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Transit Tangents
The Podcast where we discuss all things transit. Join us as we dive into transit systems across the US, bring you interviews with experts and advocates, and engage in some fun and exciting challenges along the way.
Transit Tangents
Is the US Ready for Night Trains?
We examine whether night trains can work in the United States by starting with a real sleeper ride from Zurich to Leipzig and then mapping routes where overnight service fits naturally. Dreamstar’s proposed LA–SF sleeper gets a reality check, while Amtrak’s current options and price gaps are unpacked with practical fixes.
• First‑hand review of ÖBB Nightjet Zurich to Leipzig
• Differences between compartments and open‑berth formats
• Snapshot of U.S. sleeper history and Pullman luxury
• Amtrak room types, limitations and high fares
• Why overnight rail saves time, money and stress
• Dreamstar LA–SF feasibility, timelines and obstacles
• Easy pilot candidates on NEC overnight slots
• Route ideas: LA–Phoenix, Chicago–Minneapolis, Chicago–Kansas City, Chicago–Nashville
• Shared berths as a lower‑cost U.S. option
• What it would take to win mode‑shift from flights
If you liked this video, please go ahead and hit that subscribe button. If you work for Amtrak or Dreamstar and want to talk sleepers, reach out. You can support us via Patreon, Buy Me a Coffee, or our merch store.
This week on Transit Tangents, we cover the potential for night trains in the U.S. We'll talk about my recent experience in a sleeper car on a night train between Switzerland and Germany, potential routes in the US, as well as a specific proposal for a night train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. All of this and more coming up on Transit Tangents. Is boarding a train in Los Angeles, climbing into a comfy bed, and then waking up in the morning for work in San Francisco going to be a reality in 2026? I wish that were true. It's probably not going to be true, but Dreamstar Lines says that it's going to be. I really am rooting for them. I want this to happen in 2026. We'll talk a little bit more about the proposal later in the episode, but I'm not sure that they're going to be able to pull this off in time necessarily. You're such a doomer.
SPEAKER_03:This week we're going to be talking all about sleeper trains and why they're so popular in other places in the world. And could they actually work and be more popular here in the US as well? Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02:And kind of to kick us off, I actually got to ride one of these fairly recently. If you saw last week's episode where we did Zurich using only public transit, which was a really fun one. If you haven't seen any of our European series that we just did, I highly recommend checking them out. But for me to get home from Zurich back to Jena, which is a smaller city in Germany, I actually had the opportunity to ride a sleeper train operated by OBB, which is the uh Austrian national rail operator. And I took it from Zurich, and that train was headed all the way to Berlin. I actually got off one stop early in the city of Leipzig, which is only about an hour or so from where I live here in Jena. To kind of kick us off, let's just take a look at what the inside of that sleeper car looked like, and then we'll talk about it afterwards. So a little messy right now because I just got in here. There will be other people joining me in the next stop. I'm on the bottom bunk here. Only one plug in here, but it's okay. Charge for a little bit. And then two other bunks. That one's way up. Part of me wishes I chose the top one, but a little sink in here, trash can, and then out in the hallway.
SPEAKER_03:I'm actually really curious how long did your train take?
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I was honestly really worried about it, and like throughout that whole afternoon, I kind of kept saying to you, I was like, I really hope this is comfortable. I really hope I can get a good night's sleep. And fortunately, I almost knocked on wood like I was still worried about it. But fortunately, I I slept fully through the night. It was really comfortable. It was, if if you were to do the full route all the way to Berlin, it would be about a 12-hour ride. So it would have been about eight to eight. Um, because I was getting off in Leipzig, and Leipzig was not the main destination of the train. I did have an early, early morning at about five in the morning getting off the train there, which was not the my favorite thing to do necessarily, but but I was home in bed really quickly because the timing with the local regional train was really good. So overall, yeah, it was very comfortable, about nine hours in total travel time for me. They also provided me with a little to-go baggie of breakfast in the morning. I got to order it the night before, and you get to fall asleep to the sounds of the train, a little bit bouncy, but um, yeah, it was overall it was really good.
