They’re making an American “Train to Busan” but America has no trains

I love trains. Sometimes I sit on my couch and watch mass transit videos on YouTube for hours on end. Not many people know this about me.

Funnily enough, I usually don’t like movies or TV shows about trains. I think the last train-related movie I saw was “Unstoppable,” starring Denzel Washington. But alas, I’ve never seen “Snowpiercer” or a host of other train movies.

That includes “Train to Busan,” a Korean zombie horror flick set on a high speed train. Essentially, the film portrays a zombie outbreak on a train from Seoul to Busan, South Korea.

The film scores a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and won a host of Asian film awards in 2016 and 2017. Earlier this week, news broke that producers were in the process of making an American version of Train to Busan. But I find the idea kind of hilarious. The US has one “high-speed train” route in the entire country, the Acela, which services the country’s northeast corridor. But “High-speed” is a bit of a misnomer for the route.

Thanks to substandard track, the Acela can only hit it’s top speed of 150 mph in parts of western Connecticut and Rhode Island, instead going about 80 mph along most of its route.

The Acela from DC to New York, the trip I’m personally most familiar with, comes in only a half hour sooner than the Northeast Regional, which has more stops and is supposed to operate at a lower speed. The train most definitely beats driving. Imagine sitting in a train, doing work or using an electronic device, for 3.5 hours compared to the 4 or 5 hours, traffic-depending, sitting behind the wheel of your car.

But in the US, the northeast corridor is the only place where a train ride beats out driving a car.

Truth be told, America’s passenger train infrastructure is a joke, especially compared to a place like South Korea. The train from Seoul to Busan can hit top speeds of 190 mph, along more of it’s route than anything the Acela has to offer.

Congress is seeking to address some of the problems, allocating $39 billion towards local transit infrastructure. Mainly, the funds seek to alleviate delays and access, but doesn’t do much to address frequency of service. There’s also nothing earmarked for promoting ridership in an industry that was devastated by Covid.

The US expanded west through the rail service, and then threw it all away to become slaves to the automobile. Local trolley service used to be so widespread, that you could conceivably ride local trolleys from Washington, DC to Portland, Maine. And trains ran all over the country. But long ago the trolleys were cut in favor of buses, and the train barons completed their real estate cash grabs, forcing the government to takeover passenger rail.

A lack of passenger train service is almost uniquely American. Nowhere else in the world are trains so looked down upon.

So all of this makes me shake my head at the prospect of a zombie horror flick set on an American high speed train. What’s going to happen, I’m going to get bitten by a zombie lobbyist? Our trains already have.