The alarm goes off at 4:30 a.m. You drag yourself to the airport two hours early. You stand in a security line that snakes past the food court. You remove your shoes, your belt, your dignity. You sit in a middle seat for three hours with your knees pressed against the seat in front of you. You land, wait for your bag, and Uber to your destination. Door to door: eight hours, maybe nine. And you’re exhausted.
Or you could take the train.
That’s the calculation a growing number of Americans are making — and the math is starting to favor Amtrak in ways that would have seemed absurd a decade ago. Not because trains got dramatically faster. Because flying got dramatically worse.
Business Insider recently profiled the emerging cohort of travelers choosing 20-hour Amtrak trips over flights that would take a fraction of the time on paper. The reasons aren’t romantic or nostalgic. They’re practical: the total time difference between flying and riding the rails, once you factor in airport overhead, is far smaller than the ticket price suggests. And the experience gap has widened in the opposite direction most airline executives would prefer.
The numbers back this up. Amtrak reported record ridership in fiscal year 2024, carrying 32.8 million passengers — surpassing its pre-pandemic peak. The Northeast Corridor remains the spine of American rail travel, but long-distance routes have seen some of the most surprising growth. Routes like the Capitol Limited (Washington to Chicago, roughly 18 hours), the Lake Shore Limited (New York to Chicago, about 19 hours), and the Silver Meteor (New York to Miami, around 28 hours) have posted strong booking numbers.
Why would anyone sit on a train for nearly a full day when a plane covers the same distance in under four hours?
Start with the airport experience itself. The Transportation Security Administration screened a record 3.1 billion passengers in fiscal year 2024, and the infrastructure hasn’t kept pace. Average wait times at major hubs routinely exceed 30 minutes, with peak periods pushing past an hour at airports like Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson and Chicago O’Hare. Airlines now recommend arriving two to three hours before domestic flights. That buffer alone eats into the time advantage flying supposedly offers.
Then there’s the flight itself. Seat pitch — the distance between your seat and the one in front of you — has shrunk from an average of 35 inches in the 1990s to 28-30 inches on most domestic carriers today. Legroom is a luxury product now, sold in tiers. Basic economy tickets on major airlines often don’t include a carry-on bag, a seat assignment, or the ability to change your flight without a fee. The experience of flying coach in 2025 is, for many travelers, genuinely miserable.
Contrast that with Amtrak’s coach class. The seats are wider. You can walk around freely. There’s no turbulence-induced seatbelt sign keeping you pinned. You can use your phone the entire trip. The café car sells mediocre sandwiches and decent coffee, which is roughly the same culinary proposition as an airport terminal — except you don’t have to sprint to the gate with your sandwich half-eaten.
And if you book a roomette or bedroom on a long-distance train, the comparison isn’t even close. A private room with a bed, a door that closes, and meals included in the fare. Try getting that on a domestic flight for under $500.
The Business Insider piece highlighted travelers who frame the train not as transportation but as found time. Remote workers, in particular, have discovered that a 20-hour train ride with Wi-Fi (spotty as it sometimes is) can double as a mobile office. One traveler quoted in the piece described the trip as “the most productive day I’ve had in months.” No interruptions. No meetings. Just hours of unbroken focus with the countryside sliding past the window.
This isn’t a fringe movement. It reflects a broader shift in how Americans think about time, productivity, and the hidden costs of speed. A 2024 survey by the American Public Transportation Association found that 41% of respondents would consider taking a train instead of flying for trips under 500 miles if service were available. For trips between 500 and 1,000 miles — roughly the sweet spot where Amtrak’s long-distance routes compete — 23% said the same. Those aren’t dominant numbers. But they represent a market that barely existed 15 years ago.
The economics tell an interesting story too. Amtrak fares on long-distance routes often undercut airfares, especially when booked in advance. A coach seat from New York to Chicago on the Lake Shore Limited can run $60-$120 one way. The same trip on a major airline, with a checked bag, typically costs $180-$350. Even a roomette, which runs $250-$400, competes favorably with a first-class airline ticket — and includes meals and a flat bed.
But Amtrak’s value proposition has a serious asterisk: reliability. The company’s long-distance trains are frequently late, sometimes by hours. In fiscal year 2024, Amtrak’s on-time performance for long-distance routes hovered around 52%, according to the company’s own data. That means roughly half the time, your 20-hour trip becomes a 22- or 24-hour trip. The primary culprit is freight railroads, which own most of the track Amtrak uses outside the Northeast Corridor and routinely prioritize their own cargo trains over passenger service.
