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I see nothing "unrealistic" about train travel. What I do see is a society that is losing its ability to relax. We gobble down fast food. We don't get nearly enough sleep. And far too many of us, when we go on vacation, insist on either flying to our destinations, despite the stress of cramming ourselves into child-sized seats, and of running the gauntlet of airport security, because we're unwilling to take the time to get there any other way, or driving to our destinations, with all the stress of highway travel (where do you think road rage comes from), compounded by the need to navigate on unfamiliar roads. The only vacationers whose vacations truly begin while they're enroute are rail passengers and cruise passengers. We are becoming two separate countries, in a way far more complete, and infinitely more insidious, than what led to the Civil War. We are becoming a country of a few major cities linked by the airlines and the "corridor" trains, and the "flyover" states, millions of acres of land that the urban half never truly experiences. Air passengers never get a true feel for the size of a country that spans four time zones, because they get from Los Angeles to New York in less time than it takes to take a train between Los Angeles and San Francisco. Those traveling by automobile never really experience much of the "flyover" states either, because they're too busy driving and/or navigating, and too concerned with taking the quickest route, and too tied down to the Interstate highways that rarely even go through the back-country. Part of the problem is that, in many ways, we've made rail travel so damned inconvenient, and so poorly integrated with other forms of transportation. In Los Angeles, it can take an hour or more to get between Los Angeles International Airport and Union Station. Contrast that with Europe, where, quite often, there's a railroad station AT the airport. The closest I've seen in my own travels has been the BART extension being built to serve San Francisco International Airport (and provide a transfer point with CalTrain). What we need is to have air travel and rail travel (intercity, commuter, and trolley/subway/el) integrate as seamlessly as air travel and car rental are today. The atrocities of last September, and their aftermath, taught us that we're entirely too dependent on the airlines. It proved that passenger trains are still very much a viable concept today. Not only are passenger trains not an obsolete concept: aside from the fact that it would be almost impossible for a suicidal terrorist to turn a train into a giant "Baka bomb," trains are also potentially the answer to road rage and air rage.
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