SPEAKER_03:It sounds like a really cool experience. I have not taken a night train per se. I have taken a train overnight, um, which I think are two very different experiences and that we'll uh you know kind of get more into. Uh I took a train, it was actually my first ever Amtrak ride. I took a train from Hammond, Louisiana to Carbondale, Illinois, and it was a 12 or 11 hour trip that definitely stretched overnight. I think we arrived in Carbondale at like 4 or 5 a.m. And uh that would have been great had we uh had a sleeper car, but unfortunately we did not. Uh my only way to pass the time on that one is I actually uh had a uh one of my first laptops, I was like 17 years old, had a laptop and I took it to the cafe car and I played uh not City Skylines, but I played SimCity 4 for uh several hours on the train.
SPEAKER_02:Very, very on brand. My my only other experience, and I'll only talk briefly about this one just because I I it was a long time ago, but I did a night train in Thailand. Um, different layout than the one that I recently took. The one I recently took, as you saw in the clip there, uh it was basically like little rooms. So like I had a room that had three beds in it, and I was sharing it with two other people, but they were all like little closed-off compartments. Um the one that I did in Thailand was just a long hallway up the middle of the train car, and on either side you had uh during the day, it would be two seats that were facing towards each other with a small table in the middle. Um, and then when it came time for for sleeping, um, a bunk folded out of the top, uh, a bunk folded out of the bottom, and the chairs kind of folded up, and you just had little curtains you could draw. But the hallway was essentially right next to you. Definitely kind of a different model, and that was definitely like I was I was paying paying for the cheaper option on that train in uh Thailand, um, which again, I I mean I think if things like that existed in the United States, which we will kind of get into in a bit, I think that they have a potential to be popular.
SPEAKER_03:So we started the episode asking, could this be successful in the US? And we actually have some historical context to say that, yeah, maybe it could be successful in the US. Uh the history of sleeper trains goes back to 1839, with the first sleeper car service being the Cumberland Valley Railroad. Uh, this was a service that was between Chambersburg and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And Lewis and I looked this up currently, well, currently, I guess all the time, like the whole time, the distance between these two cities has been 52 miles. So not very far. And the the best estimation we can find um is an early schedule of this service where it left at 4 a.m. from Chambersburg and arrived in Harrisburg at 8 a.m. So it only took four hours to go these 52 miles, and they offered a sleeper car service, which seems kind of wild to me.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, definitely a little bizarre. I'm wondering if they did something where you were like allowed to board the train earlier, like at bedtime, and then they start driving it at a certain point. I don't know, but because otherwise that schedule seems bizarre to me, but definitely interesting that that was the first example of it in the US.
SPEAKER_03:I do wonder if maybe they offered it less as like an overnight sleeper, but more like you can nap on this car on the journey, like to pass the time more quickly. Because if you think about it, back then the distance, 52 miles in the early 1800s, if you're taking you know a horse and carriage, that's gonna still take you, you know, quite a bit of time. Um, at least you know, more than half of the day, if not a full day or day and a half, like it's gonna take you a while.
