18.10).
Which is a shame because this ghost train story isn't as interesting as the real fake jobs story going on in the UK right now (real people working fake jobs).
But perhaps the BBC doesn't want to cover that story for some reason.
Then he said, she came from the country, he saw? To which she answered in the affirmative.
‘By Parliamentary, this morning. I came forty mile by Parliamentary this morning, and I’m going back the same forty mile this afternoon. I walked nine mile to the station this morning, and if I find nobody on the road to give me a lift, I shall walk the nine mile back to-night. That’s pretty well, sir, at my age!’ said the chatty old woman, her eye brightening with exultation.
Better to have ghost trains than the short-sighted Beeching Cuts[0]. For example, the town I grew up in once had two stations where it was possible to catch trains to both Glasgow and Edinburgh, but by the 1960s these were both closed, and now the roads are pretty clogged up with commuters every day, with little hope of ever reopening the lines given much of the land was sold off and redeveloped.
Before airline deregulation in the US, when routes and schedules and fares were regulated, I often found myself on nearly empty flights. After deregulation, when airlines were free to set routes, schedules and fares, the flights are nearly always packed.
Looks like the same situation with British trains.
I also recall back in the 70s when the DOE regulated which gas stations got how much gas to sell. The result was a patchwork of gluts and shortages across the US. That ended immediately when Reagan abolished those regulations.
Yes, but the other side of the coin of airline deregulation is that there fewer routes to smaller airports and/or they are more costly. There is a large fixed cost associated with providing service to each airport and because of this, airlines have decided to either hike up prices to make the route semi-viable or stop service altogether.
While this may be good for the airline, it's not necessarily good for the people that are now forced to drive multiple hours to the nearest airport.
I would think that something similar would happen if the trains were deregulated.
Having lots of big jets flying 75% empty would mean much higher ticket prices overall. The economics of airliners is such that they need to be full to make money.
I don't have figures handy, but airline fares (adjusting for inflation) are much, much lower today than when the government set routes, schedules and fares.
The hub and spoke system common today evolved out of the deregulation. Smaller airports are served by small "commuter airlines" today, not big empty jets.
Some bigger airports don't have the luxury of being a hub to any airline and get crappy service as a result. Indianapolis has a nice new facility but you're lucky to get a direct flight from other major cities outside the surrounding region. The few that exist are punitively priced at often 2x the cost of connecting through a neighboring hub.
The U.S. partly mitigates this by subsidizing service to smaller airports, via the $250m/yr Essential Air Service program [1]. This was part of the deregulation bill, thrown in to mollify representatives of smaller towns and rural areas, who otherwise would have opposed deregulation.
And not a totally unreasonable approach if the politicians want to maintain a specific capability, much better than making the entire market inefficient.
Buried within the article is an argument in support of wilderness:
“It has to be one of the maddest places we have both been to,” he says. “No words can describe how isolated this place was.” The closest road was three miles away; the only nearby structures were a shuttered pub and an old windmill.
In the American West, Canada, Russia, and myriad places throughout the world, it's not hard to get three miles away from a road.
The shading is one problem. I'm also not convinced the logarithmic scaling for the coding is the best approach; it may be but I'd have to see it with a better color scheme. It probably also depends on what point you want to emphasize.
In the American West, Canada, Russia, and myriad places throughout the world, it's not hard to get three miles away from a road.
It depends on where you are. In a lot of places west of the Mississippi, there are still pretty regular grids, spaced less than three miles apart, of roads. Without them, access for agriculture and ranching would be difficult/impossible.
Plus, even a lot of state and national parks have access roads running through them. You have to go out to places that have no agricultural, industrial or tourism value whatsoever in order to get that far from a road.
If it had a pub and a windmill, I expect there was at least a jeep trail running through. Otherwise how would the pub have resupplied or farmers gotten grain to the mill? This would count as a "road" in the parts of North America and Asia you're talking about. Therefore the "three mile" claim is bogus.
My gut reaction to your question was to answer "by train". Another option might (considering it's in Norfolk), by canal.
Then I thought I'd better look it up.
The comment in the article was about Berney Arms[1]. Looking on the map, it looks like the station is indeed unserved by roads. However, the nearest road does appear to be 500 metres away (much closer than three miles). The pub and windmill are on that road, rather than at the roadless station.
The next junction along that road is about 2km away (still not 3 miles), and the nearest meaningful junction (i.e. that gives you a choice of destination) 3.5km (still not 3 miles).
The nearest junction with an A road is about 3 miles away, following the road. It is also the closest you can get with Google Streetview[2]
A47 appears to be less than a mile away according to Google Maps scale bar. Walking to Great Yarmouth is listed as .1 mile (I don't know how though since I don't see any bridges across the water).
In addition, that's a stop along the train line to Great Yarmouth which isn't exactly nowhere. So, are they running a train only to Berney Arms? I doubt it terminates there. Now, it could be that passenger service is sparse because it follows the geographic feature (the river) rather than cutting through like the roads.
Finally, a lot of this stuff stems from the massive cuts that the railways took in the 1960's. That area used to have a lot more rail lines.
Half of this article focuses on the tautological notion that since the term ghost train is a made up one with no meaning that nobody in the railways recognises, then it must be about a hidden thing that nobody knows about, and you can tell this is so because nobody knows the term. Even the attempted definition of "so infrequent as to be useless" appears not to fit the headline run, which is once a day six times a week - I know packed commuter lines that are less frequent!
