Today, Explained - America’s high-speed rail fail

Episode Date: August 3, 2025

The US is well behind much of the world in building passenger rail, especially high-speed trains. But we do have one major advantage. This episode was produced by Devan Schwartz, edited by Naureen Khan, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by Patrick Boyd with help from Andrea Kristinsdottir and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Photo by Robert Alexander/Getty Images.  If you have a question, give us a call on 1-800-618-8545 or send us a note ⁠here⁠. Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: ⁠vox.com/members⁠.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Robinhood Crypto is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity Hey, we know you probably hit play to escape your business banking, not think about it. of Registered Broker Dealer. business needs. Ready to press play? Get up to $2,700 when you open select small business banking products. Yep, that's $2,700 to turn up your business. Visit td.com slash small business match to Me Express. This is Explain It to Me from Vox. I'm Jonqueline Hill. And today, we're taking the train. Because trains take a route that roads can't. So you can see a lot of the terrain changes. You can see the stars at night.

And it's just so peaceful. Now, I grew up out West, so I didn't get familiar with trains until I was in college, and honestly, I was wowed by the fact that I could take the Amtrak from D.C. to Philly. But a lot of you aren't nearly as impressed as I was with the state of passenger trains here in the U.S. You know, 99% of travel,

you're not going to be able to use rail in the American heartland. The US is kind of lacking. There should be more stations, more train tracks, and more stops, I think. So there is no train I can take to get my kids to see their grandparents. One of our listeners wanted to know why.

My name is Lara. I'm from Madison, Wisconsin. I hope that you can explain it to me and get me some answers about why the US doesn't do passenger rail well and what we could do to make it better. Thanks. Thanks. So today we're taking a trip to find out what went wrong with passenger rail in America and whether there's any silver linings. Our first stop, we're heading to a time

when American rail dominated. I spoke with Michael Hiltzik, a columnist at the LA Times who wrote a book called Iron Empires, Robert Barron's Railroads and the Making of Modern America. He told me the American railroad pretty much grew alongside the nation. The railroads were dominant in America in a region that was very heavily populated and also was

the industrial heart of the country. And that was the Northeast and into the Midwest. There was a lot of business to be done. There were a lot of passengers going on. And as a result, those regions were heavily crosshatched by rail lines starting in the mid 1800s. So we all probably remember learning about the transcontinentalroad back in history class.

That was a huge deal at the time, right? That's true. The Transcontinental Railroad, the first Transcontinental Railroad, which is the one we think about most often that was completed with the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869, that was a massive undertaking and it really was transformative for the United States of America. It was an enormous event in San Francisco when the Golden Spike was driven. The church bells rang, city hall bells rang all over the state. At the time of the driving of the Golden Spike, there was a great ceremony at Promontory Summit and the wire news

services actually dispatched telegraphers to the site so that they could type out that the Spike had been driven in real time. So you can see how much interest there was in certainly in California and throughout the West for the building of this great line. How transformative were trains to the American landscape and the American economy as you know, they took over all corners of the country? Yeah, the the American economy could simply not have developed as fast or as powerfully as it did without the railroads. And that's not just in the Northeast and in Chicago, but out to the West Coast.

So it began to be very inexpensive, at least relatively inexpensive, to go from the East or from the Midwest to the West. And that really was a spur to the Western economy. In your book, you talk about how robber barons impacted the railroad industry. You know, Vanderbilt, JP Morgan. I imagine there was lots of drama and corruption in those early days. Well, corruption was their middle name. There was a vigorous trade on the stock market

for stocks and bonds of the railroads. These securities drew a lot of investors from Europe. In fact, Pierpont Morgan, the house of Morgan, really made its, it was really built on the business of brokering investments in American railroads for European clients. This sounds like something out of like that show, The Gilded Age. Well, The Gilded Age, the money that was made in The Gilded Age was based on the railroad business.

