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Train Simulator players: heavy breathing
That’s what they said
The REAL US Tylenol Map
Thank you. I was kind of offended with the other one for implying I would neglect a huge region.
Nah, Idaho can get fucked.
I was gonna say what about the inner west coast
They know what they did
While we’re dreaming, can we connect SLC to Boise and Portland?
You know I’ve seen this argument numerous numerous times and I still don’t believe that enough people would be interested in using the train to go to either Boise or Portland in large enough numbers to make it worth it. Hell we can barely get people to take UTA as it is.
Just how much Tylenol is consumed in Japan?
Based on the latest Silent Hill, a lot.
New conspiracy theory: Tylenol actually does cause autism. But China figured out that autism is the key to a better society and they are pushing RFK to ban it so that we remain self-destructive neurotypicals.
Wait a minute, Korea got united between 2008 and 2024?
/joke
No, just everyone who is not China stopped mattering.
I’m no expert on US geography, but isn’t it like really dumb to put 3 train lines through desert? (the red, yellow and grey lines).
i can understand the coastlines (east and west) and maybe one in the south (the yellow line). what i basically don’t get is the rest.
Those are hitting main populations between new York and LA plus the cities in Texas etc.
It roughly follows existing rail links
https://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=96ec03e4fc8546bd8a864e39a2c3fc41
It really needs to go across the northern states from Chicago to Seattle - that’s so much empty bullshit that would be so much faster to cross and could connect what passes for cities along that route.
BNSF operates a northern rail that connects Chicago to Seattle.
The red route makes sense, because you’re connecting two of the most populous coastal areas of the US to each other.
If you compare this fictional map to an existing map of freight rail there are a lot of similarities
I expect better of the rail network in America. This is a tiny network for the size country we are.
These poor people have such a bad rail network that even their dreams are limited…
I felt that one as a Brazilian (govt literally went “fuck trains, cars are the future!” for ~30 years starting in the 1950s)
The thing is the rail network was pretty comprehensive at one point. Only a few remain.
It still is, if you’re a piece of rail freight.
Even for freight, it used to be better. My tiny rural town used to be serviced by a rail line hauling passengers, timber, and agriculture, but it was gone before I was even born. You can still see some of the old tracks if you know where to look.
it takes me 24 hours to go by train the same distance it takes me to fly 1.5 hours. and the cost is the same. there are some problems.
This has more to do with how commuter trains are forced to give priority to freight trains, causing delays, than actual travel times
no it has to do with stopping at every damn town and there being mountains that slow the trains the fuck down from whatever speed y’all imagine them being able to go to like, 40mph. but please go off.
It’s not that extreme, but even if we assume a 200 mph HSR train:
- It would still take 12 hours to drive the 2500 miles from Los Angeles (California) to Jacksonville (Florida)
- It would still take 6 hours to drive the 1200 miles from Jacksonville (Florida) to Boston (Massachusetts)
Admittedly, there’s a point to be made that hardly anyone would drive from Florida straight to Massachusetts or the other way around, but the distance is still impressive.
Airplanes who fly at 600 mph reduce that travel time to 1/3rd (excluding boarding, which can be time-consuming). I did not calculate how much a train ticket would cost, compared to a flight ticket.
Admittedly, i travel 400 miles by train in Europe all the time. (a couple times every year). It takes about 6 hours in total.
If you go 300km/h by train and 900km/h by plane then the numbers don’t add up.
they got some fuckin mountains, it ain’t flat. also referring to the real world, not your hypothetical
I don’t get it
Trains are a common special interest of people with autism.
I know two neurodivergent people that love trains, one is into models and the other trainspotting. They are correct too, trains are awesome.
How many neurodivergent people do you know though.
I am in the computer science field, so the answer is a bunch, us nd people accel in fields that interest us. Plus my personal friends and family members.
Then I must be autistic then, because I love trains and dream of having high speed rail.
