Taking the Train to New Orleans

(Last month I took the Amtrak from Greenville, SC to New Orleans and wrote a short series about the trip)

I’m 3 hours into a 16 hour train trip, traveling from Greenville, SC to New Orleans, Louisiana -- a trip that takes about 9 hours by car.

From Greenville, South Carolina, there are two trains per day, one heading north and one heading south. The Amtrak train south leaves at the civilized hour of 5:30am but if you want to go north to DC or Philly or New York, your only option is to depart at 2:30 in the morning.

** Why not have (at least) 3 trains per day so more people have more opportunities to take the train? **

People WANT to take trains

Like I said in my posts about my train trip a few weeks ago “People WANT to take trains - the demand is here but the service and the capacity is not.”

The nearly 4,000 comments on that post revealed that there IS a market for trains in the US — and that was just a small sample of people.

And I’ve regularly found SOLD OUT trains on routes across the country at least since the start of the pandemic.

I’ll reiterate that “we are wasting so many opportunities to reduce road congestion and air travel and combat climate change by keeping trains out of reach for so many people who can't travel for 21 hours...

This is a huge opportunity to grow, if we accept that we can do better than we did a century ago.”

What would get you to take a train in the United States?

A lot of people say the United States is too big to have a functional and fabulous train system and in Part 2 of today's train trip, let's check out why that argument holds less water than the weird little cups they have on the trains (weird little cups pictured in part 4).