Hello, I'm Simon Calder, welcoming you to my independent travel podcast, bringing you the latest news on traveling, whether you're just dreaming of a great escape or actually making plans for one.

I'm aboard a train in Orlando, Florida, and I want to talk to you about traveling by train in the USA.

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The train I'm on is a beautiful double-decker train that will get rid of all the traffic congestion problems around Orlando, Florida.

I'm looking at the carriage here, there's probably about 80 seats and about 10 of them are occupied this train runs

only from Monday to Friday because they found that there wasn't any demand of

weekends and yet every freeway and other main road in the Orlando area is often

very very heavily crowded so the US is trying to come to terms with the railroad,

which of course was the thing that built America in the 19th century. But by the 20th century,

the automobile had taken over, followed by the plane. Now rail travel except in some areas mostly around the

northeast that's from Boston down to New York Philadelphia Baltimore and Washington is just

an eccentric thing to do. For example to get from here to New York takes about 22 hours aboard the

Silver Star or the Silver Meteor and even though the Fair is incredibly heavily subsidized by the US

taxpayer, it's still going to cost typically twice as much as a plane to make the same journey and that's even before

you factored in getting a cabin on board there's a very skeleton network of trains across america now

you don't have anything like the choice or the frequency that there once was but there are signs of

improvement for example further south here in Florida the bright line train

is a huge improvement this is a service that runs from Miami to Fort Lauderdale

and on to West Palm Beach for a time it was actually part of the Virgin Trains Empire.

But now it's just a bright line. It's very premium service, very reliable, very fast and certainly for that

corner of the US it's a great alternative to interstate 95 and it's possibly going to be seen as a bit of a

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