I haven’t been able to find details to answer this. I’m wondering because my friends live a few counties over and near a rail, but there’s no passenger route that goes to them, so I could either drive one hour or take nine hours of busses (lol not kidding). The more I explored Google Maps, the more rail lines I saw weren’t being used for passenger service. Most of these used to be passenger lines but were discontinued.
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Something like 98%.
The vast, vast majority.
It’d be easier to find maps of heavy rail transit. There’s Amtrak and I don’t know about the east coast from Connecticut to DC.
The Puget Sound has rush hour only heavy rail transit, from Puyallup to Seattle and from Everett to Seattle (then the opposite direction in the evening).
Almost all of it.
AMTRAK only owns something like 3% of the rail in the country, and it’s the biggest passenger railroad by far.
All of it. Where there are passengers, Amtrak treats us like freight or worse.
There are about 145,000 miles of rail track in the United States, and it is estimated that roughly 80% is currently used for freight rail only.
I don’t know the exact percentage, but it’s the vast majority.
You can look at Amtrak’s route map at: [https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/Maps/Amtrak-System-Map-1018.pdf](https://www.amtrak.com/content/dam/projects/dotcom/english/public/documents/Maps/Amtrak-System-Map-1018.pdf)
. . .only the red lines on that map are Amtrak rail routes, the green lines are connecting bus routes.
Now compare that to various maps of the entire US rail infrastructure:
[https://www.openrailwaymap.org/](https://www.openrailwaymap.org/)
[https://railroads.dot.gov/maps-and-data/maps-geographic-information-system/maps-geographic-information-system](https://railroads.dot.gov/maps-and-data/maps-geographic-information-system/maps-geographic-information-system)
(On both of those you need to zoom in to see most railways, it’s a very dense map).
The US has roughly 140,000 miles of standard-gauge rail in total. Amtrak only uses about 21,000 miles of track on all their rails (and that includes some of their routes that stretch into southern Canada), and only *owns* about 630 miles of track (the rest is rail owned by freight railways they use).
The amount of non-Amtrak passenger rail in the US is statistically insignificant, especially once you exclude things like heritage railways and short-range commuter rail.
almost all of it.
[the US freight network runs on about 137,000 route miles](https://railroads.dot.gov/rail-network-development/freight-rail-overview), and Amtrak runs on 21,400 route miles. That makes about ~~1.56%~~ 15.6% of the rail which is used for passenger service.
Of that, Amtrak owns about 600 miles itself. There are some other bits and pieces that are owned by state governments, and some under construction like the CAHSR project and the Raleigh-Richmond line. There are also a couple of privately-owned passenger lines, like Brightline in florida and the Texas Central project in (you guessed it) Texas.
edit: worth noting; some of the privately-owned rail around major cities is also used for local commuter/regional rail operated by local transit authorities like Metra, MTA, SEPTA, etc. which I haven’t included here. So the true percentage might be a couple of tenths of a percent higher.
Nearly all of it. In the 1970s, the government formed Amtrak so rail companies can focus on freight only.
The vast majority. For passenger travel we invented this thing called the aeroplane. You may have heard of it.
I’m being snarky but there’s a point to that. Trains are best when your concern is purely inflexible large scale loads. Aircraft are best for speed. Autos are best for flexibility. We have what works for our needs. Cargo needs that inflexibility and scale for costs. Passengers don’t, they want to get there. Rail works for Europe because their routes are much smaller than ours in more dense areas where auto traffic is a huge hassle. People need to remember that not every solution that they likes is practical in every situation.
Many of these tracks (and completely unused tracks) did at one time have passenger trains. Most of those passenger trains were discontinued prior to the 1971 Amtrak takeover though.
Most of it.
And its represented in the amount of passenger vs freight travel miles per year. Passenger miles traveled is 32.5 billion and freight miles traveled is 2100 billion.
We drive using cars and buses here. I wish we had more but thats how it goes. The US is much less densely populated and thats a lot of distance to cover by rail. Instead you generally need a car to work anyway so you just use that for travel anyway
Something like 99%.
This question is even more relevant when you realize that the railroad workers are close to striking, deadline being tomorrow.
Look up Lostinthepond on youtube
Probably 90%+
I don’t know the exact amount, but its the vast vast majority.
About 84% is dedicated for freight-only. Another 13% is shared with commuter trains. I don’t know how many trains that implies, but in my area (midsized city), there is a freight train that passes about every half hour, while there are precisely two commuter trains that pass through per day (the one in the morning goes west, the one in the evening goes east). That leaves about 3% dedicated to commuters if I’m doing my math correctly.