I want to connect all the major cities of America to create a continuous line from New York to Chicago and then from Chicago to California without 10 stops along the way. So it almost sounds like railroads were kind of like the big tech of the time. Oh, I think they were the big tech of the time. They were drivers of technology.

And I think if you look at the big businesses of today, banking, investment banking, high tech out of Silicon Valley, those are the sorts of industries that the railroad played that role in the late 1800s and early 1900s. It was the biggest business in the United States by far. How did we start to lose our grip on passenger rail compared to our counterparts in Europe and other places? Well, in the United States, it didn't really happen until we were, you know, a decade or two into the 20th century and World War I. The railroads were nationalized during World War I

because the government needed their services to transport troops. So they didn't actually have a commercial presence in that period, but while they were still building, we began to see truck transport, and sooner or later we began to see air transport. These were all heavily competitive to the railroads, so we began to see competition really showing its effects early in the 20th century. And that's when things started to go off the rails. So the railroads began to run into financial problems. Infrastructures began to crumble. People stopped really seeing them as convenient and suitable means of transport.

And so business was declining. So Amtrak and Conrail, which was the Amtrak for freight, basically, basically were necessary to consolidate what was left of the American railroad system into something that could operate profitably. Okay, so a lot of our listeners have talked about trains they've taken abroad. The Shinkansen in Japan is amazing. And they have many other small trains that are wonderful to ride. Same thing in Europe. I was traveling in Europe and I got to take a train under the ocean from London

to Amsterdam. I'm wondering if you have any memorable stories about trains you've taken abroad. When I lived and worked in Russia, I took the train from Moscow to Petersburg. That was a little weird. In fact, we were told that we should carry cables and padlocks with us to secure the doors of our cabin while we were making that trip because otherwise marauders would invade our cabin and steal what we had and maybe commit violence. So it was a little scary, but we were told, it's a trip that you should take once. And we did do that.

Did you walk away unscathed? Yeah, we walked away unscathed. All right, Michael, thanks for taking this trip with us. Happy to do it. Make way, make way, the train is approaching the station. Michael Hiltzik is the author of Iron Empires, Robber Barons, Railroads, and the Making of Modern America. You can find a link to his book in our show notes.

Next stop, high-speed rail. Ish. Hey, this is Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, a show about media and tech and what happens when they collide. And this may be hard to remember, but not very long ago, magazines were a really big deal. And the most important magazines were owned by Conde Nast, the glitzy publishing empire that's the focus of a new book by New York Times reporter Michael Grinbaum.

The way Conde Nast elevated its editors, the way they paid for their mortgages so they could live in beautiful homes, there was a logic to it, which was that Conde Nast itself became seen as this kind of enchanted land. Soterios Johnson You can hear the rest of our chat on channels wherever you listen to your favorite media podcast. This Week on Criminal

In 2008, detectives from the Minnesota Police Department were called to investigate a drive-by shooting. Everything they did was recorded by a camera crew for a TV show. Those camera people are allowed to ride around in police vehicles. They're allowed to be on the scene of crime scenes that are very active, that, you know, things have just happened, people have just died. Years later, the attorney general's office would say the TV show had completely misrepresented the case.

Listen to our latest episode on criminal, wherever you get your podcasts. All aboard, all aboard the Explain It to Me Express. Please keep your arms and legs in the train. Yes, that means you, J.Q. Hey, we're back talking high-speed rail, those trains that can go as fast as around 220 miles per hour. My commute would take me about a minute at that speed, but what's the state of high speed rail in the US? Non-existent and terrible. But there's some glimmer of hope.

That's Michael Kimmelman, the editor-at-large of Hedway, a team housed at the New York Times that focuses on progress. And in terms of high-speed rail in the US, it's not really happening. High-speed rail exists all around the world, in China and in Europe and Japan, and has for decades. But the United States has consistently failed to build high-speed rail, and there's been conversation about it for a long time as well.