SPEAKER_02:Eventually, though, you know, kind of fast forward a bit, there they weren't widely adopted until roughly the 1860s. At the time, George Pullman started creating luxury sleeper cars as a way to kind of enter the market. Um, you see that with different industries today, where like you're starting with a luxury tier of something, and then you eventually will work into different options of it. Um, so they created these luxury sleeper cars and eventually down the line started to make them in other formats as well that were more of a shared format. The luxury ones were more private rooms, being able to spread out a little bit more, and then you ended up with more shared accommodations, uh, both similar in the style that I took uh in Europe recently, but as well as kind of what I described in Thailand as well, where you just have a hallway down the middle and beds folding out from the walls to be able to kind of cover the huge distances that trains were covering in the US at that time period. I mean, 1860s, you've got the transcontinental railroad happening, you've got rail lines being built all over the country, and that is really how the country developed westwards. So there were there was an abundance of trains that would take the distance of you know, overnight.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, and and back then those really popular routes would have been like New York to Chicago. I mean, there are two major cities uh in the 1800s that were really growing at the time. Um, and traveling between these two, we've talked about this in previous episodes too, about like early highways, there was no real viable uh road to get between these two cities. It was just hell trying to travel between places. So the train made a lot of sense. So you had routes like uh uh Chicago to New York, you had all of the East Coast cities uh down the the coast. So yeah, there were a lot of long distance routes that you would take that this would make a lot of sense. And I think about you know, when you think of the old-timey movies and you see people in like these luxury accommodations on trains, they were basically rolling hotels at that time, which is at least if you were rich, they're rolling hotels at that time, uh, which would be really cool if we could replicate today.
SPEAKER_02:Absolutely, and I mean you can just imagine the difference, like your option would essentially be like wagon being pulled by horses on bumpy, crazy dirt roads, or riding in a train, and even like the most basic stripped-down train would have been so much more comfortable at the time. You can't imagine doing it any other way, honestly. Very crazy. So, some of you who are seeing this might be saying, Well, what are you talking about? There are already sleeper cars, sleeper trains in the US, and the answer to that is technically yes. Uh Amtrak does operate uh sleeper cars on a variety of their routes, mostly on the long distance routes, which makes sense. They have four different options available. I'll kind of go through them briefly here. So you've got the roomette, which is kind of the most basic version. You know, you've got seating during the day, at night it converts into beds. You have the bedroom, which is a little bit fancier, uh, you have a little bit more space. You also get a sink and a toilet, as well as shower facilities. Uh, you get the family bedroom, which is the bigger version of the bedroom. Uh, you can fit up to four people in it instead of two. So you've got two sets of bunk beds, a sofa, and two reclining chairs, which is pretty fancy. And then lastly, they offer the bedroom suites, which is really just two bedrooms combined, from my understanding. So there are definitely options available. However, they're pretty expensive.
SPEAKER_03:Yes, they are, which is one of the reasons why I've never taken one, even though I've been really tempted to do it in the past. Um, so I'd be curious to hear anybody else's experiences if you've taken it. Uh, the few people that I know that have say that it's you know pretty comfortable, it's a great uh way to do these long distance lines. I have friends who their parents don't fly, so they're the only way for them to get across the country, and that's that's a really long way and almost requires that is several days. Yeah, that several days, several trains, and pretty much requires that you have a sleeper. Um, but I've never got a chance to take one. So if you work for Amtrak and you're watching this video and you want to send transit tangents on uh an Amtrak sleeper car to do a review, we are very open to that idea.
SPEAKER_02:Definitely, definitely. The thing to me that doesn't make any sense is like the way to make it more affordable is to test out doing some shared style accommodations. Like it doesn't have to be I I feel like maybe this is like a US thing, but like shared accommodations are just less of a thing here. Like you don't have I mean, there are hostels in the United States have stayed in hostels in the US, but they're much more common in other places. And the closest kind of experience that I can describe staying in the kind of like shared room that I just recently did where you have three people staying in there, is it kind of just feels like the bunk, you know, the bunk room, the bedroom areas of a hostel. And I mean when people are getting on a train late at night and they're gonna go sleep, like you know, I I just think it would be interesting for Amtrak to test out that format and I wonder if they would end up being able to fill more spaces. Now, I don't know that their current layouts would lend super well to doing that because having just two beds feels a little weird versus having three, four, five, six in a in a enclosed space. But um yeah, I think it's something that I'm surprised they haven't played around with recently.
