The problem isn’t even market share. The Trans-Siberian probably has a decent market share. The problem is that the market is too small. Airlines can profitably get people from New York to Los Angeles because the infrastructure necessary is exactly the same as for getting people from New York to Boston. Trains, whose costs scale with track length, aren’t in the same position.

NARP complains a lot about the need to service passengers who don’t like flying. Well, air has the dominant market share for long-distance travel, even though people can drive. For trips of 2,000 miles, air has 90% of the market share (link). The 50% point is at 875 miles, but that includes city pairs without direct air service, as noted in the comments to the linked article.

P.S. Alpine boards 3,519 passengers per year.

Richard identified the stretch Tucson-El Paso-San Antonio that’s already a tourist train, with little promotion. The route connects historic cities that grew up around Spanish missions, and passes through striking scenery of desert mountain badlands. (I know, because I drive most of this route two or three times a year with my aged mother.) And the tiny town of Alpine, Texas, boards several thousand passengers iirc, because it’s the gateway to Big Bend National Park and the Davis Mountains region.

But the current schedule is not tourist friendly (or I’d take the train myself). Westbound it leaves San Antonio at a highly inconvenient dawn or pre-dawn hour. At least that lets the passengers see the more spectacularly scenic areas to the west during daylight, squinting into the sunset, and arriving in El Paso just after dark. Of course that means riding on to Tucson in the dark.

Adding a second daily train to the route would allow tourists to stay a night or two in El Paso to tour that city before moving on to Tucson in daylight.

But note, San Antonio to El Paso, about 600 miles, takes 14 hours or so, on a route that is remarkably flat except for one bit in the mountains and it passes through wide open space where grade crossing are used by cattle, antelope, and jackrabbits but rarely by cars.

Speeding up that trip to average 60 mph would be cheap and easy, and a top speed of 110 would not be difficult. (Note the West Texas speed limit is 80 mph on Interstate 10.)

*** Running a train at the current speed is crazier than dreaming about running it as HSR. ***

As for who would ride it as HSR going coast to coast in 11 hours, it depends. Almost all the current passengers, if it didn’t get priced out of their range. So, obese folks who don’t fit into airline seats, claustrophobes and others with a fear of flying,
some who prefer to see landscape out the window instead of cloud tops, families who want to show their young ‘uns the vast scale of this country, travelers from towns with no air service, others who have the luxury of time, etc. An overnight sleeper would combine rail travel with a hotel room.

A slower HSR would also have great appeal. If top speed would take 11 hours coast to coast, would 110 mph give us three 11-hour days, plus stops for a day or two at Big Bend National Park and another at New Orleans? Where can I buy that ticket? Is there a market for it in Europe?

But for the most part, a transcontinental train would get filled the way the slow-poke long distance trains do now, with half or more of the passengers coming from relatively close city pairs like Mobile-New Orleans, Lafayette-Beaumont, New Orleans-Houston, San Antonio-El Paso, Tucson-Phoenix, Palm Springs-L.A., etc. (Half the Sunset Limited’s passengers travel less than 600 miles on the 2,000 miles-long route.)

The real problem is, the market is tiny. Trains only succeed on routes where they can poach riders from conventional rail and cars; the reason Eurostar struggles to turn a profit with its 70% market share is that the market is just air and rail, so its ridership was capped by some low multiple of the pre-Channel Tunnel Paris-London air market. And as small as the Paris-London market was, Chicago-LA is even smaller. Even New York-LA is, I believe, 2.7 million passengers a year, well behind the 4 million peak of Paris-London in 1993.

You forget how bad air travel is. Non-stop, or even direct flights are OK (though even they don’t do 4 hours coast to coast). Connections, though, are unreliable (I speak as one who has slept on the floor of Hartsfield all night).

But 11 hours coast to coast is not actually on offer. 2300 miles is 10 1/2 hours non-stop, but trains will stop. Allow ten or a dozen stops and we’re over 11 1/2 hours. Add schedule pad and we’re over 12 1/2. And that’s assuming the stops are all in a straight line. Plus the cities between which people actually want to travel are further up the coasts.

220 mph is not good enough for transcontinental trains. Maybe later.

Great post. I missed it when you wrote it.

I think the US High Speed Rail Association is spot on. Thanks for writing about this new organization.

What we need are transcontinental routes.

MEGA-region HSR may bring on a lot of infighting between states over Fed $.

I think USHSR missed the mid-section of the most advantageous & shortest route across the south: they correctly identify Jacksonville, FL to San Antonio, TX, but missed the section between San Antonio, El Paso & Tucson, AZ and then they correctly identify the Tucson, Phoenix, San Diego.

Put that together & you have the shortest distance across the U.S. (approx. 2300 miles.) Who cares if there is 200 to 500 miles of open space (let’s keep it that way – we need that open space – there’s a good reason its open space, there’s scant rainfall out there) – you can turn on the afterburners & max out at 220 mph out in the country.

Yonah, I very much agree with you the preferred HSR corridor is Montreal to NYC (NYC is the mega-magnet, not Boston), but there’s no reason to stop there: Montreal to Miami & that would “t bone” with Jacksonville to San Diego.

The latest news:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8221540.stm

Construction of a new rail line (HS2) between two cities in England is planned at $65 billion and those two cities (London and Birmingham) are only 100 miles apart AND the train won’t even go into Central London (it will connect with a radial commuter service) to save money.

Good luck with HSR across the continental US for $12 billion. Try $1.2 trillion, be really focussed on demand led routing rather than poilitical routing, and see what you can get.

There is no reason why train travel must be cheaper than air ticket wise. People who can afford air now will look at cost and end to end journey time. Many people would choose rail for similar journey time and cost, modern rail is MUCH MUCH more comfortable than air. Note the 75% adoption of Eurostar for London/Paris, previously the busiest international air route in the world.