Earlier in the show, we got into the history of rail in the US. And you know, it used to be so innovative and so cutting edge. What happened? How did we end up falling behind like this? The story is usually told that, you know, we had a great rail system, the country was connected by the transcontinental railway in the 19th century, and we gave up that advantage.

And that story is true, for sure, but it also doesn't take into account the way the country has developed. The fact is that we had a lot of land and a lot of places where people could grow. Once the automobile became something that people could afford and it wasn't just for rich people, people wanted roads. So we invested less and less in trains and that's part of the story but there are a lot of other

reasons why we we failed too which is that we've become a country that's extremely regulated and that has made it very difficult to build anything big anymore. We have a million obstacles to progress and we have very few easy paths. Okay, it's not here in the U.S. Then where is the best high-speed rail system? Who's getting this right right now? Well, a bunch of people, right? I mean, I think in the time that California has said that it would build

a high-speed rail between LA and San Francisco and done none of it, I think China has built nearly 30,000 miles of high-speed rail, just in these couple of decades or less. Japan, of course, has a famous high-speed bullet train called the Shinkansen and has had that for decades. And most of Europe now, Western Europe is connected by high-speed rail. It's perfectly normal in Europe to go to your local train station and get on a train that will take you 200 miles an hour to another city. So you don't have to go to an airport, you don't have to come from an airport, you don't have to go through security. It's a much easier, more, not just convenient,

but more pleasant way to travel. We were supposed to have high-speed rail in the US. What happened to that project? There was a project that was supposed to take place in California. Yeah, there was. And technically there still is, though I wouldn't hold your breath.

Yeah, back in the 80s actually, Governor Jerry Brown in California had this idea that California could use high-speed rail. I make no bones about it. I like trains. I like high-speed trains even better. By the 90s, California had already begun to move ahead with this plan for a high-speed rail. By 1996, I think, California had a kind of plan in place and it took them until 2008, I think, to approve a measure, I think it was called Prop 1A, which set aside about $10 billion to construct a high-speed rail, which was going to connect LA and San Francisco. It would take about two hours and 40 minutes directly from one to the other. And the cost estimate was around $33-34 billion. And the completion date was

2020. 2020 has come and gone, and there's still no high-speed rail from San Francisco to LA. Recently, the Trump administration revoked $4 billion in federal funding for the project. Overall, it's been kind of a mess. By 2018, it was clear this was never going to happen by 2020 and may never happen at all. And the cost estimates doubled, more than doubled. They would ultimately triple.

And then when Newsom Gavin Newsom, the current governor, succeeded Brown, he spoke about the fact that this was obviously not going to be possible anytime soon. And his big promise was that possibly California might have high-speed rail between Bakersfield and Merced, two cities in the Central Valley that no one had really asked for high-speed rail to travel between. And now that's pretty unlikely too. The estimated completion date would be sometime in the 2030s perhaps and at a cost of well over $110 billion.

So yeah, that didn't work out. The failure of California's high-speed rail has been held up as this symbol of all kinds of political problems. It was even talked about in this book called Abundance, co-written by this guy named Ezra Klein. You may have heard of him. Gentlemen, you wrote a book about an optimistic future, about reforming America's institutions.

Why delve into sci-fi? To get the future we want, we need to build and invent more of the things we need. We don't build enough homes. We don't build enough clean energy. We never managed to build high-speed rail. The California high-speed rail has been held up definitely as a prime example of that. That path between LA and San Francisco runs through a lot of properties and a lot of jurisdictions, each one of which can put up obstacles and

make complaints and say what they want. So in general, what had been seen as a great boon suddenly becomes a boondoggle. And I think that's what's happened in California. So it's a really good example of the problem that the abundance agenda describes. And I think the fact that we're having this conversation may actually be an indication that the conversation is shifting now, finally, a little. So that's California.

