this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2025
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Depends what you are thinking of as long distance. NY to LA? Sure. NY to Chicago would be 4-4.5 hours, downtown to downtown, with a proper train (typical French TGV speeds of 330 kmh / 205 mph). Faster than flying when you count the time and cost of getting to the airport etc., and that's by no means the fastest train. The fastest lines of the Shinkansen and the next generation TGV they're planning in France are over 1.5 times as fast as that.
Exactly this. People too often compare price and time of "train ride" vs. "flight", which the flight often wins. You need to compare the full travel, and train travel has a lot less overhead, which means a train travelling 100-200 km/h usually wins on stretches below 500 km.
But 500 km (or rather 310 miles since I'm in the USA) is at the upper end of the distance I'd drive. There isn't a distance for which a train is better than both flying and driving.
With what I've heard about the train infrastructure in the US, that doesn't surprise me. Personally, I only ever use a car if I'm travelling into the mountains or transporting a lot of luggage. I never drive if I'm travelling between cities with little luggage, if only because it's much less of a hassle to just hop on a train and get where I'm going.
So in most Western European countries I think that limit is actually more like 1000km, or if it includes crossing France even more than that, or if you're not close to the airport too. Beyond about 7 hours of train, flying starts to be faster and more convenient, most people around here find, but you can get quite far with a train in that time. I appreciate the current situation in the US isn't the same and it would cost money to upgrade the network, but I think the rest of the world does show that it's actually worthwhile.