SPEAKER_03:That seems like a really good test case for somewhere on the East Coast, too. Like if you offered some type of hostile car um to to be able to, you know, travel, like achieve accommodation to travel from Boston to DC or something. I think I feel like that would do okay.
SPEAKER_02:Um Because the the service that I did to be clear too, you could book it as a private room. You could book the whole thing yourself, or you can like have a more budget option.
SPEAKER_03:So are night trains a good idea in the US? I think a lot of our conversation lately has really centered on developing more high speed rail in the US, and don't hate me for saying this, but it doesn't sound like we're getting true high-speed rail anytime soon. So maybe the viable alternative to increasing rail travel or rail passenger ridership uh and providing better service, maybe that is providing more night trains. Uh so we really need to look at what are the benefits of a night train versus how you would get somewhere otherwise, whether that's driving or flying.
SPEAKER_02:So starting off, the biggest thing is you can travel while you're sleeping. And with that, you can arrive at your destination hypothetically well rested. As long as you do these well, the beds can be fairly comfortable, and you should be able to sleep on these much better than you would be able to on any other mode of transportation kind of period. You're gonna sleep better than you would in a car, you're gonna sleep better than you would on a plane, with the exception of if you have the like$5,000 business class ticket or something for an international flight, maybe. Um, it's it basically allows you to utilize time that would have been wasted laying in your bed at home, not moving, and now you are moving during that time period.
SPEAKER_03:It can also be a cost-saving measure. So a lot of times when I travel, I have to leave after work. And when I arrive at my destination, I still have to get a hotel room for that night, even if I'm arriving at 1-2 in the morning to the destination. If you're able to take a night train, arrive, you know, a little bit later, say like 8 a.m., 9 a.m. in the morning, get to that city. Now you've eliminated an entire you know nightly rate from your hotel. And depending on what city you're going to, I mean, that could very easily be anywhere from you know$150 to$350. You know, it depends on what type of hotel you're going to. Or higher.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, in a city like New York, it could be$500, you know. Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_03:So that's that could be a major uh cost savings by by taking um that night train. And probably one that's that's it should be the biggest sell in the US, and I'm actually surprised that it's not, is the fact that you don't have to deal with an airport. Anyone who has taken a train knows it is so much faster and it's less stressful that you just show up and you board the train, you find your seat, you're done. Uh, versus getting to the airport, you know, two, three hours early, you know, checking your bags, security, all of the stuff that comes with the airports. It's so much simpler when you are boarding the train.
SPEAKER_02:Well, Chris, you you haven't heard that that the airports are all fine now because Sean Duffy has asked folks to dress up for their flights. So all the you they they ask you to dress up and look more presentable. Don't wear your pajamas to the airport.
SPEAKER_00:Uh, I would encourage people to maybe dress a little better, which encourages us encourages us to maybe behave all a little better. Um let's try not to wear slippers and and uh and pajamas as we come to the airport.
SPEAKER_02:And reports that I've heard so far is that that has solved everything.
SPEAKER_03:I didn't even hear that. I didn't even know that he said that.
SPEAKER_02:Oh anyway, anyway. Um and you know, all of those are are very good kind of arguments for why this should be something that we should at the least be trying out more of. Um and to be clear, we're talking specifically like service that runs overnight too, right? Not just like, oh, we need to have sleeper cars on more trains. It's we need to have more trains that like leave at 8 p.m. and arrive at 8 p.m. Obviously, plus or minus a little a couple hours on either end of that. But the main reasons that it feels like this wouldn't be that hard to pull off and would it would in fact be much easier to pull off than some of the more ambitious goals of some of the high-speed rail proposals, which again, like both of us are in favor of high-speed rail, but the the the timeline for for when high-speed rail will become like widely accessible in the United States is decades. Like the timeline for when wider night service on these train routes could become operational is a couple of years. Like it doesn't have to be decades, it doesn't have to be this huge ordeal for a couple of reasons. Number one, whether there are passenger trains between destinations or not, there are definitely freight ones. So the rail infrastructure already exists. In many cases, it's owned by the freight lines, but if you have all night to get between these, you know, between two destinations, it doesn't need to be the most like fast schedule. You can build in time to allow for freight trains to pass or to mix you know between their schedules to be able to pull this sort of thing off. So it just feels like it's mostly uh just tweaking schedules and then actually having the the designed train cars themselves.
