PUT THE TRAINS IN THE BAG

Train Simulator players: heavy breathing

That's what they said

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.

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.
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

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

Just how much Tylenol is consumed in Japan?

Based on the latest Silent Hill, a lot.
China must be chugging Tylenol
- 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

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.
- Then I must be autistic then, because I love trains and dream of having high speed rail.
- 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
It's something that happened in the meme-o-sphere and I too am left out

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)
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
- 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.
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.

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.
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.

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.
The train tracks are extra support to keep Florida from floating away.
- wont stop it from going under water though.
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.
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
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.
- 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?

And once again Phoenix to Las Vegas is ignored.

i mean, at those speeds, it'd probably still be faster to take the trip through LA than to drive at least.

At least we’d have a much cooler president.

I know it's a shitpost and AI has come a long way but holy cow it still made a ton of mistakes in that image. Rails are only spiked on one side, perspective changes between the foreground and mid-ground, wrong wheel arrangement for Thomas (he's famously an 0-6-0, which is established within the first 30 seconds of the first episode of the TV series) no vacuum breaks which Thomas should have, the white house sign can't decide if it's a station sign or a sign for the building (styled like a British station sign but it's the wrong color, wrong shape and half in the grass)
Honestly I think I'd prefer a shitty image macro of Thomas with a red tie pasted into the Whitehouse lawn
- Thank you so much for the response. It was exactly what I was expecting and love every second of it. I have a family member who is a train fan and they had a similar reaction. There is some subtlety there you did miss though.
  The image date was changed to the approximate date when Eugen Blueler published his first paper proposing the psychological concept of autism. It is also location set for Zurich, Sweden. So, it is a bit more than a shitpost and I certainly wasn’t going to burn anymore trees asking for something a little more accurate than a 2 sentence gpt prompt.
  Thanks again for the information!