I just spent the past half hour looking up potential alternatives to Amtrak in regard to passenger rail travel in the United States, which is hilarious and tragic. I knew that there were no legit alternatives (not counting GrandLuxe Rail Journeys, which, no shit, used to be called the american orient express and costs $8,000 for a ticket from San Francisco to Washington DC), but I’m surprised that I can’t even find anybody talking about them. Even on the dedicated, serious railroad enthusiast websites- which it will come as no surprise to you, I’m sure, are populated by dire fucking nerds- there’s no serious speculation about what might come next.

Now, Amtrak runs on track owned by freight companies, which is why, if you’ve ever taken an Amtrak journey, you may have noticed that you were sometimes stopped for two fucking hours for no reason- there actually is a reason, and it’s that the freight companies give their trains priority over those run by Amtrak. Which makes a lot of logical sense, except for the fact that your average passenger rail train is, like, six cars, and a freight train probably has five times that.

Anyway, I can see private entrepreneurs not being all that fired up to run rail lines on tracks owned by someone else, especially given Amtrak’s historic status as a money-sink. But you’d think that there’d be someone with some money looking into this now. It’s not like gas prices are going to get cheaper, you know? It’s not like airlines are going to suddenly become more courteous, or the damn Greyhound is going to become something other than an experiment in stark psychological terror.

But there’s nothing. Maybe it’s all in the whisper-planning stages, but I’m just really surprised. I had the idea that I should start talking to the people who were surely planning these things, write about them as the summer travel season is going on and people are looking for cheaper ways to get around now that the reality of gas prices and the subsequent airline price- and inconvenience-hikes as a permanent part of the American reality has started to sink in… At the very least, it seemed a saleable article.

But it isn’t. There’s nothing to write about. How dumb is that?