SPEAKER_03:I think that's probably one of the biggest uh hindrances right now, or or things in the way is that we don't really have great sleeper cars that would accommodate um this type of service, which would take time to design and acquire, and you know, even just getting a new type of train in the US takes so much time.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, a hundred percent. And we've we've been fairly positive here for this section of like talking about why it's a good idea, so to play devil's advocate a little bit. I'm curious, like do you think that like what what needs to be done for people to actually consider choosing the night train over choosing flights in some of in some of these potential scenarios? And we're gonna lay out a couple potential cities here shortly where this could happen. But what what do you think some of those factors would be and like what would convince you to do it over flying?
SPEAKER_03:I think I think a lot of it is mindset though. I think you have to be able to change people's minds on what is an acceptable form of travel. Um I think that's that's one of them. I think also we should in the US, and this isn't happening anytime soon either, but we should be restricting certain air corridors. So like you shouldn't really be able to fly between Austin and Houston or Austin and Dallas. There should be a train, a high-speed train that takes you there. Um, those are sort of future state things, I think. Um, you know, Chris not being able to travel with the people coming out. Sorry.
SPEAKER_02:People are gonna come at you in the comments for that one.
SPEAKER_03:I know, I know. Southwest are the same.
SPEAKER_02:And Southwest is gonna try to get us shut down.
SPEAKER_03:I'm not very happy with them right now, anyway, so it's fine. Um I I don't know. I think I think it's just there's such a big like mindset that has to change in the US for this to be something that people really look at because for whatever reason, we would rather be miserable for six hours on a flight uh and and going through the security and the whole red eye thing and not being able to sleep and all of that being crammed in, you know, shoulder to shoulder, versus taking a train. And it drives me crazy that that is the mindset.
SPEAKER_02:Yep, no, I agree. And I I think this is a good transition here into talking about the proposal we kind of let off the episode with, which is the Dream Star Lines proposed night train from Los Angeles to San Francisco, because what they're doing is is trying to kind of cater almost to that mindset of like this actually could be a really comfortable way to travel. They are going for the higher end option, which is pretty funny considering, you know, I mentioned we were talking about the history that uh George Pullman launched kind of the first wide scale sleeper cars in the US with a luxury process. Product. So they're offering what looks like from their renderings, which take the renderings with a grain of salt, uh, but it looks like they're offering a high-tier, really comfortable product, and they're aiming for that kind of higher-end business traveler who is kind of going back between LA and San Francisco. You know, just getting to LAX from wherever you are in LA, just the process of getting to the airport could take you an hour or more. You've got to arrive at the airport two hours early.
SPEAKER_03:The airport hubs open, just saying.
SPEAKER_02:That is true. That is true. You know, then you've got to be there two hours or so early, deal with whatever is going on at the airport, get to San Francisco, get from the airport and you know, whereas the train could hypothetically get you right in to your destination without the issue of dealing with the airport.
SPEAKER_03:And you know, Dream Star is going to be ready in 2026, Lewis.
