Are American trains better than British ones?
, .
I once took a train in the USA. It was the Amtrak service from Chicago to Denver. Two American cities about the size of Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, and Newcastle — the kind of places I live in, work in, and write about.
Much to my trolling pleasure, the train was good value, comfortable, large, on time, and fast. 915 miles in 17 hours makes an average velocity of 54mph which is great compared to equivalents below 45mph for similar journeys in England such as Leeds to Liverpool or Aberdeen to Penzance.
Of course, I know that British trains on routes to and from London are much faster. The USA’s fastest trains connect New York to Boston and New York to Washington DC, distances of around 200 miles, in about three hours. No fast train from Liverpool, Manchester, or Leeds to London takes that long, and the 50 miles longer journey from Newcastle to London can take just over 2h30.
Most of the UK may not have modern high speed railways, but the world’s first railways, sufficiently upgraded and with clever prioritisation, are still pretty fast.
But that’s not as good for trolling, and nor is it that great a comparison. The USA’s size and federal structure means it has no city as “central” as London in so many meanings of the word.
Trains between smaller cities
So on that Amtrak train through the endless corn fields of Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska, I started thinking about how bad US trains really are compared to trains between similar non-capital cities in Britain.
A feature of Britain’s fast trains is that for various geographical, historical, and modern reasons they typically go straight to London and not via each other. The fast train from Glasgow skips Manchester, Liverpool, and Birmingham on its way to London. From Newcastle, you don’t go through Leeds, and from Leeds you don’t go through Sheffield. And so getting between Britain’s large cities, even though they are close to each other and big, means exploring the neglected backwaters of the British railway system for at least part of the journey.
From Leeds, trains to every other major British city except London are diesel, delayed, short and thus overcrowded, dirty, expensive, and slow.
The 90 mile journey to Birmingham takes nearly the same two hours as the 170 journey to London. The 170 mile journey to Glasgow takes over 4 hours. CrossCountry trains consistently rank by far the worst in Britain and because they don’t go to London and aren’t devolved, there is very little government interest in improving them.
This got me wondering.
CrossCountry trains are bad, but they are frequent. There are fourteen trains a day from Birmingham to Leeds, one per hour from early until late. In the British transport planning mind, frequency is good.
American trains are long and comfortable in my one experience of them, but they are infrequent. There is one train a day from Chicago to Denver and seven from Milwaukee to Chicago.
Which is better at getting people to take the train?
Origin-Destination Matrix
I decided to focus on the Leeds to Birmingham train. It’s one of the worst in Britain and I took it often in the nearly three years where I lived in Birmingham and worked regularly in Leeds.
For a comparison I searched the USA for a pair of cities, about 3 million to 6 million in population, about 90 miles apart.
I looked at Pittsburgh to Cleveland, but both cities are at most half the size of Leeds and Birmingham.
So I moved on to Philadelphia to Baltimore, much closer matches on city size and distance, but I couldn’t find data on rail passenger numbers between them. I’d expect it to be higher than Leeds to Birmingham given how much faster, larger, more frequent, and cheaper the trains are, but without data I don’t know.
So I ended up with Milwaukee to Chicago. Within 30km of each city centre they have 1.5m and 4.5m population respectively and the two are separated by 81 miles. Leeds and Birmingham have a similar 2.6m and 4m population, separated by 92 miles. They’re a pretty good match.
And most importantly, I could get a decent estimate of the number of people who take the train between Milwaukee and Chicago every year. Let’s call is 600,000 conservatively.
Thanks to the recently released Origin-Destination Matrix data from the UK’s Office for Rail and Road I could get an equivalent data point for Leeds to Birmingham. At first I counted the number of journeys between the two main stations in Leeds and Birmingham and got an answer of 110,000. Far too low. The problem is that most people don’t start their journeys in the central station.
So I built a tool. It’s at tomforth.co.uk/passengerflows and it calculates how many rail passengers travel between two circles in Great Britain (each single journey counts once) in a year.
Using it, I can estimate that there are just under 300,000 rail journeys per year between Birmingham and Leeds. A return trip counts twice. That’s if I trust the data, which I have my doubts about, but I probably should.
Here’s a summary of this blog post so far in a table.
| Leeds to Birmingham | Milwaukee to Chicago | |
|---|---|---|
| Combined city population (30km from city centre) | 2.6m + 4m = 6.4m | 1.5m + 4.5m = 7m |
| Distance between cities | 92 miles | 81 miles |
| Trains per day | 14 | 7 |
| Train duration | 1h55 | 1h39 |
| Typical number of seats | 200 | 350 |
| Annual passengers | < 300,000 | > 600,000 |
Why and so what?
The main reason why passenger rail travel between cities in the USA is generally worse than in the UK is that the USA is much bigger. There are very few pairs of US cities big enough and close enough to support high frequency, long, and fast passenger trains.
A small supplementary reason why British trains are better is that London plays a much more central role in the country than Washington DC does. Here in Leeds my schools, hospitals, trains, major roads, courts, and taxes are almost all effectively run from London by the UK government to laws made in London. And that means travel.
But it’s interesting, and I think counter to much online narrative, how when the USA has similar pairs of cities of similar size it seems capable of providing better and possibly even more widely used rail connections, despite much better road connections competing with them.
This blog post is largely not a celebration of the USA’s passenger railways. It is a condemnation of Britain’s.
The very poor quality of, and resulting low ridership on, CrossCountry train services, especially between Leeds and Birmingham is something Britain should fix. Fixes have been promised for decades and continually cancelled.
HS2 was meant to connect to Leeds and Birmingham in under an hour and provide enormously increased capacity on much longer electric trains. That leg of HS2 and the huge improvement in Leeds to Birmingham journeys that came with it was by far the most economically viable segment of the project but was the first to be cancelled.
A consolation prize of electrification of the railway from Leicester to Sheffield (closing much of the gap between Leeds and Birmingham), the kind of prizes that those who supported HS2’s cancellation in North England promised could now be funded due to that cancellation, was recently cancelled. There is no current prospect of electric trains between Leeds and Birmingham. The least bad trains from the services were recently removed as they had become too old to meet safety standards. Their replacements are more of the very poor trains, cascaded from operators that operate trains to London who have received new rolling stock, that discourage ridership and require costly subsidies as a result.
We can do better. Our competitors are doing much better. We must do better, or we’re keep underachieving.