It’s okay to find out new things about yourself. 🙂
The California railroad museum is definitely one of the best in the country but if you want to see potentially the largest collection with lots of cosmetically and mechanically restored equipment, you have to check out the Illinois Railway Museum
Of course if you’re more into narrow guage the Colorado Railroad Museum is hard to beat. Or if you just want an epic train ride, take your pick of the Durango and Silverton, the Cumbres and Toltec or the Royal Gorge Route
Personally I’ve been to the California Railroad Museum (back when they were still Orange Empire), the Illinois Railway Museum, the Cumbres and Toltec and the Colorado Railroad Museum. The IRM is great anytime but especially if you come during an event weekend like Labor Day or Memorial Day because they run their mainline and trolley loop at full capacity during the holiday weekends with as many as 8 trains running at once, but they also have enough accessible equipment even on weekdays when they just run a single electric interurban to make it still worth a visit. The Colorado Railroad museum whelmed me when I was there on a weekday, but I’m sure it’s far more exciting on a weekend or event day with more going on. It’s pretty small but has pretty unique collection (including 3! of the galloping gooses) Cumbres and Toltec was definitely a worthy bucket list ride, and when I was at the California Railroad Museum I joined a tour group, had the entire group split off, so the guide took me off the beaten path and gave me a really in depth tour of literally everything he has keys to and shared a ton of neat information about a lot of the equipment (such as the interurbans that were specifically built to serve one of the college campuses. As he put it “y’know how in Wisconsin bored college kids will go cow tipping? Well here they’d go street car tipping, so they built these to be much heavier so they couldn’t be tipped and ran them exclusively at the campus”)
I’m really hoping the Colorado museum gets their wigwag fixed one of these days. Poor thing lights up but doesn’t swing, probably needs new electromagnets.
There might still be an operating wigwag signal at Devils Lake State Park. When I was last there about a decade ago it was still there and operational (and for revenue service no less!)
Otherwise the IRM has a really good collection of railroad signals. Many are actually in use on the mainline (so crews have to be familiar with even the biblically accurate railway signals along with all sorts of fun obscure variations. And if I remember correctly as you first enter and cross the streetcar loop and the steam shop/long barn sidings (long enough to store the entire Zephyr trainset on one track, as well as where quite a few cosmetically restored locomotives are stored including multiple articulated locomotives and a DDA40X) there’s a wig wag protecting the crossing
Oh, probably. And at the very least the Colorado museum also has the Delhi wigwag which does still work thankfully. The IRM has a ton of really cool crossing signals too for sure. While I’m a railfan, I’m also a total railroad crossing nerd lmao
Yes, but how does that pertain to this picture, I would need like a before and after photo to know any context for this image, thank you for sharing, though I appreciate the response response
If Tylenol caused autism, there would be a lot more support for trains in the U.S.
In two parts.
- The before map would be of the only high speed train the US currently has, and it’s the Acela Express. So, something like this.
- If lots of people are consuming Tylenol in day to day life, and it causes autism, and some autistic people love trains, then the US should have a system like the map posted.
The good news is that soon there’ll be the California High Speed rail line. I’m hopeful that I can make a good long trip over there once it opens in a few years to check it out. Heck maybe I’ll move to California for a year or two? Who knows!
I always forget the Acela is technically a high speed rail. It would only actually be a tiny fraction of that line. Less than 10% of the line is HSR
Acela trains are the fastest in the Americas, reaching 150–160 miles per hour (240–260 km/h) (qualifying as high-speed rail), but only for approximately 40 miles (64 km) of the 457-mile (735 km) route.
That has to be the slowest high-speed rail in the world. 260km/h is not even that fast and it only reaches this speed for couple minutes.
In short, the US has absolutely zero high-speed rail infrastructure - and barely any rail infrastructure at all compared to what it used to have and the size of the country.
This was one of many proposed high-speed rail networks from (I think) the late 2000s/early 2010s, but the fledgling train companies were largely strangled or bought up and closed by freight rail, car, and fossil fuel companies, so nothing ever happened.
China will swallow up everything. This is how useless that extremist, “fuck the peasants” ideology is. It just leads to being outcompeted heavily.
The rich are also really stupid and shortsighted. The consolidation of wealth leads to populism, which leads to authoritarianism.
Have they not seen what happens when they clash with authoritarianism? They should look at Jack Ma and realize that, from a game theory perspective, if they just stand against tyrants and ease up on tax reform, they stand to preserve their power and wealth better…
OK, so it was like a real life who framed Roger rabbit situation, thank you for taking the time to explain
Weird aside, but Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Is actually kind of base on a true story. Oil, tire, and car companies did actually conspire to dismantle Los Angeles’ then extensive street car network, and then pretty much every other major American city too.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Yeah. I kind of figured as much, there is so much truth hidden fiction. It’s Astounding
We have rail infrastructure…it just happens all be mostly owned by freight rail companies
We do, but it’s really scaled back compared to what we used to have. There are so many scars of abandoned rail lines all over major cities where they were torn out and replaced with road infrastructure. So many central train stations that are shadows of their former selves.
It’s something that happened in the meme-o-sphere and I too am left out
The most efficient would be 3 major east/west lines, Boston to Seattle, DC to San Francisco, and Atlanta to LA, connected by a series of north/south lines to form a grid. On the east coast, just extend the Acela down to Atlanta.
