[herunan]

Am I the only one who finds it surreal to see long distance trains in the US? Don’t get me wrong - I know they exist. It’s just that I feel like they never get depicted anywhere in the media. I also don’t think I know a single American who has gone to another US city by train.

[keerthiko]

Media depictions are a hugely underrated aspect of public transport perception.

In japanese and korean media (my experience is with a ton of anime and k dramas, more in the former than the latter though) trains are very common casual and serious backdrops for a variety of scenes, either within the train, at the station, or just a train passing by on the bridge in the background.

In Hollywood/American TV, it's always cars, with the occasional airport/plane. It riles me up quite unreasonably that shows/movies set in New York fuckin city with 24-7 subway service, and characters are shown trying to catch a cab in Manhattan in the middle of the night to go 20 blocks away. At least Marvelous Mrs. Maisel acknowledged this directly as a class thing for some characters and other characters took the train, but most movies just assume the American viewer cannot relate to someone using the subway.

[kmeisthax]

As someone both born and raised in Long Island and raised on lots of Japanese media, it seemed perfectly normal to see lots of people taking the subway. Granted, Long Island is still car dependent suburbia, but it at least made sense to me that if you were going into "the city", you took LIRR and the subway. So Japanese media depicting public transit or walking mentally registered in the same headspace as Manhattan.

I moved out of NY almost a decade ago, but car-centric America still feels more foreign to me than Tokyo does. On LI, if my family had to drive off the island, we treated it like Europeans treat driving to a foreign country. In SLC, it's entirely common for people to spend 10+ hours on the road as if it were nothing. Hell, I've done it myself. Still feels weird.

[throw0101d]

> In Hollywood/American TV, it's always cars, with the occasional airport/plane.

Except for the movie Planes, Trains, and Automobiles. Classic:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planes,_Trains_and_Automobiles

[pavlov]

Yeah, people in “Friends” never took the subway which is just weird.

Of course it’s because these shows are shot in LA, and they have Manhattan street sets built and ready in Hollywood studio lot, but no subway set.

[chgs]

Earlier this month I took a train Washington to New York, plenty of people on that.

I then went down to Miami, train was fairly full - not many stayed on the entire trip but I wouldn’t expect them to, they got off at various stations along the way. Everyone I head in the dining car was American.

[NoboruWataya]

When I visited New York (from the UK) last year I took trains up to Connecticut and Rhode Island. I was surprised at how regular and comfortable the trains were given the US's reputation for passenger rail. I saw that you could go south as well. Is it just that the each coast is particularly well connected compared to the rest of the country?

[gcanyon]

> a single American

Hi there, nice to meet you! I've take the train:

   San Diego to Redding
   D.C. to New York and back
   St. Louis to Chicago and back
   St. Louis to Little Rock
   St. Louis to Kansas City and back

[Uehreka]

It’s so funny that this all came up today, last night my partner showed me the episode of Sex and the City where Carrie and Sam travel from NYC to San Francisco by train, though it’s mostly depicted as being an annoying hassle (imo their expectations of what train travel would be like were too high).

[ta1243]

That's the one where Carrie complains about the fact the shower at the toilet are above each other.

[Klonoar]

Growing up on the east coast (VA), quite a few people I knew took the train between cities.

Usually it’d be for going into DC for the weekend to party, or up to Baltimore or something. Certainly not uncommon.

[markphip]

You've obviously never watched a Hallmark Christmas movie. Train travel is pretty much the norm in that world :)

[billfruit]

What about long distance bus travel? Is is possible to go coast to coast on a bus?

[alisonatwork]

I've done it, or at least several long sections. I found that I met more interesting people on long distance buses than Amtrak and VIA. Younger people, more diverse, less moneyed. But the experience is much less comfortable, and the places they drop you to get food are utterly abysmal. My best memory was pulling over at some rest stop in who knows where and everyone is grabbing fast food trash because that's all there is, and I noticed some vegetables on the counter in the gas station, asked about them and the guy says they were free, dropped off by a local farmer. So I got some fresh tomatoes and they tasted glorious after days of stale motel bagels and Burger King.

Another awkward thing about bus travel in the US in particular is if you get off anywhere that isn't a major city, you're often stuck on the edge of a highway miles away from any accommodation that might be available in the town the bus is supposedly servicing. Most people get picked up by friends with cars to get where they're actually going, so if you hitch your pack and walk to town you really are gonna look like a hobo.