But there's another project in the US that's already running. It's called Brightline, and it's a higher speed train that runs between Miami and Orlando. It's the only privately owned and operated intercity passenger rail in America. In short, they didn't have to go through a million of these approval processes. And they kind of already owned the route. And in California to Vegas, that's pretty much the plan for Brightline 2, which is to go along 15, a highway between the two cities, that in the median, so there's not a lot of properties to deal with, there are not a lot of sort of obstructions. You don't have to move people out or whatever.

And as a consequence, that may actually happen. And that might be, in fact, the first genuine high-speed rail in the United States. But Brightline has also been found to have a dubious safety record. An investigation from the Miami Herald and WLRN recently reported that Brightline trains have killed 182 people since they've been in operation and failed to make critical safety updates to prevent accidents. The safety record of Brightline in Florida is really troubling. Partly it's growing pains, transitioning from a freight rail to a passenger train that runs through the middle of cities. But the company bears a lot of the blame. It's clearly a crisis and a learning curve for the

company and those Florida communities. Are you hopeful that one day we'll have high-speed rail that's both safe and fast? Even if it's pie in the sky, is it gonna be like, gonna go see my grandkids by getting on that high-speed rail? Yeah, I have the same dream. It's gonna have to happen sooner for it might see my grandkids to do that. But yes, I mean, I'm not entirely pessimistic about this.

High-speed rail is something that could connect large cities and those cities could really use it, and that will serve many, many millions of Americans. All right. Michael Kimmelman, thank you so much for explaining this to us. My pleasure. We have arrived at the station. Please remember to fetch your luggage or else it's mine.

Our next stop is our final destination, where American trains are still breaking new ground. No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrails.ca.

We all get our packages from Amazon, but you know those goods have to have come into the country, so they come in via our ports and then usually it's the rail system that's picking them up. So there's very few things that a rail, particularly long-haul freight, is not involved in. That's Chris Holan. She's the executive director of the B&O Railroad Museum in Baltimore, the birthplace of American railroading. We are where literally the very first stone was ever laid,

the first mile of commercial track. We are a 40-acre campus with eight historic buildings. It's all original B&O grounds. And we are coming up on the 200th anniversary of the American Railroad in 2027. It was first chartered, the first commercial railroad, the B&O, was chartered on February 28, 1827. Okay, this whole entire episode, we've been talking about passenger rail. Passenger rail in the US doesn't have the best reputation, but there is one way where American railroads are still kind of reigning supreme.

Can you talk about that a little bit? Absolutely. The freight rail is reigning supreme. I mean, we have and forty thousand plus miles of rail in this country for freight. So literally one end to the other and right now almost two billion metric tons of freight cross the country each year. So when I meet people and they'll tell me oh I don't take the train I always say well everything you own and use does.

That's how prevalent it is in American life. So I think we have this real tendency to romanticize Europe. You know, the food, the healthcare, the trains, like that scene in Before Sunrise where Ethan Hawke's character meets Julie Delpy's. I feel like we have some kind of connection, right? Yeah, me too. Yeah, right. Well, great. So listen, here's the deal. This is what we should do. You should get off the train with me here in Vienna and come check out the town.

What? Come on. It'll be fun. So do they have better modes of transportation or is it more complicated than that? I think it's an issue of priority. So you know in the United States we prioritize the movement of goods. So really there can be some government investment but it's really the railroads themselves, the private companies who invest and maintain their lines. And those lines are used for freight. Whereas in Europe the railroads are really more government owned and they're prioritized for passengers.

