Surely there are more trains lines about than this ?!

Nope. We’re animals. I’ve only trailed by train twice in the U.S., and it was the same line, once DC to Philadelphia, and once DC to NYC for work once I discovered the train was two hours faster than flying and cabbing back into NYC.

I do forget though that you guys fly everywhere and trains might not be practical. I live on an island the size of one of your states !

Fun fact: the busiest railway station in America (Penn Station in New York City) gets fewer passengers than Liverpool Central.

I knew the US had a much less extensive rail infrastructure than us, but bloody hell, the fact that there are ENTIRE STATES that literally don’t have passenger rail is madness.

I’d still love to travel on it some time, mind.

Just imagine the jobs you could create by building a decent railway system!

Behold, the end result of graft and political corruption.

I had no idea most of the US had no regional lines? Like, I live in tiny little MA with one of those clusters of red. Does everybody else have to DRIVE???

yes. we drive. and it’s terrible.

D: This is actually distressing.

to be fair some cities do have good bus systems

but….yeah.

what the shuddering fuck?  That’s IT?!  

actually we used to have a lot more, but as far as i’m aware i’m pretty sure the car companies bought a lot of railways and then destroyed them to force people to buy cars

Also some of those states that don’t have rails also have more cows than people.

Also our trains are slow and it’s usually much faster to drive than to take a train. We don’t have those speed rail things.

WAIT WHAT? THAT IS ALL?

There used to be more (map of train tracks 1870 & 1890), but, as @kaza999 pointed out, alot of it was destroyed on purpose by General Motors in the firsty half of the 1900s to, ahem, pave the way for the primacy of the car.  And, since then, any investment in rail infrastructure (or any infrastructure at all, for that matter) has been opposed on ideological grounds by the conservative wing.

When you suddenly understand Sheldon’s train enthusiasm

And then there’s Europe:

And because that looks a tiny bit cluttered (and because we’re a German blog), here’s a railway map of Germany:

In red are the high speed InterCityExpress lines, blue are the InterCity lines and the grey ones are smaller regional lines.

And for Americans who don’t know how large Germany is: It is half the size of Texas.

Consider that this map does not show local lines, for example:
This is Hamburg

This is Berlin

This is Cologne

And this is Munich

(Aesthetic.)

Munich’s network deadass has more lines than the entire state of MA

this makes me so fucking upset, I fucking hate what car companies have done to our train network

there used to be a train station right in my town, that’s a short walk from here, that would have allowed me to go to boston with minimal fuss, but nooo, it has to be torn up and made into some sort of trail thing that I don’t think anybody even uses, like, I just wanna scream

Kill The Automobile Industrial Complex

The line up through Vermont no longer goes to Montreal, either. 

Good public transport is vital in reducing drunk driving, getting crunked is no prob when you can take a train home. 

violent capitalism destroys any decent public venture