Here in Germany, the main railway firm Deutsche Bahn has a really bad reputation. For being unpunctual, inability to expand their existing infrastructure. How is it in America? Are they state owned or private? DB is mostly state owned.

50 comments

  1. Our freight rail network is probably the single best bulk transportation network in the world. Our passenger rail network is quite limited, and is state-owned trains running on private track for the most part.

  2. For passengers, it’s not great. Speeds are low and delays are common as freight trains often have priority. Taking the “high speed” rail from Philadelphia to Boston is barely faster than driving.

    Some cities have commuter rail that is OK. For my region, that is SEPTA. Trains are usually on time but headways are awful, one train an hour on weekends for most regional lines.

    But the US freight rail system is probably the best in the world.

    Amtrak is a quasi-public for-profit corporation. Most track is privately owned.

  3. Almost all rail in the US is privately owned with the exception of a handful of commuter rails run by cities/states/regions. Amtrak, the national passenger rail service which is kind-of-sort-of a private company, owns most of the northeast corridor rails for their routes between DC and Boston but mainly operates on freight rails.

    The tracks are designed for freight rail through most of the US and honestly some of the conditions of the tracks aren’t that great. One of the things the railroad workers were complaining about during negotiations is the track quality, meaning that the trains have to run slower and then it takes longer to get places and makes shifts longer.

    I was recently in Alburqurque, New Mexico which doesn’t have much freight rail going through it. I think they have one line on the edge of town. Otherwise they get like 15 commuter trains a day and an Amtrak train and that’s it. The lack of freight rail noise was a welcome change of pace compared to my home of Indianapolis, which is home to several CSX freight rail yards and a lot of lines crisscross into neighborhoods and across major surface level streets. Amtrak also has a repair facility on the southside of town.

  4. Amtrak serves it’s purpose

    I believe it’s basically owned by the government

    Very few people use it except in the northeast

  5. I have used DB extensively and still find it to be WAY better than American passenger rail.

    That should tell you a lot.

  6. It’s pretty good. For freight.

    Passenger rail is run by Amtrak, which is a government-funded company. It barely exists outside a few small regions. Large swathes of the country, especially the western part, don’t know it’s even an option for travel (and to be fair, it’s a pretty sad option compared to planes for any longer trip). I was in my 30’s the first time I saw a passenger rail train that wasn’t a tourist attraction.

  8. The commuter rail lines in my are is fairly reliable. The subway used to be pretty good, but there have been breakdown issues the past several years.

    I haven’t taken interstate rail trips since the ‘90s. It was ok then.

  9. Amazing for freight.
    Not so much for passengers.
    Anything passenger is public owned, meaning the operation, not the rails themselves. Amtrak is operated as a for profit company, but is a government controlled company

  11. It’s been 9 years since I moved back from Germany, and I understand Deutsche Bahn’s reputation has declined since then. But I was pretty impressed for the 6 years I lived there, particularly the ICE corridor from Basel to Koeln.

    For the US, Amtrak does a pretty decent job connecting the cities in the Northeast, particularly.for business travel, but it borders on unuseable for all but the slowest leisure travel elsewhere. Maybe the sleeper service between Virginia and Orlando that also allows you to bring your car is another useful route.

    As others have noted, our freight network is much better than passenger service, although few Americans will notice.

  12. I rate it 🐕💩 and I’ve traveled by train in a dozen or more countries. I prefer the actual train cars and tracks from WWII in Thailand used to transport allied POW’s over Amtrak. Not kidding.

    Most our tracks are privately owned. However our national and most local passenger trains are publicly held.

    Amtrak is not on time most the time. The trains are decent but the ride is awful due to the tracks. At least that’s what Amtrak tells me when I got thrown out of a bed at 2 in the morning on a train trip.

    The passengers are one notch above Greyhound bus passengers. That’s our cross country bus line and you never want to use it.

    Lastly, the employees of Amtrak are de facto federal government employees. That means they have very little accountability for anything short of killing a passenger in a racially motivated attack. Most are great people but if you use the train regularly you’ll encounter some folks who DGAF about you let alone customer service.

  13. So, we have a federal rail network, Amtrak, which is intended for long-distance travel. It does not have a good reputation for punctuality, but it is a comfortable, cheap ride. Besides that, every major metro area administers its own subway or light rail systems. This limits the extent to which rail travel is available, since the custom-ness of it all makes it more expensive to build on a per-mile basis.

  14. I like Amtrak and WMATA. Great for getting me home for the holidays, since I hate driving

  15. Never been on a train and don’t even know where the nearest one is besides the ones that haul freight

  18. I don’t know because I’ve never been able to take a train anywhere I’d like to go, and I’ve checked. But it probably sucks based on my attempts.

    Last time I looked was a few years ago. It was going to be more expensive than flying, and take over 24 hours (longer than the drive time and not including the 3 hour drive to the closest station) because of a layover in the middle of the night.