To be honest, if where you're going is on the train line, the train is better in almost every way. Much more comfortable, nicer views, somewhat better food, sometimes (but not always) more convenient stops. But there's a lot of Turtle Island the trains don't go and you'd miss so much if you didn't take the bus. Unfortunately even bus service is getting rarer. I remember wanting to visit a town of around 25,000 people and was shocked to discover there was no way to get there at all. I would have had to walk 20km from the closest Greyhound stop, which is absurd. I emailed a local museum and the curator offered me a lift back and forth, which was kind, but holy heck. Imagine being a kid stuck in a place like that! Just bananas.

[nkrisc]

You’d probably spend a lot of time sleeping overnight in a bus station waiting for a bus for the next leg of your journey. Coast to coast by bus sounds miserable.

[agys]

The comfort of bus travel is way inferior to train travel!

[ipdashc]

It's possible, but IME, people really do not exaggerate when they say it's bad. It's bad. I don't consider myself a super pampered traveler - I fly budget airlines, I take overnight layovers, I've slept in Amtrak coach - but Greyhound (which, AFAIK, is pretty much the main long-distance bus service in the US, outside of a few regional lines) is the bottom of the barrel. There are some fine Greyhound routes, I'd say on average they'll usually work as expected and get you to your destination. They're often even comfortable. But they fail often and when they do, they fail HARD.

The most annoying normal, happy-path thing for long-distance travel on Greyhounds is the periodic stops for driver changes. They happen without warning - it doesn't appear as a layover when booking, it seems like a normal stop right up until you get to it, when all of a sudden everyone is asked to get off the bus for an hour or so. You have to decide at the start what stuff you want to take, because you won't be let back on the bus in that hour. During that hour, you'll wait in the bus station, which is pretty much always a run-down, filthy building in an awful part of town. There might be a store if you're lucky; there will at least be a vending machine and a (nasty) bathroom. I don't know if they do these stops overnight, but I have had them happen pretty late when I was trying to sleep.

And yeah, that's just a bit of an annoyance - under normal operation. If something goes wrong? That's the really great part - Greyhound has effectively zero customer support. As far as I can tell (or as far as they make it seem), no customer-facing employee actually has the power to do anything, or any special visibility into the system. The agent in the station, if there is one, will refuse pretty much any question and just tell you to call the customer support number. Once, at one of those driver-change stops, the new driver just... didn't show up? The station agent refused to talk to anyone beyond periodic updates every few hours (which were little more than "the driver might be here by X time", as X kept increasing) and yelled at people to call the customer support line, who also seemed to have zero idea what was going on - and of course, you guessed it - told us to talk to the station agent. It's kind of beautiful, in a Kafkaesque, Catch-22 kind of way, if you ignore all the human suffering it inflicts upon its riders, who are generally the poorest people in society.

A new driver did eventually show, after ten hours of overnight waiting for what should have been a one-hour stop. Obviously, everyone missed their connections, but thankfully at the next major station, the agent helped us out- just kidding, she told all of us to call the customer service number. (I'm still mind-boggled by what the actual purpose is of a station agent if not to rebook people.) Based on some of the interactions we had, I suspect the customer service agent just sees the exact same "change your ticket" UI you do from the booking website. And obviously, as far as I know, nobody got any sort of voucher or refund; nobody was put up in a hotel.

A different time, I had my luggage go missing from the cargo area from under the bus. The driver told me it might have mistakenly been offloaded at an earlier station (cool. thanks.) and told me to talk to the agent inside. You can probably guess what the agent told me to do.

And there's all the issues the others mentioned - mainly the thing with them closing their actual station buildings and just picking up and dropping people off on the roadside or at random gas stations.

I didn't mean for this post to be this long, but it truly kind of depresses and amazes me how bad of a system it is. It is falling apart at almost all levels. People talk badly about Amtrak, but as mentioned elsewhere, they'll at least put you in a hotel if you miss a major connection. Budget airlines are uncomfortable but at least have actual gate agents, and even the worst airport is vastly cleaner and more comfortable your average Greyhound building.

There are some redeeming factors. The buses themselves are usually comfortable and decently clean, and most if not all have power outlets, although often not at every seat. The "weird/gross passenger sitting next to you" thing is exaggerated, though I have had one bad one. The Wi-Fi exists but is generally completely unusable, but if you have a hotspot, it'll generally work pretty well since you'll be on major highways the whole time.

But the punchline to it all? It's not even that much cheaper. It's, like, maybe half the price of an airplane ticket.

[elijaht]

I take the train several times a month to different cities in the US