Most railways are privately owned by freight companies which passenger trains must also use. Because of this, freight trains always get priority for using the rail first while passenger trains have to wait for the line to clear before proceeding.

47 hours isn't so bad. I drove San Fran CA to Charlotte NC once and it took 69 hours with stops for sleep included.

But, your core point is still valid, I've kinda always wondered that too. I guess the other replyee explained it, freight trains get priority.

To compare a train ride I took once, I took a train from Charlotte NC to Detroit MI and that took 24 hours. The drive is 10 hours.

My takeaway, maybe we should build dedicated rails for hauling people.. wait, the auto industry doesn't want us to have that and lobbies expressly against it? Fuckers. Back to reality, all US politicians are owned by corporations and oppose train infrastructure expansion, and yes, I recognize the main opposition is conservatives. But on this topic quite a few liberals are probably opposing it also, I actually don't know and am speaking from generic observations.

Nonetheless, corporate lobbying is the root cause. Aka legalized corruption.

The reason I highlighted conservatives is because they oppose absolutely anything that costs money (which is everything), and they spend all their efforts banning books/lifestyles/scientific-phrases and well, science and medical advice from science and medicine experts. That's all banned too. But not guns, because "bans don't work," (except in every other civilized first world nation in existence, but wait that doesn't feel good to think about) so conservatives ignore that.

So you know, I guess it's not my fault that I assume Republicans are the root cause to this problem too, since they are the root cause behind most Americans' ills.

For all you "both sides bad" people, great, so introduce ranked choice voting in your state. That would disrupt both conservative and liberal life-long politicians. If you won't do that, when you say "both sides bad" you are actually saying "Republicans aren't that bad".

Ranked choice voting, bitches. Do that shit. Read about how it works before you go ask the people in power and media-shills about it, spoiler, they fucking hate the idea because it would dethrone quite a few of them.

(Shoots AR15 into the air, the traditional American greeting and salutation for departure).

Have a nice day.