    I decided I didn’t want to spend more money to find out how safe I would feel alone in a public train station at 2am.

  19. I would say that it would be meaningless to rate it on a national scale. The vast majority of railway use here is regional, and the quality of the system varies from region to region.

  20. With a few exceptions passenger rail travel isn’t popular because it combines some of the worst elements of air travel- the expense and not having your own car at your destination and limits of the luggage you can take, with some of the worst elements of ground travel- how loooooong it takes. Passenger rail is a government company (because no private company is willing to do it) called Amtrak that runs on privately owned rails.

    There was a brief time when the government owned freight rails in the Northeast, Conrail, but this was privatized in 1999.

  22. I actually don’t think I’ve ever been on a (non-subway) train in the USA.

    There’s a train not too far from me that I hear really good things about. I think it’s thought of as comfortable and easy to understand.

    They just expanded the train networks in my state, and while it’s still early, initial reactions are that it seems expensive compared to driving.

  23. I love Amtrak, but it’s terrible. The biggest issue is that they use the same rail lines as freight but freight gets priority. So my friend took Amtrak this summer and I was going to pick her up and her train was held for an hour and a half just before her destination because a freight train was passing and they had to pull over to let it pass. We’re getting better rail slowly but it’s pretty dismal at the moment.

  25. 2/10 by and large its worthless outside of small regions of the country where at best we have a moderate quality equivalent of commuter rail.

    Trains (Amtrak) are generally ok about being punctual (compared to other forms of public transit) but suffer regular delays and cancelation. Inside cities and sometimes states our commuter rail is good for getting folks to and from work in the standard 9-5ish range but particularly bad for things like nightlife. In the cities that have a functioning metro/subway there’s a constant struggle of upkeep and funding but by and large that’s as good as it gets.

  26. I did a long distance train ride on DB (Mannheim to Berlin) when I was 16.

    I did my first Amtrak ride when I was 18 (Albany to NYC).

    I spent the whole time wondering why we couldn’t do it the German way.

  27. I live in california and the only trains I’ve ever ridden on were in theme parks…

  28. I’m taking Amtrak next week and I’m honestly just praying the train doesn’t derail while I’m on it.

  29. Some of the major cities have commuter rail between the center of the city and the suburbs, like [Metra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metra) in Chicago.

    The only other way to be a train passenger in the US is on [Amtrak](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amtrak). It is a government-owned corporation that runs itself, like the post office. Outside of the strip from Boston-NYC-Philadelphia-Washington DC is it not worthwhile to consider as a serious option to go somewhere. It’s either going to be too slow, inconvenient, or expensive compared to alternatives.

    The freight rail system is excellent.

    I’m very pro-train and transit. A long time ago the country/government decided to focus passenger travel on airplanes and highways rather than trains. There are two reasons that trains aren’t considered a viable way to get around in the US.

    The US is really big. All of Germany is the same size as Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio put together. Moscow to Lisbon is 2400 miles. New York City to Los Angeles is about the same distance. Would you take a train for that journey and spend 3 days on a train each way or would you rather take a 5-6 hour flight instead?

    The other reason is that most of our country was built pretty recently, the last century and especially since WWII. Cars existed in that time so everything was built assuming cars were available. Even if there happened to be a train from where you are to the city you want to go to, once you get there, you’ll be stranded at the train station. It’s not like how I could take a train to Munich and then take transit from there to the house of a relative I want to visit or have several days worth of tourism stuff to do within walking and transit distance of downtown Munich. In the US that’d only be the situation in about a dozen major cities. Thousands of small and medium and even smaller-large cities will have no way to get around or much of anything near where the train station would be.

  30. It’s convenient and really pretty good in the Northeast Corridor (Washington D.C. to Boston). There is a cluster of densely populated cities, all connected by Amtrak and most having their own commuter rail networks independent of Amtrak as well. People have said Amtrak isn’t a bad option to get around in the Midwest (Chicago/Great Lakes Area), but I can’t vouch from personal experience because I’ve never ridden it out there.

    Outside of that, it falls out of favor a bit as a means of transportation as routes become more sparse. The Silverstar between New York and Miami is usually pretty busy, but if I understand it that’s because it only runs the route once a day. The cross-country route is mostly a tourist attraction if you’re looking to see some stunning views via train. I don’t think many people use it as a serious way to commute cross country given how long it takes.

  33. I am amused that you think we have a viable passenger rail system.

    I always think it’s a shame, one of the biggest endeavors in the 19th century was the railroad. There was actually a race to connect the East and West coast, it was a huge deal (and a huge cost in regards to human lives), there was a ceremony where the tracks met and a golden spike, the time needed to cross the country was reduced from weeks to days, it was amazing.

    Then the car was invented. Then WW2 happened and Eisenhower was so impressed by the autobahn that creating the interstate highways became his goal.