So on our lines, freight gets priority, passengers second. And it's pretty much reversed in Europe. Alright, so in the U.S., we tend to move our packages by freight. And there's an advantage to that. If you're going to move goods a long distance it is the most efficient and it's the most efficient for all aspects and particularly environmental. I mean you can move a ton of freight almost 500 miles on a single gallon of fuel so there's a lot of efficiencies there's

trade-offs too you know if you want something very quick, you might go with the airline industry. But if you want to look at cost, if you want to look at the environmental cost, if you want to look at moving goods efficiently, it's going to be via rail. If we didn't move it by rail, we would have so many more trucks and congestion on our roads. Think about the amount of trucks we would add back to the road and congestion on our roads. Think about the amount of trucks we would add back to the road if we didn't use rail. I also wanted to know where freight rail is headed and Chris told me there's actually really big news on that front. You know I'm sure you've probably heard

that Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern announced just this week that they have reached a deal on a proposed merger to create the first transcontinental railroad, which would create over 50,000 miles of rail between Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern. They would literally be able to go from California all the way over to Georgia on one company. But it is rather exciting to see after 200 years that we're now getting that proposal. What do you think the future of American Rail looks like? The future of American Rail, I love that question because we are looking at the 200th anniversary

in 2027 and at the museum, I'll just say we are planning an innovation hall as part of 2027 looking at the technologies that are emerging in this industry, looking at safety and speed and efficiency. And you could argue it's gone from the horse to the steam engine at 13 miles an hour, the very first steam engine, to now freight and, you know, going, you know, 70, 80, 90 miles an hour to, you know, in Japan going 300 miles an hour. So you know, the advancements have been pretty great. Okay, so freight rail is actually pretty good here in the US.

But what about passenger rail? Will it ever catch up to freight? The issue is going to be the constraint, the use of the tracks. You know, there's tracks only in so many places and then if you do try to build new infrastructure like we're watching high-speed rail trying to get permitted, you know, if you look at an area like the East Coast, it's a pretty constrained environment. So where do you put those tracks? It's certainly not out of the realm of possibility and if you did have something like high-speed rail where you could go from New York

to DC in less than an hour, you can imagine commuting patterns changing. I live in New York but work in DC. What does that mean for a sense of community? So I do think the transportation system is going to continue to modernize. There's so much history and the railroad has changed American life socially, culturally, economically. It was formed only 50 years after the birth of the country. So there's almost nothing that it doesn't touch. You know, if you talk about medical, the first railway surgeons, you know, first responders and trauma surgeons really originated from this industry. So, you know,

our time zones, railroad standard time, you know, came into effect in 1918-ish. You know, those are our four time zones. You just think about every step of the way, how it's changed the country. It really was the internet of its time. Thanks so much Chris. Thank you it's great to be here. Before you go we have a series on wellness coming up and we want to know about your relationship with fitness trackers. Whether it's a watch or a ring or something else we want to know if you use them and how you use them. Do you find them helpful, harmful? Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545. This episode was produced and conducted by Devin Schwartz. All aboard!

It was edited by Nareen Khan, with fact checking by Melissa Hirsch, and engineering by Patrick Boyd. I'm your host, Joni Flynn Hill. Explain It to Me is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. For more award-winning podcasts, visit podcasts.voxmedia.com. Thank you so much for listening and please don't talk in the quiet car. Girl, she is a mess, but America is cute. So there's that.

So, you know, get settling, get ready for a long ass ride and just look upon America and just be like, wow, you know, your politics are terrible, but you are so cute. Hi, I'm Teffy. Maybe you've seen me on TikTok or TV or interviewing celebrities on the red carpet. But before all that, I was just another girl running late to her desk job, transferring calls, ordering printer ink.

I don't miss that. But I do miss not working at work, gossiping with my coworkers-workers about celebrities. What's the latest with Bieber? Where's Britney? And which Jonas brother is which? That's what I want my new podcast to feel like. Like you and I are work besties. We'll chat about celebrities we're obsessed with. How could you be registered to vote and not know who Jennifer Hanneson is? Look up their star charts. Sagittarius and the Capricorn, they do clash

and have so much fun avoiding real work together. I'm having a silly goose of a time. Teffy runs, Teffy laughs, Teffy over shares. Teffy explains, but most of all, Teffy talks. From me, the cut and box media podcast, this is Teffy Talks. Let's go.