"Americans don't understand passenger trains"

[whole diary]

[grahame]

From YouTube - with an interesting comment that Americans love trains when they come to Europe, but have so few of them that when it comes to local votes they don't know enough about them to vote for appropriate rail projects.

[Lee]

From YouTube - with an interesting comment that Americans love trains when they come to Europe, but have so few of them that when it comes to local votes they don't know enough about them to vote for appropriate rail projects.

it is interesting...I remember my fondness for the French way of life being fed when I started visiting as a young man and travelling on a public transport system that joined together so much better than back in the UK^▸ (United Kingdom), and already had ultra-modern to us but well-established to them elements such as high-speed rail that we could only dream of back then, and still only have largely as a link to their system even now. Now that I live in France and work in that public transport system, it only makes me appreciate it even more.

By contrast, Americans visiting the UK probably think that locals are living in a real-life version of one of those "quaint" classic British comedies, somewhere between The Titfield Thunderbolt and Oh, Doctor Beeching!...

[Electric train]

You have to think of the scale of the country and the fragmented federal system where each state has so much autonomy that investing in 200 mph high speed national rail is almost impossible.

A few years ago I was travelling on a train from Venice to Rome with a group that included a few Americans, they though that the 80 / 100 kph was fast as we travelled away from Venice when the train got on the the high speed line and was running over 300 kph their expression was wow

[broadgage]

I met an American family who felt that 25MPH on the West Somerset Railway was "too fast" for a "museum line" They seemed rather shocked when I told them that very similar rolling stock was still used at several times that speed on the main line.

The risk of colliding with another train distressed them and they seemed unconvinced by my explanations regarding interlocked signals making this almost impossible.
They seemed convinced that where two trains cross at a station with two platforms, that only the timetable prevented accidents on the adjacent single line.
I got the impression that most preserved lines in the USA have no signaling and are worked with only a single train.

[grahame]

I met an American family who felt that 25MPH on the West Somerset Railway was "too fast" for a "museum line" They seemed rather shocked when I told them that very similar rolling stock was still used at several times that speed on the main line.

I hope you re-assured them that their train was only running as far as Bishops Lydeard, and not onto the section from there into Taunton where there have been three accidents with significant loss of life.   Thank goodness lessons were learned in each case, and the close proximity of all three accidents was purely co-incidental.