>>1839414In addition to being slow and expensive, Amtrak trains are infrequent, routinely delayed, and most stops in the west don't have public transit available for when you get off the train (and even if they do have some transit, if your train arrives in the middle of the night it's not going to be running). Also, because there's no north-south connection that runs along the eastern edge of the Rocky Mountains, you can't transfer between the major east-west lines without going all the way to the Pacific or the upper Midwest, so a trip is going to be even longer and more expensive if you're not traveling between two points on the same route.
I used to live in Chico, CA only a 10 minute walk from the Amtrak stop but it never made sense to use it because the train was always more expensive than driving or flying out of Sacramento, and even if I wanted to take the train for fun the only trains that stop there come through at 1 AM or 4 AM.
As kid I rode Amtrak with my family twice though, once from Minneapolis to Denver and again from Chicago to Denver and it was slow but pretty nice actually. We had a 23 hour wait in Chicago between trains on that first trip which would have been a problem except we had family in Chicago to stay with for the day...
