To be fair, Europe also kind of sucks at long distance trains. If you want to go the same distance as Seattle-Chicago in Europe by train (say Lisbon-Warszawa or Rome-Northern Sweden) you're often looking at 40-50 hours, mainly due to having to make 5-7 connections.
As long as you are just going between two cities with a direct train line it's trivial. The problem is if you are trying to take a train between two cities without a direct train line, like if you wanted to go from Berlin to for example Lisbon instead of Vienna.
Which is obvious because they are different countries? And, also tourists select specific countries to visit so your "use case" is very rare.
Edit
Rare = majority of tourists in Europe go to specific cities and countries. There are trips between countries but it is rare to go around ALL Europe by train. Trains are significantly more expensive that flights.
If continental Europeans want to visit another distant European country, that's a rare use case? Or are you only referring to e.g. US tourists visiting Europe?
Trains are significantly more expensive that flights
Unless you actually want to travel around ALL of Europe (or even all around a few countries in Europe), in which case trains get cheaper again, thanks to things like the interrail ticket.
That's true, and it requires more planning and available time.
I'd like to add a perspective on the contrast between Europe and the U.S. in this context. Having partially lived in both regions (across various European countries, though my main base is Buenos Aires, Argentina), one of the things that bothers me most about the U.S. is the car-centric culture. It feels almost artificial in 2024, as if it’s been taken to an extreme (I say this with a grain of salt). I don’t intend to start a flame war, but it’s surprising to me that in many areas where a 45-minute walk would be natural, there are no pedestrian paths. I’m not suggesting that cities like Los Angeles should be entirely pedestrian-friendly, but there are places where basic walkability is neglected, despite the infrastructure being suitable.
What I want to convey is that it's difficult to compare both regions' approaches to moving, and say that the article is amazing!
> Passenger trains between major cities in Europe are in the 200-300 km/h range.
I don't know which country exactly you mean, I live in central Europe (Slovenia) and no train goes over 200 km/h, most go 60-80 km/h.
Also, every time I'm at the train station in Ljubljana (Slovenia's capital), there's an announcement about the train from Budapest being ~40min late. And it's a way shittier looking train than the local commute ones going 60.
French high speed trains are fast, for instance the average speed of the train on the Paris-Strasbourg section (~400km in length) is 250km/h. This is the global average speed, so it is even faster on the high-speed section, going at around 320km/h. I often take this train, which is very convenient.
To emphasize just how fast this is in comparison to regular rail:
When I was visiting France some years back and took the TER train on the way from Paris to Strasbourg (300mi / 500km), and that crawled. On the way back, we took the TGV, which flew.
If you look at booking tickets on SNCF's website, the difference is stark: about 5 hours via the TER, versus a little under 2 hours via the TGV. (From that perspective, it's a little funny to describe the TER as crawling, seeing as that's not meaningfully different from driving that distance.)
There are some portions of Amtrak that have comparable max speeds (notably, the Acela) but even then, the average speeds on those routes are nowhere near 200km/h.
Some information online indicates that the non high speed train takes about 20 mins more than the high speed train on that route. It does not seem a huge time difference
The connection that takes 20min longer has two additional stops (the fast connection is a direct one) but it is still served by TGV or ICE trains, like the direct connection.
The distance between Paris and Strasbourg is >400km, so even the "slow" connection has an average speed of ~200 km/h. The actual regional train connection (TER) takes nearly 5 hours with plenty of stops in between. Slightly faster non-regional but non-TGV connections only exist on lines that are not served by TGVs.
This reminds me of Voyager buses in Ontario during the 80s/90s. They had two routes between Ottawa and Toronto.
One took maybe 6 hours. The other 12+ or some such. The 12+ hour took almost the same route, but stopped at every. single. town.
Woe to the person wanting to go from Ottawa to Toronto, and buying the wrong ticket. This is pre-Internet so research was less common and easy, and if you have no idea it could matter...
That’s all very well if you’re going thousands of km. For a plane journey that takes less than 3 hours, though, the train may still win, because the train doesn’t involve… airports. No getting to the airport, security, hanging around because the train is inexplicably an hour late (trains are sometimes late, but even in the worst systems not on the scale/frequency of plane lateness), no half-hour spent boarding the train, no taxi-ing, no sitting around for 20 minutes at the end while they get around to opening the train door, no walking through a km worth of airport.
Sure, but… cities in the USA are thousands of km. Seattle to Chicago (the example given by the GP) are 2800 km distant. Those cities are slightly more distant than Lisbon and Warsaw. Chicago to Washington DC is almost the exact distance as London to Marseille (1000 km). Chicago to Houston, Texas is the same distance as London to Rome.
To go back to the first example, Seattle to Chicago is a 4 hour (scheduled, which already includes taxi time at both ends and a buffer for late departures) plane ride. Even a TGV running continuously at top speed (320km/h), with no stops, would take 8.5 hours to complete the same journey. Wikipedia tells me that the fastest start-to-end scheduled speed of a TGV is only 280 km/h, which would take over 10 hours.
Unfortunately, the monetary and political interests in security theater became entrenched after 9/11. I'm afraid something similar might happen to trains eventually, if they're ever used in a sufficiently theatrical instance of violence. I'm enjoying the ease of access while it lasts.
Wait until you find out how quickly you can board and exit a train at a station that’s right in the center of the city, versus traveling to an airport, going through security, waiting to board, and then waiting some more for the plane to hopefully get its take-off slot from air control.
You can get from London to Paris by train in less time than it takes to go from Manhattan to boarding a plane at JFK.
Ah yes, the fake line of argument that for airplanes you have to drive an hour to get to the airport two hours before your flight, while in the case of trains, a powerful genie comes into your house, packs your suitcase and whisks you away in his powerful arms directly to your seat on the train 13.21 seconds prior to departure.
It's BS. In existing cities, train stations are just as hard to build in the city center as airports -- neither happens. You do not in fact need to get to airports hours in advance, and security theater in airports is still excruciating, but you can get PreCheck or Clear and cut the time way down. There is some time advantage to boarding trains, but it's on the order of 20-40 minutes, not hours.
Paris and London are only 213 miles apart! It's about 2/3rds the distance that SF is from LA, much less say SF to Seattle or NYC to Chicago. Rail travel works great in Europe because distances are small, density is high, and the cities grew up centered around rail infrastructure.
In existing cities, train stations are just as hard to build in the city center as airports -- neither happens
only in countries where they neglected building train stations before the cities grew to todays sizes. but even then it's not true. US cities are less dense, so it should be easier to find space. train stations are also much much smaller than airports and trains don't make as much noise as airplanes. there are many more reasons not to build airports in the middle of a city, none of which apply to trains.
the main problem for trains is finding a route for the track into the city. that can be and is solved with tunnels though. or the chinese approach where the high speed trainstations are sometimes built away from the center of the city and instead the center is connected by a dense network of subway lines. a process that started less than 20 years ago but now puts many chinese cities at the top of the list of the largest subway networks in the world.
The "big country" contributes in that passenger-only high speed rail would be ruinously expensive to lay down and maintain. Long distance passenger rail exists at all in the US only because it can share track with freight rail.