Thinking tactically, rather than strategically, has anyone asked the dispatchers? Rail networks are usually not partitioned (in the graph theory sense); moving equipment around for reasons of wear levelling, capacity, maintenance, replacement, or traffic control might account for some ghost trains. After a major snowstorm, airlines need to reposition equipment to meet schedules; they hate to fly aircraft empty, but they do it.
The same reasoning applies to road freight, pipelines, and probably fresh fruit and cut flowers too.
The article is talking about revenue runs whereas the kind of movements you're talking about are non-revenue runs (or deadheading). On non-revenue runs, there's no need to provide service, unlike these ghost trains, where service still needs to be provided even if there is little or no uptake.
In the late 80s I flew from Santiago, Chile to Antofagasta on a quite nice LAN Chile 737. There were about 10 passengers. One of the best flights I've ever been on. I'm not sure what the need was to the government to keep that flight going or if it's still like that.
Nowadays a lot of those flights between Santiago and Antofagasta stop in La Serena. When I was on it a few months ago, the flight was full both ways. I assume that flight is important for mining operations, and nowadays for tourism.
Europe needs some huge infrastructure projects. I wish the EU would make some huge investments - yes, I know it is socialism. Why not connect all the major hubs? Why should it not be possible to go from Lisbon to Moscow by high speed train? Build 4 tracks, two for transportation of passengers, 2 for freight. The Transrapid was a stupid idea but rail is an established technology and can be improved easily.
Also, Trains are run by electricity which can be created through nuclear energy (Thorium reactors in the future etc.). I see a point in the future, where we DON'T have the resources to build such an infrastructure anymore:
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/
Slightly off-topic but the Royal Mail used to run a network of nine 'Mail Rail' stations underneath London with small trains that moved general mail around. They were discovered in 2011 by a group of photographers exploring abandoned tube stations.
I do wish Baltics had something similar to ghost trains but I understand it is the privilege of richer countries.
The train infrastructure has fallen badly since Soviet times and it will be another 20 years until Rail Baltica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_Baltica will be completed(that is politics and economics willing).
In 1930s you could take a train from Riga to Berlin in 14 hours(I have the original poster), from what I understand the only way you can make the same route is by going Riga-Moscow-Berlin which is not very convenient or making taking a lot of local trains http://www.seat61.com/Latvia.htm#Moving on
Pretty much every Amtrak line outside of the Northeast or the West Coast is a "ghost route" in the sense the article describes. I took the Sunset Limited as a kid once from New Orleans to Mobile. Aside from my dad and my brother, there was one other passenger on the train. That leg of the route was cancelled after Katrina washed out the rail bridges in 2005; they've since been restored, but the train service hasn't.
You should get out more. My family and I ride Amtrak from California to Colorado. That 1 train is always busy. In a first-world country, there would be 2 trains/day instead of the single train.
There's not really any market justification for running it in the first place (aside from what value it has for scenic purposes), nor is there ever likely to be.
A flight from Denver to San Francisco is $150-200 roundtrip and takes about 2 hours. A train from Denver to Emeryville (the train doesn't even go into the city) takes about 33 hours and costs $220 and hemorrhages money so badly that each passenger is a loss of $150+ even with that price.
You could dump 100 billion into it, making it true HSR and not having any intermediate stops, and it still won't be time competitive, and obviously won't be cost competitive. The distances are too large.
I support the HSR corridors, and more commuter services in the urban/semi-urban areas. But with the long distances and zero population density of most of the American West, the cross-country routes often make little sense beyond basically being a long scenic railway.
As someone who rides the train I can tell you that you are very, very wrong.
In the winter lots of people ride it to Reno.
Families ride it from Winnemucca, NV to Green River, UT. Kids ride it (by themselves) between Reno and Winnemucca.
Lots of families ride it that can't afford the airfare for all of them. Or they have too much luggage, or they live in rural areas that are hours away from the nearest major airport.
Unlike an airplane that is point to point - the train connects people in the in-between places to other in-between places.
Between SFO and Chicago, Amtrak sells each seat in the zepher about 3-4x.
I know that the train will be crowded between bay area and reno ( filled with people that don't exist apparently ). It will empty out at Reno. Gradually refill across nevada, utah and western colorado. Empty out again in Denver. And then refill to chicago.
And yes I have met people who are taking the train all the way.
Traveling by train is way more than just getting there.
And that airfare from SFO-DEN - that is fantasy - esp around christmas.
Hmmm - I believe I did. From a single person's perspective: it is expensive to fly from winnemucca,nv to say green river, ut.
And as far as the whole "does not pay" / "subsidies" - that is a nonsense argument because no one applies that standard to the interstate highway system or to airports.
This frustrates me to no end; I live in NO and would love to be able to get to Jacksonville, Pensacola, Mobile or Orlando without the interminably boring drive down I-10...
Some of these routes will probably never be viable on their own, but the segments of track might be needed some day as a detour. For instance if a bridge somewhere needed to be out of service for a year or something.
For example, one of the more famous "ghost trains" (since it's in London) is the daily Paddington to West Ruislip service. Since they're both served by the underground there wouldn't be much need for a mainline train between them. If long-term work disrupted that connection they might want to temporarily run a regular service on that line though.
If you just abandoned the track, you wouldn't know its condition when you needed it. Just as important, the regulators wouldn't let you run passengers using crew that hadn't been trained on that line.
So just running an occasional train and rotating staff through it, the line and the skills are always kept sharp. Then if you suddenly need that bit of track in an emergency it's ready to go.
And since you're going to run a train anyway, you might as well sell a few tickets if people want to join you.