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A couple of things occur to me as I read this thread: 1) it's been said (by who, i forget) that "A man's sole capital is the hours of his life" (or words to that effect) 2)Railroads are best at handling heavy volumes of traffic with relatively little incremental labor cost. (translation: a few people can handle the driving for a lot of ____(fill in the blank)) 3) in a mobile culture and economy such as the one we live in, a mode of transportation must be 'random access' to be effective at meeting the needs of its users. I therefore submit that rail travel is not an effective means of getting people between widely scattered points, because : 1) it takes too long; 2) there is insufficent demand for travel between any two points at any given time at the speeds rail can cover long distances (arbitrarily >500 miles, say) to leverage rails' advantage in traffic density; and 3) it's hard to change the route of a railroad. put another way, passenger rail (as much as I'd love to see it thrive) has the disadvantage that is killing the legacy air carriers, with none of the speed. To wit: the hub-and-spoke route topology. The business traveller wants big miles-per-hour. The Vacationer wants cheap flexibility. And so rail, as currently configured, can't supply either market. (I don't know if any amount of subsidy or investment can change that. Rail is inherently fixed-route in a way no other mode of transportation is.) Now, Commuter Rail is different: you have a large number of people who need to travel the same route day in and day out, to a destination-rich endpoint, usually all at the same time. That spells 'Predictable Traffic Density,' and that's something railroads are well-equipped to handle. And so Commuter rail thrives where distance rail withers.
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