This is the central tension in American rail travel. Amtrak doesn’t control its own destiny on most of its network. The freight railroads — BNSF, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, CSX — own the infrastructure, and despite federal law requiring them to give Amtrak priority, enforcement has been weak for decades. The Surface Transportation Board has begun taking a harder line, but progress is slow.
Congress has noticed. The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed in 2021, allocated $66 billion for rail — the largest federal investment in passenger rail since Amtrak’s creation in 1971. Much of that money is earmarked for the Northeast Corridor, but significant funds are also flowing to long-distance route improvements, new equipment, and expanded service. Amtrak has ordered 83 new long-distance trainsets from Siemens Mobility, expected to enter service starting in 2026. The new cars promise wider seats, better Wi-Fi, improved accessibility, and modernized sleeping accommodations.
Whether that’s enough to convert the train-curious into train-committed remains an open question. But the cultural momentum is real.
Social media has amplified the trend considerably. TikTok and Instagram are filled with creators documenting their long-distance Amtrak trips — the sunsets over the Rockies on the California Zephyr, the morning coffee in the observation car of the Empire Builder, the surprisingly convivial atmosphere of the dining car. These posts routinely rack up millions of views. The aesthetic of train travel — slow, analog, contemplative — resonates with a generation that grew up overstimulated and overconnected.
There’s also a climate angle, though it’s more complicated than advocates sometimes suggest. Trains are significantly more energy-efficient per passenger-mile than planes for most routes. The International Energy Agency estimates that rail travel produces roughly one-third the carbon emissions of aviation per passenger-kilometer on comparable routes. For travelers who factor environmental impact into their decisions, that matters. But Amtrak’s diesel-powered long-distance fleet isn’t exactly zero-emission, and the environmental calculus depends heavily on occupancy rates, route specifics, and the electricity mix powering electric segments.
Still, the perception matters as much as the math. And the perception is shifting fast.
Airlines aren’t blind to this. Delta, United, and American have all invested in premium economy products and domestic first-class refreshes in recent years, partly in response to passenger dissatisfaction. But those upgrades come at premium prices, and the basic economy experience — the one most price-sensitive travelers actually book — continues to deteriorate. Spirit Airlines filed for bankruptcy in 2024. Frontier has cut routes. The budget end of the airline market is in turmoil, which paradoxically pushes some cost-conscious travelers toward Amtrak.
The international comparison is unavoidable. Japan’s Shinkansen, France’s TGV, Spain’s AVE, and China’s high-speed rail network all demonstrate that trains can compete with — and in some cases beat — air travel on routes up to 600 miles. The United States has nothing comparable outside the Acela corridor, and even that tops out at 150 mph in short stretches, a speed that would embarrass most European rail operators.
But here’s the thing: the Americans choosing 20-hour Amtrak rides aren’t waiting for high-speed rail. They’re making the choice with the infrastructure that exists today. Imperfect, slow, frequently delayed infrastructure. And they’re choosing it anyway. That says something profound about how broken the air travel experience has become for a meaningful segment of the population.
The demographic profile of the new Amtrak enthusiast is broader than you might expect. It’s not just retirees with time to spare or train buffs with a romantic attachment to the rails. It’s remote workers who can log on from anywhere. Parents who’d rather their kids roam a train car than sit strapped into an airplane seat. Business travelers who’ve calculated that arriving rested and productive beats arriving fast and frazzled. And yes, people who simply hate airports — a cohort that grows larger with every TSA line, every delayed flight, every gate change announced over a crackling PA system.
Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner has leaned into this moment, positioning the company as a modern travel alternative rather than a relic. “People are rediscovering what train travel offers,” he said at a 2024 industry conference. “Space, comfort, productivity, and the ability to actually enjoy the trip itself.” It’s a pitch that would have sounded delusional in 2015. In 2025, it lands differently.
The question is whether Amtrak can deliver on the promise. New equipment is coming. Federal money is flowing. Ridership is climbing. But the structural challenges — freight railroad conflicts, aging infrastructure outside the Northeast, political headwinds in Congress — haven’t disappeared. And the Trump administration’s approach to federal spending has introduced new uncertainty about whether all that infrastructure money will actually reach the tracks.
For now, though, the trend is unmistakable. More Americans are looking at a 20-hour train ride and seeing not a sacrifice but a trade-up. Less stress. More space. Better views. And a door-to-door time difference that, once you strip away the mythology of speed, isn’t as dramatic as the airline industry would like you to believe.
The 20-hour train ride isn’t for everyone. It never will be. But the fact that it’s for anyone — that a growing number of rational, time-conscious adults are voluntarily choosing it — is a verdict on American air travel that no earnings call or loyalty program rebrand can easily dismiss.
Something has shifted. And it’s moving at the speed of a train.
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