Locomotives: Fill & Download for Free

The original question asked why aren’t passenger trains more popular, and got merged into “more frequent”.Either way though, the answer is the same. Where there are a bulk of commuters, passenger trains are both frequent and popular. Many commuter trains are being upgraded to multi-level designs if they don’t already have fleets of cars like that. New Jersey Transit serves an area roughly the size of Denmark, and I dare you to find an empty NJT train leaving or entering New York City. Deadhead equipment moves don’t count!Since I live in New Jersey, I get to see all sorts of passenger trains. I see SEPTA, PATCO, PATH, NJT, Metro North/MTA, LIRR, CDOT, just from bumping between New York and Philadelphia. If I wander a little farther south than I usually do, add MARC and VRE. If I ever get to Bost, MBTA. We have almost the whole alphabet. Last but not least, plenty of Amtrak.The issue is, outside of these heavily populated regions, there are not enough people who would use the train to make it worthwhile. I’m not even talking just in a revenue/profit sense (which I’ve done a million times in my other answers about this topic). If you’re only taking a few dozen people off the road, you’re not really using the train effectively. You’d be better off sticking them on the bus. A train creates way less pollution than automobiles when you have hundreds or even thousands of passengers, but running that locomotive to the middle of nowhere to shift a few people does not do any good.The other issue with trains (specifically Amtrak) is that the distances are too great with to little traffic between to justify frequent long distance trains. Consider that the area between the Mississippi river west to California are basically empty. You could fit a huge chunk of Europe into this space. Not surprisingly, the trains that travel through this area are some of the most unsustainable. Why spend days rolling through the desert when you can spend a few hours on a flight? At least in Europe, you can “connect the dots” a little bit, and there are tons of people moving between intermediate points.High Speed trains don’t really help too much. Even if you doubled the speed, a 45 hour trip like the Empire Builder only comes down to about 22–23 hours, and that is still a long time. It is not clear to me that this would be enough of an improvement to compete with the airlines on a similar route.I believe if you build a High Speed train where there are people to ride it, they’ll take it.