Dear MEL Topic Readers,
Why doesn’t the US have more passenger trains?
There is one thing that China, Japan, and France have but the US doesn’t.
Fast, punctual, and popular railroad network. It was nearly two centuries ago
when the first common carrier line started operating in the Northeast of the US.
Then in 1869, the first transcontinental railroad reached Sacramento, California
from the east coast. Railroads played an important role in industrial growth
and passenger transportation between the late 19th and early 20th
centuries. But in the latter part of the 20th century, as passengers
started driving on newly built interstate highways and flying on commercial
airlines, the number of train passengers declined. Today, Amtrak, a government-subsidized
national passenger corporation, serves about 20 million passengers annually by
300 trains daily. Compared with Japan’s bullet train services, which are used
by over one million passengers daily, Americans aren’t traveling much by train.
Also, China has built a high-speed rail network of over 42,000 kilometers across
the country just in the last 15 years. Why aren’t Americans using trains to travel
or commute?
Read the article and learn about America’s dated and lagged train
network.
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