This is the Venice Simplon Orient Express. It costs around €3000 per person for an overnight trip and a cabin from Paris to Venice.
It's very impressive but bougie bullshit like that belongs in a museum.
Technically, it is a rolling museum. They just need to drop the entry fee.
Too little leg room, look how narrow that center aisle is with the footstools and coffee tables in the way
I thought the EU famously had better safety regulations than the US, what the hell
This is actually the lounge car, so there's not really a whole lot of movement in there.
Extremely bourgie but honestly kinda nice to look at. Expropriate it, obviously.
It only goes up from there. Some of the bougier cabins on longer trips will run you tens of thousands. It's fucked.
Now, and listen here, Jack, what if we had nice trains (with modern conveniences ofc) that the average person could afford, and it was high speed?
Ok Jack, here comes the fun part. Now if we built a bridge across the Bering Strait, we could, uhh, you know the thing. In this essay, I will
Bering Strait
The only way to get high speed rail in the US is to let the New Soviet Union and China connect and build out their transit network across North America.
how would that work with continental drift, I'm a dumbass, I know it's slow yet wouldn't it after a few years become an issue?
Continental drift is more it may be an issue in a thousand years or so kinda slow
The physics behind materials confuses me. How long can a bridge handle a stretch of an inch or so a year? I literally don't know, but I'd think once you get to a few feet some of the materials would weaken yeah?
Also hello again we keep running into eachother on here lol
Wes Anderson needs to make another good movie. One that is different from his bad movie(s). No I will not explain which are good or bad, or how many are good or bad.
On one hand would love to enjoy a cup of tea, served in expensive china while dressed in a full Victorian tea dress while investing a misterious murder together with a charming sidekick/love interest... On the other - the problem is not with luxuy per se, it's that this luxury is guarded off and unaffordable to the common person.
Oh god yeah, a fancy dress murder mystery tea party on a train would kick so much ass.
I'd like an option for a futon seat on an overnight train, so you can chill and eat/drink, then fold it down to sleep. No private cabin needed.
The concept of sleeping in an open public area around strangers terrifies me. The possibility of some pervy dude watching me sleep or potentially touching me is fucking hellish.
That can be countered with sufficiently good culture, I think. Like, in a culture where people looked out for each other and had a really no-nonsense attitude about stuff like that. (This being a hypothetical; I don't know that there are any cultures I would characterize as sufficiently protective/supportive in this regard, other than micro-cultures like a specific school or something.)
Idk. I guess the only experience I've ever had where I've felt comfortable with the concept of sleeping around people I'm not super close with, especially in a mixed gender environment was probably camping with Scouts/Venturers/Rovers as a teen? Like, I knew most people well enough and felt sort of baseline comfortable enough with people that sleeping near the few people that were strangers (esp. male strangers) wasn't entirely nightmarish.
I guess my point is, it's difficult to find a way to be comfortable knowing that people are gross and that if you're sleeping in an open space, there's always a small chance you'll wake up at 4 am to pee and discover some horny creep is staring at your boobs and has his hand down his pants and nobody noticed or if they did they felt too uncomfortable to do something. Idk.
That's a good (sad) point, people are creeps. Futon cubbies then? The seats on Amtrak are already adequate for sleeping anyway, so maybe we can stick with those. I just want more trains in the US 🥲
A lot of overnight trains will have very small private rooms which usually have either couchettes or actual little sleeper beds and these fold-down beds that are around the size of a submarine bunk, usually in 2, 4, or 6 berth rooms.
I wouldn't describe them as super comfy, but they're kind of like a capsule hotel on wheels.
I'll have to check one of those out, thanks. I used to sleep in a closet as a kid, so sleeping in a tiny room sounds great to me.
VIA Rail and Amtrak in CA and US respectively both have sleeper cabins, though I've never actually been in one of the VIA ones. I gotta ride more trains once transit opens up and the pandemic isn't such an issue.
I don't see that luxury trains like this negatively affect the system as a whole, so I'm not against it besides it just being decadent luxury I couldn't afford, but would probably do if i could tbh
Looks cramped as fuck and youd have to stare at the people ahead of you to sit
It's a lounge car, so it's a place to go to sit down and talk to strangers or others in your group and chill. I've also heard that phones don't work for shit, and wifi is nonexistent so it's kind of a "not a cell phone in site, just ppl living in the moment" kind of vibe on the train, so people are liable to mingle and tell interesting stories. Personally as a transit nut, I'd love to talk to people that work on the train.
