Recently, in 2016, Amtrak stopped publishing time tables for its trains. For many years, Amtrak regularly printed time tables for its trains, in both brochure form for single routes, and as a book for its entire system. The brochures, along with featuring the information for a single route, would give information on connecting bus or shuttle routes.

Stopping the physical publishing of this information makes some sense, because it changes often, and printing can be wasteful. But Amtrak also stopped the publishing of time tables online. Instead, when a passenger orders tickets, possible times for travel are given. This makes it easy for people who already know where they are going, but harder for people who do not.

For two reasons, not having time tables in some format is a bad idea. One is a practical reason: because a train might make several stops across a metro region, a passenger might decide which stop is most convenient for them. For example, someone heading somewhere in the San Francisco Bay region might decide whether Martinez, Oakland or San Jose has better arrival and departure times. Especially in this region, where there is many different public transit options, a visitor might consider it more convenient to get off in one city and take a local train or bus, but it also applies to people who might be getting picked up by friends or family, or using a service like Uber or Lyft. This is one of the main differences, which is almost always an advantage, between trains and planes: with very few exceptions, a plane doesn't make "hopping" flights along a route, but goes strictly point to point. A train, on the other hand, has the option of letting someone out 20 miles before they hit a metro area, something that is a bad idea in a plane, unless you are DB Cooper.

The second reason is more philosophical: as a train and bus passenger, I look at the United States as a continuum. Most of my peers were air travellers (and indeed, considered anything other than air travel as ludicrous) think of the US as a series of discreet points, connected to a series of tubes that pop them out in an airport somewhere. Whether San Francisco is north of Los Angeles or vice-versa is not even something they need to consider. They are discreet points that they are sheparded through by a large institution, all in the anonymous architecture of airports and shuttle vans---that is, if they have enough money. The Amtrak timetable assumed that a traveller would have at least some interest in what towns they were passing through. Instead, by just having customers see their destinations, everything else becomes the equivalent of "flyover country", an idea that has been pretty pernicious for society in America.

Also, on a personal level, I just liked paging through the pages of the thick catalog, seeing all the different pieces, and putting imaginary excursions based on those interconnecting pieces.

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