Comments by "afcgeo" (@afcgeo882) on "Wendover Productions" channel.

  1. Institutional corruption, not just incompetency.
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  2. Federico Di Liberto Check your numbers please. It takes 5.5 hours, on average, to fly between NY and CA.
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  3. Skier It is a great decision. Why? Because of the short distance between Philly and NY, there is little time advantage of the Acela vs Regional trains. It’s about 10 minutes. However, the cost difference is over $50 each way. That means no one takes the Acela between the two anyway. It’s a waste of money. The regional runs it in 1h 25min. Acela in 1h 15min.
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  4. To be fair, freight and passenger rail are incompatible in Europe, Japan and South Korea as well. Since almost all rail in those countries is owned by the government, government-owned passenger services have been getting priority for decades, forcing freight onto trucks. That creates insane traffic, pollution and high freight costs. The two systems can’t co-exist unless they’re both owned by the government as in Russia, for example. There the freight agency schedules all traffic according to each line’s priorities.
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  5. In order to expand and better the services, you must first cut down the loss. Once it profits, it can plan to build more of its own rail, even HSR, which will create even more profit, which will enable them to build more.
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  6. Finetales They don’t. Freight moves slowly. Amtrak doesn’t often have to let a freight train go by it. That’s not the issue. The issue is that Freight companies run their trains tightly in many corridors and won’t space them out for a faster passenger train to go in between. So then you have Amtrak waiting. You also have irregular operations at freight lines where dispatchers do give priority to their own. It’s why the NY-Montreal train takes over 10 hours. The CSX line on the West side of the Hudson river.
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