The charm of train travel is intact, but they are decidedly too expensive, pleads in The Guardian journalist Emma Brockes, recounting her recent journey across the United States by Amtrak train:
“At Easter my two 7 year olds and I took the train from Moynihan Train Hall [le nouveau terminal de Penn Station, à New York] for a nineteen hour trip to Chicago. We were about as excited as if we had gone west in a pioneer wagon.”
New York – Chicago, a little over a thousand miles through New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana before arriving in Illinois. “The train runs along secondary roads, passes dozens of small towns and crosses rolling landscapes as far as the eye can see. We saw the rusting carcasses of abandoned factories lost in the middle of the fields cultivated by small rural communities. We were forced, for twenty hours, to live in slow motion, to take the time to breathe while looking out of our little bubbles. We became aware of the vastness of the country and experienced what is very rare to feel: wonder.”
Amtrak constantly on the verge of bankruptcy
In the United States, the national rail network is slow, more or less well maintained and underfunded. Amtrak, the national railroad company is constantly on the verge of bankruptcy and must be regularly bailed out by the federal government – last November, it benefited from a new budget extension of 66 billion dollars.
However, on the passenger side, comfort has improved, says Emma Brokes, since the last time she had the opportunity to travel by night train, a long time ago, from Los Angeles to Seattle, on the West Coast. .
The train: a pleasure that costs an arm and a leg
Because of Covid, the old-fashioned restaurant car, where food was cooked to order, has been replaced by meal trays, like on planes. But the wifi works pretty well and the coffee is good. In the compartment equipped with bunk beds occupied by the journalist and her children, the toilet, which also acted as a step to access the top bunk, was placed exactly at the height of the window. “Which means you can find yourself sitting on the toilet while cars pass a few meters away from you when the train runs along a motorway. A situation that amused us greatly as we drove through Ohio.”
Still, in the United States the train is expensive – too expensive: 900 dollars [soit 850 euros] one-way ticket for one adult and two children.
“The same week, the round trip by plane New York-Chicago would have cost me around 600 dollars [370 euros]. If I had been better organized, I could have saved a few hundred dollars by booking in advance, but the train would still have cost me more than the plane.”
Traveling by train therefore remains a luxury, “something that is only possible on occasion and for fun”. And the journalist draws a parallel with the situation in Great Britain where a recent tweet from the mayor of Manchester caused a sensation: booked at the last moment, a round trip London-Manchester (360 km) had just cost him the whopping 369 pounds (440 euros), just a little more expensive than a round trip flight to Brazil !
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