Step inside the sprawling factory in California where the largest fleet replacement in Amtrak’s 55-year history is coming together piece by piece.
Step inside the sprawling factory in California where the largest fleet replacement in Amtrak’s 55-year history is coming together piece by piece.
The cost problem for medium or long distance trains is the cost of human labor.
In a given 10 hour work day (apparently common for airline flight attendant) how many flights can that worker work? Let say New York to Los Angeles flights. So the answer is about 2 flights per day. Compare that to the time it takes by train for the same distance, which is about 77 hours. Because of this length this means you also have to have more than one set of crew available to the train passengers.
The staff have to be paid significantly longer on the train to transport far fewer people simply because of more elapsed time. It may be worth it for a nation to subsidize long distance train travel, but understand that that is the problem with profitability vs airplanes that can simply move more people in less time, requiring few paid human hours of labor.
I haven’t run the numbers, but I feel like that discrepancy is made up for by the number of passengers trains can carry, considering trains can carry way more people than a plane.
In the USA at least, apparently the Amtrak Auto Train is one of the largest passenger capacity trains and can hold about 692 people.
A single Boeing 777-9 can hold 426 passengers.
So yes, a passenger train can carry more, but only about half again as many. So because of how much slower it is, the plane can carry more in the same amount of time.