> If Amtrak was subsidized on the same level as the
> airline or car transportation is, the 7pm departure would
> arrive at Penn Station around 8am next day.
Maybe not. That's about a 950 mile trip (730 by air), and a 12 hour schedule? You want to compare to Europe, so let's look at a comparable train trip in Europe (actually a fairly difficult task, since Europe is much more compact): London->Rome via: Eurostar to Paris; TGV to Milan; and ES* to Rome: all three legs are modern, "fast" trains, heavily subsidized by their respective governments. I see the best connection gets you there in just about 17 hours: depart 06:19 arrive 23:30. Or you can travel overnight, and it takes longer (with a nice 3am connection to break up your sleeping patterns). Even on the 17 hour trip, it's about a 40 minute connection in Paris (Eurostar comes into Gare du Nord and TGV leaves from Gare de Lyon; fortunately you can take the RER between them) and just about an hour in Milano Centrale before heading to Roma. So call it 15 hours of actually travelling ...
(And if Doug thinks that airfare prices in the US are "insane" he should look at the 20 or so prices you and your seatmate can have on Eurostar ...)
Amtrak's Lakeshore Limited is a same-train service with only a few (scheduled) stops along the way: Albany for half an hour to hook up with cars from Boston; Buffalo for water; Cleveland and Toledo for connections to busses. In 1949, the Broadway Limited (on a different route than the current one, but still) used to make the trip from Chicago to New York in just over 16 hours, but the current ~19 is still quite respectable.
> That would actually save you time and money vis a vis the
> airplane. To be in Manhattan at 8 AM by plane, you would
> have to leave Chicago the day before and then stay in a hotel
> at $250+ per night.
Well ... if you want to spend the night in a coach seat, yes. But if you want an Amtrak bedroom, figure spending that $250 (more, actually: Viewliner rooms are $334, but you get a discount on the transportation part ... $402 one way total) anyway ...
There's an overnight train Paris->Rome (London->Paris on Eurostar can be added to make this realistic) that takes 14:30 and costs under $200 for a cheap bed (6-berth room) off-peak or as low as $120 with lots of restrictions.
You also can't really look at Shinkansen in Japan, because the longest link is about 4.5 hours: Japan is a very small place, there's no two cities that are 1,000 miles apart ...
> Trains and planes operate in different yet complementing
> market niches where each has distinctive advantages. Europeans
> learned that long time ago, but people who call themselves
> the government in this country seem incapable of grasping
> that obvious fact.
I'm not so sure I get what the "obvious fact" is in this case either.
/jordan