At least aircraft have almost infinite sky to play in, except for those fiddly landing bits.
Trains have an annoying tendency of trying to compete for the one piece of rail while wanting to go in opposite directions. A few times lately we’ve found that they find this desire irresistible and they have a good ol’ bonk.
If they only had some that could bear the load of national traffic.
In Europe, the security theater installed after 9/11 was a godsend for the trains. Suddenly, saving an hour by going by plane instead of bullet train didn’t matter anymore if you had to waste hours waiting at the airport security queues.
Two tough (but important) reminders for the US this week:
- You can’t rely on Big Tech.
- You need a national high speed train system.
WELP.
Ok.
They’re rushing AI/LLM integration because they lost the midterms.
They’ll all be scrutinized, not funded, impeached, etc, so they have to do what they were either paid to do and/or will personally lose a ton of money if they do not do… NOW.
So we are basically getting the ‘logistics week’ version of DOGE, right now.
At this rate I wouldn’t be surprised if they manage to break like, turnpikes, toll bridges, truck weigh in stations, port authorities, alllll that kinda shit.
… God help us if they attempt to ‘install AI’ into our powergrid, dams, water treatment facilities.
EDIT
Also, the last thread you and I were commenting on…
… doesn’t exist any more?
???
Lemmy is acting like it doesn’t exist for me, but maybe thats a problem on my end… somehow?
Or maybe its just the whole comment chain we were on???
Yeep, that sure seems like a pretty good read on the situation. Really not looking forward to the next few weeks of them grabbing everything they can and running. They’re already trying to AI-ify foodstamps for “fraud detection” which is just fucking insane. Revolutions start when people go hungry and hoo boy 6 million people is a lot of gambling on apathy…
(IDK why that post was removed, but it appears to have been removed. The OP might have deleted it or the mods??)
edit: Oh
Knowing the .world admin, news moderation team, my guess would be:
The title of the post indicated that the groundstop order is currently in effect, as of ~30 min ago, it has been lifted, so the post title does not reflect reality, therefore this news event and the discussion it spawned now need to be euthanized, to prevent the spread of misinformation.
… something like that, that seems like jordanlund logic to me.
Sure, let me just drive several hours to get to the nearest station :)
Now imagine if there was a local train line that leads to a rapid train line instead of a 8 lane highway
See, and that’s exactly why we should have more trains.
And just how are you supposed to get a train there? There’s no tracks! This cockamamie plan will never work!
You can lay down rail tracks…
American passenger trains suck, though.
Just as expensive as flying, except that it takes days of travel time instead of hours. And there are very few stations – some entire states don’t have a single passenger rail station.
Well, yeah. There’s a reason planes got popular in the US, place is fuckin’ huge, takes a while to get anywhere especially thru the mountains. Well, that and our rail service was systematically crippled by a long series of utter fucking bastards so that people had no choice, that contributed too. But hey, it could be worse; we could be stuck with Deutsche Bahn…
(FWIW the only states without are South Dakota and Wyoming last I checked (well and hawaii/alaska), and lets be real the kind of person that would take a train would never want to go to SD/WY. Real pretty scenery - real ugly everything else.)
Hey at least deutsche bahn has connections and a lot of rail. You can at least theoretically get somewhere using DB
It’s easy to have vast amounts of pristine rail if you never wear it out by doing something crazy like “running trains on it”. Seriously wtf is going on with that system - the last two interurban trips I tried to take on DB both involved going approximately to the city limits before getting stuck onto a coach bus because there was some massive technical failure that shut down the whole system. Like nah I’ll happily take Amtrak over that shitshow. Sure it’s slow and useless if you’re trying to go anywhere that isn’t between the country’s largest metro areas, but it’s reliably and predictably slow and useless. Moribundity you can count on!
(And non-sarcastically, even tho it sucks there’s straightforward ways to improve it pretty rapidly. It’s bad for sure, but it’s still shockingly useful for the few areas it’s able to be useful in. The incredible amount of overhauling that needs to be done for DB is… well, I’m glad it’s not my problem to deal with because holy shit is that a mess. Starting from nothing does have some perks and, yknow, at least amtrak’s radios don’t melt when it gets a bit warm out)
the kind of person that would take a train would never want to go to SD/WY
But people who live in SD/WY might want to go other places?
