Amtrak Breaking Every Record Except Speed

Cameron Booth's "Amtrak Subway Map" (for sale as a poster) beats anything Amtrak has to show you. Sigh.

"134,230 passengers rode Amtrak on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving," crows Amtrak in their pdf press release, "a new record for the single busiest day in the history of the railroad." More than 704,000 passengers took Amtrak over the holiday weekend. In contrast, all the airlines together were expecting to average about 2 million passengers per day during the same period, so Amtrak is pulling a significant share of the holiday traffic load.

Closer to home, ridership on the Amtrak Cascades route jumped 13 percent from last year, largely thanks to the second train added for the Olympics. When the eejits running Wisconsin and Ohio rejected high-speed rail funds, the Cascades route was showered with an extra $161 million, which will be spend on not going slow, or coming to a complete halt. Of particular interest is combating the winter mudslides that occur each winter north of Seattle, and can result in full days without train service (passengers are bused around the slide).

The bulk of our previously allotted "high speed rail" money will be spent on switches allowing passenger trains to bypass the much slower freight trains. That, coupled with track upgrades, should allow top speeds of up to 110 mph. In the U.S., 90 mph qualifies as high speed; in Europe, riders expect nothing slower than 150; China has some 200-plus mph options. Basically, 110 mph is like we've caught up with Japan in 1964.