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How far can you go by train in 5h?

chronotrains-eu.vercel.app

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Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#111

Post by asdajksah2123 »

aj7 wrote: post #76
PeterHolzwarth wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America actually has a rather vast and impressive rail system. It's just used almost entirely for shipping.

Exactly. People’s time is too valuable when per capita GDP is $60k.

And that's why they prefer a mode of transport that requires you to drive an hour outside the city in traffic, arrive at least an hour before your flight so you can go through the indignity of airport security, take an hour long flight, and then wait for bags and then drive an hour back into your destination city in traffic?

Total time 4 hrs.

Or they prefer driving through traffic from one city to the other for 4.5 hrs where they have to have complete concentration so they literally don't die and kill a bunch of other people?

As opposed to a 4.5 hr train ride where they have lots of seating space, an extremely comfortable ride with great views where they can basically just sleep through the trip and/or work comfortably on their laptops with great wifi?

These are not hypotheticals. These are literally your options if you were to travel from NYC to Boston.

All the modes of transport take about 4-5 hrs. Train is significantly better in almost every way. The only problem is that Amtrak subsidizes the rest of its highly unprofitable network which means they price gouge the NorthEast corridor and under invest in it, making it more expensive, and not as good as it should be.

Even with a sub par train service relative to European and Asian counterparts, train is easily the best option on this route.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#113

Post by woodruffw »

fatnoah wrote: post #97
woodruffw wrote: post #43

For the Europeans on HN: on the East coast of the US, the furthest you can get by train in ~5h is roughly Boston to NYC, or NYC to Washington, DC. Both are roughly equidistant (~220 miles, ~354 kilometers). One of the perverse things with our passenger rail network is that you can actually take take trains that "only" take 2.5 hours, but: they run nonstop point-to-point, and any subsequent connection you make (e.g. t…

Boston to Philadelphia a closer approximation. The Acela is scheduled for 5h 1m for that trip. I travel between Boston and New York by train frequently, and even the slower regional service takes < 4 hours. Either way, still not a great comparison to Europe.

Sorry, this was confusing wording on my part -- I was trying to say that Boston/NY or NY/DC is consistently under 5 hours, and that just about everything else is over 5 hours, illustrating a gap in our network.

NYC to DC is also consistently around 3.5 hours, even with the slower NE Regional.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#114

Post by Kon-Peki »

gregsadetsky wrote: post #71
arnaudsm wrote: post #53

I'm impressed by the low latency, great job sir

Indeed, it's very well done. Each isochrone is loaded from a static server/CDN -- for example https://chronotrains-eu.vercel.app/api/isochrones/7100002 -- and that bit of vector map data is then rendered using the mapbox gl/js frontend. Great work

Unfortunately it's been hugged to death.

I wonder if it loads the entire set of isochrones when you open the page, given how incredibly responsive it is. I tried to share it with someone who would really enjoy it, but alas, no luck at all.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#115

Post by redtexture »

chrisfinazzo wrote: post #60
dahart wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly our 1000 mile trips currently take ~24 hours rather than the 5-6 that it could. Multiple factors for that: slow trains; long stops; cargo rail gets priority over passenger rail.

Yep. Even the fastest trains Amtrak offers ("Acela") are zoned - or permitted, not sure what the right term is here - up to 150 MPH, and only on specific portions of the route. Makes no sense at all.

The sense is that the Northeast corridor has too many curves and roadbed issues to be able to go faster.

There would have to be constructed a new corridor, not in the same path as existing railroad rights of way, for not a small amount of money, and going through expensive real estate.

The political will for that is not in existence, so far.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#116

Post by aj7 »

maeln wrote: post #18

You can really see the Paris-centric approach in France: From Paris you can reach almost any other major city in 4h, but on the other hand, all the other metropolis can barely reach 1/4th of the other major population center in 4h. Compare this to Germany where almost any major metropolis can reach 80% of the country in 4h ...

These are countries the size of Oregon.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#117

Post by decafninja »

qalmakka wrote: post #22

As a European it boggles my mind seeing how trains are basically non-existent in the USA (just look at Houston station), given how dominant the whole "Wild West" railroad rush is in everybody's immagination. Railroads are super ubiquitous here, and we've to work with a pretty hostile terrain - Italy has lots of mountains, hills, rivers, and yet has one of the best networks in the world. Most of the USA are basically…

I'm visiting Italy in a month and have multiple tickets booked on Italo's Club Executive class. The seats look sweet and the price was surprisingly affordable. Looking forward to see how good it is.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#118

Post by bobthepanda »

chrismartin wrote: post #104
black_puppydog wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also shows an effect that the focus on high speed rail brings: rural areas are often very badly connected. Here in France they've even kept shutting down regional lines. That creates the train equivalent of "fly-over states": areas that you see from the train while going through, but that it would be impractical to go to .

Has anyone considered the following? In a small town, you have a section of track running parallel to high speed rail. The track has a small and short "local" train (maybe just a couple of cars) that picks up passengers and accelerates to maybe 80 MPH, while the high-speed train slows to the same speed. The trains run next to each other for a couple of miles, some doors open between them, and people can step between…

It has been considered and basically it’s not really reliable or practical or safe.

Re: How far can you go by train in 5h?

#119

Post by jmkb »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #14

I delight in isochrone maps[0]! There used to be some open source, web interfaces but they all became commercial. An isochrone map is one of the best tools for weekend get-aways, job hunting, and finding a home location. OpenStreetMap[1]! Add it to your site, it will be great hit, in my opinion. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isochrone_map [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org

GeoApify[0] is one of these commercial services using OpenStreetMap data. They have a no-friction isochrone "playground"[1] that's sufficient for casual exploration. You can switch the travel mode to "transit" to include train routes, but the maximum travel time for the demo is capped at one hour.

The results are very different, eg chronotrains-eu.vercel.app claims that Wittenberge is within an hour of Berlin Hauptbahnhof, but GeoApify won't take you further than Nauen. Possibly chronotrains-eu is showing a best-case travel time while GeoApify is attempting to calculate realtime travel using the current day's schedules?

I doubt the main OSM site would ever host an isochrone demo, as it's more of a reference implementation of very basic map and routing features that OSM data enables. Notably, the routing demos there do not (yet) include any kind of transit mode.

[0] https://www.geoapify.com

[1] https://apidocs.geoapify.com/playground/isoline

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