    And no shade, the interstates are also amazing, but they were the death of passenger rail in the US.

  36. The rail network here is focused on freight in our huge country. There are lots of heavy goods that need to be moved thousands of miles. It’s incredibly economical transportation. It’s first class, with a very good reputation.

    There are much better ways to move people those equivalent distances. Freight cars get their efficiency from not having to start and stop multiple times. Once they are at speed, they keep rolling as much as possible, minimizing fuel use.

    The US rail network has 2.5 times more miles than the next closest one, and its efficiency is optimized in its role as a freight transporter.

  37. Any kind of passenger service is not a single system. We have Amtrak but many of the routes are disconnected from each other.

    We do have reason to be optimistic though. We are building a California High Speed Rail system here in California, its really the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere and will link up 24 or so stations when completed. Phase 1 is not expected to be completed until the 2030s. Its expected to be 220mph (350kph) in the dedicated zones (which they are building now) and 110mph in the blended zones. This will be the fastest rail in the entire western hemisphere. This one train line is going to justify a bunch of local investment into transit to connect communities to the HSR Stations.

    Brightline is a brand new privately owned system in Florida and they are building Brightline West that will link up Southern California to Las Vegas. The Brightline in Florida just expanded their route and you can watch some review videos on YouTube. People are pretty optimistic about it. As people start using Brightline it will justify expansions. It would be great if they could pull of Atalanta to Miami as that is one of the more popular airline trips in the country.

  38. Freight rail network is excellent. Passenger rail, not so much. It actually used to be better until the early to mid-20th century when rail lines were removed to make way for roads.

    HSR is really viable in the northeast and certain high traffic corridors between major cities. You also have significant barriers like bureaucratic red tape (see California’s project) and geographic issues which make high speed rail difficult and costly to build.

  39. I lived in Japan for years, where nearly every tiny village has a passenger train station, even if it’s just an unmanned little waiting area. If the train is two minutes late, there are apologetic announcements.

    In the U.S. I’ve been on a train once, between Los Angeles and San Diego and it was nice. But nothing that you could use on a habitual basis or for commuting

  40. Horrible for obvious reasons, Freight Trains are the only thing that are good.

  41. Folks really gotta understand that trains are used very differently here…and again, how BIG we are. Germany is roughly the size of Montana…ONE STATE…out of 49 that are accessible by land.

    We don’t have an intricate, long-distance railway system. Planes and cars are simply faster.

    Trains as transportation really only have significant value within highly populated areas where driving is a nightmare. Big major cities, with over a million people. Those cities often have very elaborate subway or train systems, but they mostly stick to just within that city.

    The ACTUAL value of trains in the U.S. is freight transportation. That is what we primarily rely on trains for.

    I could “rate” the system, but the the thing is…what train system?

    * The subway system(s)? Well, everywhere that has one is different and they aren’t connected.

    * Long distance/cross country? Most haven’t traveled that enough to really have a valuable opinion on it.

    * The freight system, which is what we mainly use trains for? Folks aren’t riding those.

  43. Amtrak along the East Coast is amazing. Not so much through the rest of the country 🙁

  46. In terms of moving freight–top notch. Nearly all (all?) freight rail is privately owned.

    In terms of moving passengers–bottom barrel. Most passenger rail is owned by Amtrak, which is a US owned corporation. (Note passenger rail and freight rail use the same tracks in most of this country, and often freight gets prioritized.)

    We’ve emphasized more profitable freight in this country, which is why its easy to find relatively inexpensive goods all throughout this country. And for much of this country long-distance rail makes little sense: if you think the ride from Frankfurt to Berlin is long–just get a load of how long it would take to cover a 4,000 km ride from New York to Los Angeles…

  47. I did a rail trip down the east coast and it was great. Relaxing, good scenery, and very spacious. Easy to get in and out. Good value for the price, especially compared to the horrors of traveling coach by air. It had fewer delays and a better on-time record than air, as well.

    I’ve often used shorter distance trains, as well. The ones from my town to the nearest big city are picturesque, spacious, nearly empty, clean, and on time. It’s a million times better than driving the same route. I get there in a fraction of the time and zero traffic or parking to contend with. It’s also much cheaper than paying for gas how prices are.

    Now, years ago, i used to take a train on a very popular commuter line between to mid-sized cities It was crowded, often delayed, and a bit worse for the wear, but it was cheap and convenient.

  48. USA has the biggest freight rail in the world and until recently, it was carrying more volume of goods on its rails than China or entire EU + Russia. Its marshalling yards are still the biggest in the world. Its freight operating companies are one the most efficient in the world. It is the passenger rail services that sucks and it is very small.

  49. Freight rail is quite efficient. Aside from the Boston-Washington corridor, passenger rail is often slow, inconvenient and expensive compared to driving or flying.

  50. What railway system /j

    But really, I don’t live in either of the two largest cities in my state so there isn’t any train I could take

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