You need to hit major centres and you need to consider common trips to be efficient. You’re talking about the most efficient per station but most efficient per passenger is going to look different. This image doesn’t see too bad and can still have branching lines.
Yeah just get a slime mold to design it for us.
The biggest concern with that setup is how inefficient it is to reach the Pacific Northwest region, LA is a serious bottleneck on top of being a common endpoint in and of itself. A line that goes straight to either Seattle or Portland from the Northeast simplifies things a lot.
LA is a bottleneck if you assume every single line and dot is perfectly equal. If we’re already imaging a well built system then that green line would have a higher frequency of train to accommodate what you’re talking about and it’s station(s) would be large enough to handle the fact that it would absolutely be a major hub.
Efficiency is not always about perfection for every single trip. Cars(in a car-centric hellhole, at least) will take you from your driveway to your destination parking lot but they are vastly inferior to the overall efficiency of a metro that you walk five minutes to and is then five minutes from your destination. This is highspeed rail, there’s not much extra time being taken if you don’t go direct direct, it’ll be fine.
The problem is that population distribution means that almost nobody is going to be getting on or off the train between Minneapolis and Seattle. The population of North Dakota is 800k, South Dakota is 925k, Nebraska is 2 million, Montana is 1.1 million, Wyoming is 590k, Idaho is 2 million. That’s nearly a whole quadrant of the country with less population than the Houston metro area. If we’re building trains, let’s build trains in Houston and serve the same number of people with like a tiny percentage of track that it would take to serve the upper plains states.
exactly. even under communism/socialism, a business must still operate at least somewhat meaningfully. it can’t just be “trains for the sake of trains”. there has to be a meaningful number of people served per km of rail. that’s why it makes sense near the coastlines.
also, short reminder that even if a rail goes at 200 mph, it would still take around 15 hours to travel the 3000 miles from east to west coast. almost nobody is willing to sit in a train for 15 hours straight. at that distance, most people prefer an airplane. it’s significantly faster.
i did some quick maths and calculated that at least in europe, for distances greater than ~800 km (~600 miles), an airplane is mostly faster than a train, at least in western europe.
From Japan rail networking, I’ve heard that you need a popular stop about every four hours for an HSR to be successful
And it’s weird, because the map has some faint grey lines where you’d think there’d be routes.
I think those are lines with standard passenger train service on them, though I can’t remember the reasoning for that. Might have been the states there refused to cooperate with the company or it could just be a terrain issue with the rail grade being too steep or winding for high-speed rail.
By memory this was a group of enthusiasts realistic dream for a high speed rail network. Basically a possible but lofty goal to lobby for.
The grey lines would be standard speed rail service topping out at 87MPH (some match current Amtrak services, and I’m going to assume without verifying that the others match existing rail infrastructure because the Venn diagram between foamers and river counters has quite a large overlap)
Why do I feel like inefficient access to the Pacific Northwest suits all involved?
Taking the Seattle Freeze to whole new dimensions lol
Umm yeah…now we are autisming! Though I’m not autistic as a disclaimer.
I assume the gray gaps are due to red states refusing to get on the Tylenol/Autism Train, but I can’t believe, if the Autist Party were in power, they wouldn’t insist on connecting ALL the dots.
Yeah this is clearly the work of Big Acetylsalicylic Acid
You-know-who oughta be grateful he only had to stumble through pronouncing acetaminophen.
It’s kind of weird too because logistically the northern border is the easiest place to expand rails: big flat great planes region, with both of the two largest rivers for ferrying in supplies, followed by a bypass around the bulk of the rocky mountains into Oregon or Washington State.
It’s about need. Like yeah, Chicago through the Dakotas is easy as pie, but the demand would be to seattle and that crosses two mountain ranges and the only stops between Minnesota and Seattle with much demand there would be at national parks.
Like yeah it would be awesome as hell and the American version of the CCP would absofuckinglutely have a high speed rail to Yellowstone and the badlands since they’re on the way. But Yellowstone is past the start of the mountains and you need to connect all the way to seattle for it to be more than a vanity project.
The important lines are the NY-Chicago (land is dirt cheap for lots of it, mountains are small, and population is dense with several makor cities you can hit) and the west coast line (basically actually do California high speed rail, then extend it from San Diego to just outside British Columbia. From there the east coast line, something involving texas, or stretching the ny-chicago line is good.
The above map basically connects every major city in the country with a high speed rail route, makes it easy to travel by high speed rail from any major city in a region to any other major city in a rrhion and standard speed routes to connect some of the smaller major cities and provide alternate cross connections for less populad itineraries
There is already a rail south into California.
why do all tracks lead to Florida?
