The Sad and Awful Way We Destroyed the World's Greatest Passenger Rail

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This should have been called "How to get depressed in 17 minutes."

When people say the USA is too big, or we never had passenger rail, I tell a simple story of how my father rode a train in the late 1940's from a small town of 25,000 in Ohio to Washington, D.C. The trip took 8 hours to travel about 400 miles. Oh, he also told me there were three trains a day! At present, Chillicothe, Ohio has no train and no station, so you can only get there by car, it takes 8-9 hours, and it's exhausting. Thanks for describing the way we used to travel around the country and thanks for the website. This is so depressing.

Usually I'm depressed for no reason, but after watching your videos, I am depressed for good reason. Its a real relief.

The saddest fact I'll always remember is the Zephyr in the 1930s went from Denver to Chicago in 13 hours. Now it takes over 18 hours if it's not delayed 😞

I was reading an old postcard that my grandmother had save and it was from a family friend describing how to take the Winnipeg Selkirk Electric Railway to visit them in what is now a bedroom community. They said it would only take half and hour from Winnipeg. This was from 1912. Google maps tells me the journey would now take 45 min by car.

Don't you love when politicians say that rail would be relevant if it was profitable, yet they use billions in public funds for road projects. Give the roads back to private companies and see where that goes.

This actually was a thing for a lot of roads before the 1930s. After a while, the owners realized they could toll everyone and didn't bother to upkeep the roads cause they knew the people needed to use the road to live.

In fact, most of local rail in Europe was also neglected or dismantled, just nowhere to the extent that the US did, and thank God for that.

Even in Europe, at least half of our rail lines and the vast majority of our trams and urban rail have been abandoned.

Enforcing the 1972 Amtrack law that gives passenger rail the right of way over freight can be the first step to truly " MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN"

A plaque in Cincinnati's station says that during WWII, more than 200 trains stopped at Cincinnati daily. Amtrak now uses what used to be the lounge outside the men's room, while the rest of the station has been repurposed. Two museums - good use for the building - but how times have changed. Also, Cincinnati to Chicago? Middle of the night service.

Living in the Midwest, I am constantly infuriated at how unbelievably well-connected each and every city was by passenger rail less than a century ago when comparing to today’s service. The region is ripe for rail revitalization given the effects of outsourced manufacturing jobs, the respectable population density of the region, and the seemingly endless flat topology. We can make it happen :)

My Great Grandmother, Iris, was only able to visit my family by train because it was the most comfortable for her, as she was near a 100 years old, it makes sense. The stress of an airport, the turbulence, the uncontrollable anxiety, are all great reasons, as well as straight up handicap accessibility being better on a train.

I rode the Shinkansen from Tokyo to Kyoto and wanted to compare it to a trip in the US. Turns out it's almost exactly the same distance as Chicago to Detroit. In Japan, though, the trip took about two hours while my last Amtrak ride from Detroit to Chicago took five and a half. Once you start comparing trips between Midwest cities to any other country it's hard not to get sad

It's really f@cking depressing how much intercity passenger rail services we lost. We used to be second to none and now we have a rail system the Russians would be ashamed of. This atrophy could have been arrested back in the mid 1950s by passing a sensible transportation policy instead of that Interstate Highway Act of 1956 which spelled the death knell of passenger rail, the remaining streetcars, and even the old industrial cities, and it didn't have to happen!

Couple weeks ago i looked up how many intercity trains a week are there in Cincinnati, Ohio, population: 2.265 million people, 6 intercity trains a week, that's a train every 1,680 minutes or 28 hours, on average.

Comparing that to the 2 closest cities by population in India:

Salem, Tamil Nadu, 2.46 million people, 652 intercity trains a week, that's an intercity train every 15.5 minutes on average.

Nashik, Maharashtra, 2.18 million people, 544 intercity trains a week, that's an intercity train every 18.5 minutes on average.


And that's not counting the local trains.

This vid inspired me to share a favorite family story. My Kansas City, MO born/bred grandma was sent away to a seminary school in Indiana by her parents when she was 17 in 1939. Her family expected her to become a missionary. Grandma had other ideas, though, and under cover of darkness, slipped out of the school, boarded a train bound for San Francisco and never looked back. Yay, trains! 🎉❤

This video is the reason why I’m going to speak in front of a bunch of old people at a city hall meeting about turning our abandoned rail line into a light rail network. Godspeed, CityNerd.

“Morphine drip of urbanism outrage” 💀

Reminds me of how the second tallest building in the world when built in 1927 and tallest outside of New York in North America until 1964 was the terminal tower in Cleveland. It was built to be Cleveland’s rail terminal and was fully electric.