MA(t)GA: Make American (Trains) Great Again

- 5 minutes read - 1016 words

As I’ve mentioned before, in high school I encountered the industrial erotica of Ayn Rand and thought long and hard about whether or not it was bunkum1 . While her philosophy is incomprehensible to me now, her aesthetic lasts and can be loved quite separately from her philosophy (see: BioShock). Her aesthetic was the apotheosis of Art Deco or 1940s Manhattan. And, to be fair, it was pretty great.

  • Art Deco Skyscrapers (Hell yeah)
  • Latent fetishization of a semi-religious “elect,” authoritarian class (oh…no, nonono)
  • Horny, small-chested, wealthy women in fabulous gowns2 (Hell yeah)
  • Horny, broad-chested, poor men, sweating and making an industrial paradise (Hell yeah)
  • Romance between the two3 (Hell yeah)
  • TRAINS! (Hell yeah)

Yes, TRAINS!.

Atlas Shrugged imagined a world where trains were the load-bearing4 strut to the economy. The lady that ran the trains was the nation’s most iconic industrialist; the magnate that could make a better rail was the only peer to her (Yes! They boink!). They show altruistic liberals what’s what.

So here’s my question: Why aren’t the partisans of MAGA (who don’t give a shit about the environment, or, like Rand, about sexual consent) advocating for trains to be expanded all across this land?

Flying is a semi-bestial experience these days. Why not move in grand vitesse luxury for a few more hours with satellite telcom uplink and get where you’re going with nary a wrinkle in your Brooks Brothers? And you mean to tell me you’re going to let the shithole countries distinguished trading partners lay more rail than us, or France and Japan run faster trains than ours?

If the MAGA paradise age was 1955, it should be embarrassing that there were more routes back then than there are now. Head on over to your local rally and let’s get us some trains!

Accessibility

If you live in a major metro area, the prospect of sending for your parents is frightening: flying in tiger-cage class, navigating sprawling terminals, navigating rideshare or taxi, etc. How much better to send a shuttle to their home, get them to a terminal in their metropolitan hub, and then let them scroll or nap for a day and then show up bright and early, in my case, at Moynihan or Grand Central stations. Like we did once when, apparently, the land was Great.

Alternatively, with a small human, how much more fun would it be to pack him up for an overnight trip? Take a taxi. Wake up somewhere south of Chicago, rocketing through the heartland, next stop Dallas, thence, say, Houston?

Like, seriously: How is it possible that there’s no high-speed rail from Houston (our fourth largest city) to New York City?

A proposed high-speed corridor: Houston, Dallas, Chicago, New York City.

A proposed high-speed corridor: Houston, Dallas, Chicago, New York City.

Comfort

Frankly, you don’t need to be in the earlier / later phases of life to find this preferable. Who wouldn’t take a 10-15 hour overnight train from Houston to NYC instead? That sounds incredibly humane.

In Houston, when flying, you’re looking at 60 minutes to the airport, parking, shuttles to the building (45 minutes in triple-digit weather, often), 2 hours burned checking luggage and sitting through security theater, 3 hours and 45 minutes in the air, 1 hour taxi/black car to central Manhattan. That’s 8.5 hours, and you haven’t even sat down for the flight yet. That makes driving start to seem reasonable. Why not scale that on a train?

Or let’s assume you go at 6pm instead. You pay for a high class dinner. You retire to your cabin with high speed WiFi and watch 2 episodes of TV and go to sleep. You wake up, dimly in the night as you stop in Chicago; you doze, when next you rouse it’s the courtesy ding as you approach the Jersey coast before rolling into Penn Station at Moynihan terminal. Heck you could put your suit (back) on with nary a wrinkle.

Or I guess you could stand at the Southwest ticket center with the guy whose vape is on a lanyard and whose sleeveless tee pronounces him as an enthusiastic practitioner of analingus5 .

Comparison

China laid roughly 2,862 kilometers (about 1,778 miles) of new high-speed rail track in 2025 alone, pushing its network past 50,000 km total.6 Japan’s Shinkansen, meanwhile, tops out at 320 km/h (200 mph) in regular commercial service on the E5 Hayabusa trains running the Tohoku line.7 France’s TGV runs the same 320 km/h (200 mph) as its standard commercial top speed on the LGV high-speed network.8

Time Tradeoff

So: what would Houston → Dallas → Chicago → NYC look like at TGV/Shinkansen speed? Using straight-line distances as a rough stand-in for an as-yet-nonexistent rail alignment: Houston–Dallas is about 224 miles, Dallas–Chicago about 805 miles, and Chicago–NYC about 713 miles, for roughly 1,742 miles total. At a flat 200 mph that’s about 8.7 hours of pure running time. Real-world high-speed service never holds top speed the whole way — acceleration, curves, and station stops drag the average down — so a more honest estimate, using something closer to a 180 mph average the way actual Shinkansen/TGV runs do over long hauls, puts the trip at roughly 9.5 to 10 hours from the Gulf of America coast to Bay of Hudson, not counting any dwell time changing trains in Dallas or Chicago. Call it a wash with the plane, except you show up rested instead of ruined.

China, Japan, and France can do it. Why can’t America Make its Train System Great Again?

Footnotes

  1. It is, mostly
  2. Never forget Alice Rosenbaum, later Ayn Rand, started her career in costuming in Hollywood.
  3. Oh boy. Here the movie is better than the book. The movie leaves things “fade to black,” but in The Fountainhead it’s a stone-cold rape scene
  4. LOL, yes, I know that’s an AI text-ism of the moment, promise, I’m using it ironically
  5. Seriously, I saw a truck declaring “I eat ass” at Bush Intercontinental a few years back.
  6. China Focus: China’s high-speed rail mileage tops 50,000 km
  7. How Fast Is the Shinkansen? Bullet Train Speeds Explained
  8. High-Speed Train In France: How Fast Is The TGV?