Its the other way around, there needs to be as many ways to get out of Florida as possible.
One reason for this is hurricanes are more frequent, and sometimes the notice level is too short to have safe evacuation from Miami through highway systems. There has been anger over deaths from evacuation, when a storm warning did not destroy as many homes as was “hoped”/feared.
I think because it has large populations on both coasts?
Quote from ‘The People Under The Stairs’ ; “Sometimes the only way out is the way in.”
A bunch of individual reasons.
Chock Full-0-Sea ports
Nasa historically moved a lot of big stuff over rail.
Florida has a shit ton of Agriculture but a lack of raw materials
Tourism
It’s flat as hell
Chock Full-0-Sea ports
Is really the big reason. Less and less portage is going through the traditional East Coast hubs of NY and NJ, mostly going to places like Louisiana , Texas, and Florida instead.
Historically Florida has always been pretty big on trains as well. In fact you used to be able to take a train from Florida to Cuba…kinda. You could take a train across the overseas rail line to Key West where they would ferry the whole train car over to Cuba.
We used to be an actual country that did stuff, and that’s because we weren’t afraid to do cool stuff with trains.
Flattest state in the union, which I learned not too long ago. As to raw materials? We don’t even have rocks down here. I can only think of one place I’ve seen natural rock, and I’m all over the woods and swamps.
Well, you do have limestone in spades, but you either get land or limestone :)
Florida is also densely populated compared to other similarly sized states, around 135 people per km² (US average is about 37/km²)
Escape to Cuba
The train tracks are extra support to keep Florida from floating away.
wont stop it from going under water though.
Thats a weird way to spell Chicago? 3 out of 8 tracks is far from all of them
Look how many tracks are aligned for consecutive stops in the state though
Those aren’t necessarily tracks but services. 3 services can share one mainline and several stops. Makes (dis)boarding easier for longer distances if passengers don’t have to change trains after they get out of the peninsula, plus 3 services hitting the same stations means 3x as much frequency along that corridor. Someone going Jacksonville to Miami can pick between the Chicago, LA or New York route and someone going from Miami to LA can just hop into the LA route and stay there until they arrive without changing trains
Lots of people in a pretty small area in relatively dense cities that currently drive or fly between the cities (technically called strong city pairings). There’s also a pretty enormous tourism industry in Florida that captures much of the Midwestern US/anyone not going to California or Hawaii for their beach or disney vacation. Florida is also flat which makes for very cheap high speed rail. Note how the map goes out of its way to avoid the mountains out West.
That being said, I’m not sure this map is one of the ones made with serious city pairing calculations. I’m skeptical that Quincy, IL has a really strong draw for high speed rail, for example, and that long gap between Portland and Sacramento/San Francisco, while beautiful and filled with cool places, is way too sparsely populated to justify 6hrs on high speed rail. I think it’s a sort of meme map that’s been going around for years, though I wish it were real.
It’s better than being stuck in Cheyenne Wyoming.
The tracks in Ticket to Ride do something similar. idk the root cause though
Ports to South America, and ports in New york to Europe.
Third most populous state for one.
My dumb ass thought this was a ticket to ride map for a minute.
No, there are more routes in ticket to ride
Tryna get that LA to NY route
I would think that Kansas City would be a bigger hub since it already has a lot of rail through there and is more central in the country.
for freight, not passenger rail, which is what high-speed rail is primarily designed for
But dood. Put a USPS fishbowl-connected car on the end with a sorter working inside and prepping for each stop, and watch FedEx sweat.
Why sort in the train when you can sort ahead of time and maximize storage space? The ZIP code system allows for a national radix sort.
Freight rail is a lot less than it should be as well.
It is also owned by Private Industry without clear rules on what they can charge in that more than it should be.
The rails were only made with eminent domain, Private Industry should not be able to screw people on it, or give preference to large companies over people and small ones.
but its not high speed rail though.
As would I. There is an existing line from Kansas City to Tulsa to OKC that has been talked about being opened for passengers for a couple decades.
What a beautiful sight.
It’s too bad Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood is such a flimsy underrepresentation of the average American oil tycoon
WIll the prices not be as bad? Amtrack costs like $270 from Clevland to Colorodo which I know is a travaling half of the country but thats not cheap for me
If you buy a ticket last minute for a high speed train it will stay expensive. Train people want you to be predictable, so book ahead and pay around half price.
Slower trains will obviously be free at point of use.
The trains are not always trains.
How can our eyes be real?
