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Our states are different than your provinces. At least their supposed to be. The federal government got way too powerful, but that's a different subject. You can come up with all sorts of schemes and plans, but two things will always remain: Long distance rail travel is 1) unflexible and 2) time consuming. Let's use your Allentown to Chicago idea. Now, I don't know about potential stops in between Allentown and Philly, but is about sixty miles distance so we'll say it takes an hour to get to Philly. Unless everyone got attacked with a case of the stupids, they'll have to schedule things so that the Allentown-Philly train arrives with plenty of time for it to be late into Philly but still give the passengers enough time to get to their train. Let's say half an hour. So the trip is now running 90 minutes long. We leave Philadelphia on schedule at, say, 3:00PM heading for Pittsburgh. Nothing delays us and we arrive there at 10:10 PM. It has now been eight hours, forty minutes since we departed Allentown. Twenty minutes later, the train leaves Pittsburgh. After running all night, we arrive in Chicago at 7:45 the next morning. Our total travel time is 18 hours, 45 minutes, not including the small amount of time spent getting to the Allentown station and from the Chicago station to where-ever you're staying.. Let's drive the same distance: From Allentown, you get on I-476 and take that for 40 miles. Then you get on I-80. 689 miles later, you're in Chicago. 11 hours give or take 30 minutes (its 10.6 hours at 65 mph the whole way). If I want to trust my fate to someone else, USAirways can depart from the airport in Allentown fly aboard one of (at least) ten flights a day to Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, or (for some reason) Charlotte, North Carolina (I guess this is why they're bankrupt) to change planes for the bigger leg to Chicago. Assuming everything goes on time, which it won't becuase its USAirways, and I take the flight that takes me completely out of my way to North Carolina, I can be in Chicago in five hours. The much more sane Allentown-PIttsburgh-Chicago flight is only three hours fifteen minutes. Driving it is stupid. It takes too long and would require either a stop to sleep or a second driver. But its flexibility can't be beat. I can depart from anywhere at any time and even choose my route on the fly. Plus I don't have to worry about renting a car when I get to my destination. Taking the train is nice because you don't have to worry about actually doing anything and you can eat and sleep while still traveling. Except that if you only want to go to Chicago for a few days or are only going there for business, you're looking at dedicating FOUR DAYS to it. Let's suppose there was a show of some kind Saturday night in Chicago that you wanted to see and it was the only US performance. You'd have to depart on Friday afternoon, arrive Saturday morning, go to the show, leave sunday morning, and arrive sometime on Monday morning at home. Driving wouldn't be much better, but at least you'd get home on sunday night. Or you could fly out Saturday morning, go to the show, stay over night, and be back in Allentown before noon on Sunday. Also, I didn't like when I took the train home once that when I got home, I didn't have my car and couldn't do anything because we don't have mass transit out in the country and never will because it doesn't work out there.
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