Do people live there? I think that’s just a legend.
If you want a real answer, it’s because WY/SD have such a small and low-density population that there’s not really anywhere useful to put a train station. And yeah, obviously in an ideal world it would be better to have them connected with passenger rail for the usual host of very good reasons. But, with the limited resources and the minuscule (but growing!) ridership on Amtrak, it would be a tremendous expenditure to extend coverage and would grant no real benefit to the people living there that isn’t better served with intermittent air travel or their current car-centric infrastructure.
If you want a slightly less real, but possibly more honest, answer: Ew, no, fuckem they can stay put in their racist little shitholes. They wanted this, they can figure out how to cope with the result.
So it is not just flyover country, but also drivethrough country, too?
“Pass-through states” is what I’ve heard them called in logistics. Awful places, beautiful landscapes.
Sure, but do the people in those other places want them there?
Well, North Dakota got a station, and we all know that North Dakota is Worst Dakota.
i regularly take an interstate trip on amtrak. $99 round trip, takes 8hrs vs a 5 hour drive.
That’s because American rail tracks have never been built for speed. Some time ago there was an article about a new (or completely rebuilt) track, and they were happy to save a few million on the project by building it in a way that limits the speed to 80-100mph, instead of spending just a few percent more that could have enabled 200mph for bullet trains.
I tried to take an Amtrak from Albuquerque to Denver, a 7ish hour drive. The train is over a day, i think closing in on 2 days. And about 4 times the price of a plane ticket.
Just out of curiosity where about are you taking this? Amtrak in the northeast corridor is a vastly different service from Amtrak in the rest of the country.
Tbf that’s true of any service. Internet, cellular, interstate, etc. it’s wildly different living in the West before you hit the coast.
texas eagle
Interesting, the stuff I usually look at for examples is Midwest areas. For instance Cleveland to New York city is around a 7 and to 8 hour drive but Amtrak schedules it at 13 hours and I guarantee that route will have a delay.
yeah that tracks. delays are common, and it tends to be a little under twice the drive time.
i wouldnt call it convenient travel, but for my ride its definitely cheaper than driving or flying.
Ah, that explains it. You guys are already used to moseying along, so the time the train takes doesn’t bother you.
Still ridiculous that it’s slower than driving.
And that’s a very short trip. Most people wouldn’t take a plane anyway to go somewhere that’s a 5-hour drive away. So I don’t think that’s very representative of what it would be like for the average person to replace an airline trip with a rail trip.
And trains aren’t immune to computer outages either, control rooms are basically all computerised.
Uh oh
FRASCC ADVZY 111 DCC 11/13/2026 NATIONAL RAIL AIR EVENT TIME: 13/2053 - 14/0400 MESSAGE:
DUE TO EXTRAORDINARY CIRCUMSTANCES AND FOR REASONS OF SAFETY.
ATTENTION ALL LOCOMOTIVE OPERATORS, BY ORDER OF THE FEDERAL RAILROAD COMMAND CENTER ALL STATIONS AND YARDS ARE AIRED.
ALL DEPARTING TRAINS SHOULD REMAIN AIRED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
INBOUND CROSS-BORDER CONSISTS WILL BE MANAGED ON A CASE BY CASE BASIS.
EFFECTIVE TIME: 132054-140430 SIGNATURE: 26/11/13 20:54
Funny that Amtrak went down for a while too.
Ah yes, if I want to visit my mom in Atlanta, I can take the Amtrak train which takes 34 hours, ten minutes. Or I could take any number of dozens of flights that leave every day and be there in ~45 minutes.
Note: The train tickets are about 3x more expensive too.
now imagine if the government invested in a train you could take to be there in 3 h total without checkin/security that runs multiple times per day
Well you do if you want to visit her right now…
I know someone stuck in Honolulu. I should suggest this to them. Maybe we need a chunnel!
Nope. AI runs that shit too.
Does it? PSR sucks, but there’s so many outright analog systems that I haven’t heard of any broad AI rollouts (outside of maintenance prediction and freight routing, which has gone great. None I’ve heard of for scheduling, though.)
trains
Planes
…and my axe!
Autobots
Now you’ve made everybody of a certain age or fandom think of automobiles.
