Of Amtrak, AI, and Arguing About Trains on the Interwebs

Trains are wonderful modes of transportation. Trains also have to follow the laws of physics and realities of economics, politics, and public sentiment.

Graphic created via Google Gemini Imagure 3.

Every once in a while, two of my niche interests find each other on the interwebs and cause a trainwreck.

The chatbot for Amtrak’s Twitter account wasn’t built for trying to respond to the public dogpiling response to the choo-choo train taking a shot at Southwest Airline’s recent announcement of no more free bags.

One of the more SFW responses:

Now, the viral responses are part of the point; the old tv/radio adage about “hate watch and love watch is the same ratings number” applies to clicks. Plus, thanks to Elon’s ridiculous mismanagement idea that forces folks to slide links into the replies so the ads auto populate, this is how this must be done. But unsmart moves is the feature the head of X-turned Grand Potentate of All Things wanted. His sandbox, his sand piles, his gritty sand in all the wrong places.

Anyhoo, Amtrak and AI…

There are many discourses on social media that quickly go from educational visit to the zoo to poo throwing in the monkey cage. Trains be one of them. Specifically, trains in America, the moderately functional but financially suspect Amtrak, and the unicorn humping of a bright shiny future of unlimited, omnipresent high-speed rail. Similarly, AI is pitched on a spectrum from the very useful souped up search engine most of what is called “AI” is to promises that all our troubles will be cured by just asking ChatGPT/Grok/Gemini/Copilot/widgadigit/whatever.

Just the way I framed that train sentence, if put in front of train Twitter, would bring accusations of being a “train hater” or worse. It is a ridiculous charge. When I lived in Europe, both times, I paid for, used, and enjoyed my Eurail Pass. Especially the first time, since I was still under 26 and could get the discounted “student” one. The last few times I’ve travelled to Washington, D.C. I’ve taken Amtrak and will do so just about every time I need to.

Thing is, having a professional background in transportation and quite a bit of travel experience, I see trains as what they are, not what the internet claims they can be if there was just unlimited money, no such things as interstates or airlines, no geographical or ecological restrictions, and America was the same size and population density of (insert country with the train system utopia du jour here.) Tracks have to go places, and be built, and maintained. Folks have to want to ride X train to Y destination in Z amount of time for $ amount of money. That’s how transportation works. This person/thing to this place in this amount of time, what will it cost?

Train utopians, especially the high-speed rail subsection, hate that discussion. “Why do you hate progress, puppies, and all things that are good by bringing up icky money?” they will wail. “Why don’t people understand how giggity awesome spending 2 days on a train to get somewhere is” they’ll mope. “Of course, there will be a huge demand for people to drive multiple hours to get on a train that takes multiple days to get where they don’t want to go in the first place, why can’t you understand this is a GOOD THING, PROGRESS HATER?”

And the only thing that makes that discourse worse is smart aleck social media person who fires off a one-liner, then turns on the chat bot and relinquishes control of public branding for a moment of viral attention. Always a good plan. It is Amtrak, so your tax dollars at work. AI plus train discourse was always going to end up in a digital train wreck of real people getting their online snark jollies off not fitting into the created AI’s search parameters.

Trains can be wonderful modes of transportation. Trains also have to follow the laws of physics and the realities of economics, politics, and public sentiment. Rail travel works when you have dense population centers with good local transit, connected to regional rail, connected to intercity rail. High speed rail can only, and will only, work in conjunction with that infrastructure already in place. The formula is always a group of people in one place that have a pressing need to get to another place where there is also a group of people need the reverse trip, in numbers and regularity enough to make it viable. Everything else is wish casting trains to nowhere.

That’s the beauty of the internet, of course. Keyboard train warriors don’t need to understand HSR has grade requirements that mean mountain travel is out, or that there are only a handful of densely populated regions that can support the hub part of a hub-and-spoke transit system. There is the refusal to understand folks with driving and flying options will take both over rail that is more expensive, less reliable, has really weird schedule times, and is more time consuming. When rail is the cheaper, easier, faster option, rail will do just fine. Choo Choo sine qua non, and so forth.

And no amount of internet snark will change that.

But that’s the fun part of being in a niche online dogpile policy cult. Real trains have never been tried, or something, hope springs eternal, and the railroad dream will never die.

Unless you actually have to take train from St Louis to Orlando. In which case, “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”, which is Dante for “there be a high-speed rail discussion ahead.”

Originally Published by the author at Ordinary Times