SPEAKER_02:So they claim that. It's said that in a few spots. They haven't updated this yet, but there are several reasons to be skeptical about this at this point. First off, they they have the conceptual drawings, like I said, and they have designs that look really beautiful of all of these train cars. Unfortunately, they do not have the train cars themselves yet, and they haven't even like purchased them. You basically have two options. You're either buying new ones, which the lead times on new train cars is years. It's like like several years in many cases. The other option is essentially to buy used train cars and then you know convert them into what you're looking at. Um, and even that process, you know, from what I've read at least, says it would take somewhere between 18 months and two years to go through the process of like once you've identified specifically which ones you're gonna buy, once you pull the trigger, it's getting them to your location, retrofitting them all, testing them all, making sure everything's good to go. And they haven't initiated that step yet. So they have identified a couple potential vendors where they could get these train cars to be refurbished from, but they have not actually pulled the trigger yet to be able to do it.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, I I'm wondering if there is a term that's similar to gadget bond, but it's for marketing. So it's like they've got it.
SPEAKER_02:I mean, it's slick, it's slick looking.
SPEAKER_03:It it has a lot of of really good potential. I think I think SF to LA makes a lot of sense. Um right now the current train line takes eight to twelve hours, I think, depending on how you get to SF from LA. So it's kind of wild. Driving is five hours and it's driving in California, which is beautiful, but also, you know, you get stuck in traffic a lot. So it it does seem like this is a really good alternative to be able to travel between these two cities. And if we can provide a really comfortable train experience, you know, all the all the better. Um in my the back of my brain, this whole episode, I keep thinking back to um, and I haven't seen this in a long time, but the movie Wild Wild West with Will Smith, and they're like on the Western train, and they have like a pool table and everything, and it's like that like old western luxury hotel train. That's what I'm picturing.
SPEAKER_02:As a child, so me and my two stepbrothers as kids, we had that on VHS. I've probably seen that movie, Chris, 20 times. I I'd say, but I haven't seen it in the last 20 years. The giant spider thing that the guy's walking on. Um the one uh positive that they have here with this the Dreamliner, they do have a preliminary memorial memorandum of understanding uh with Union Pacific, who own the tracks here. I would imagine that getting the permission to be able to use the tracks wouldn't be a huge ordeal here, considering uh an existing agreement already is there with Amtrak. So um they do have that going for them. And again, like you said, the travel times, you know, varying a little bit depending on your options of between 10 and 12 hours. That is a really nice sweet spot for a night train service where you could leave after dinner in LA and arrive, you know, around breakfast time in San Francisco. So I do think that that is a good one. And we'll we'll keep an eye on it this year. I mean, hopefully I I am we've we've talked some shit about them, but I'm I'm we're rooting for them to make it happen.
SPEAKER_03:Well, I was gonna say yes, we might be we might be a little unfair to Dreamstar. If you are from Dreamstar, you know somebody who works there, we would also love to talk about it and hear about why you know you think that it's going to be this revolutionary uh new way to get around. So if you have to let us know. Yeah. But yeah, there are other potential routes that I think a sleeper car would uh sleeper um service would make sense. Probably one of the biggest would be DC to Boston. This is already a corridor that's served by the Acela, and you can do that route DC to Boston.
SPEAKER_02:Roughly seven is yeah, on the on the Acela, it's roughly seven hours from DC to Boston.
SPEAKER_03:But being able to actually sleep well on the Acela would be nice. Um, so I can see that one being a really popular one.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and what's interesting is I looked back and doing research on this and I found a Reddit thread of people talking about this, and there are trains that presently go from like, you know, running the Northeast Corridor from DC to Boston and vice versa, that on the overnight legs do often have a two-hour layover either in New York City or in Philadelphia. Normally it's New York City, but right now I guess it's in Philadelphia because of some construction work going on in New York. And they used to actually run trains with sleeper cars on them in that area. And while the train was stopped for the two hours in New York, you would you could just stay on the train and stay sleeping. Um and it basically the the reason they left that gap in the schedule was just for better kind of pickup and drop-off times in, I forget which cities it was, but it's to make the schedule more appealing to riders in some of the other cities. But it would be such low-hanging fruit to test this as a sleeper service. The trains are literally already running. Um, it would be a matter of adding some additional cars to it in an area where the infrastructure is already really good. And, you know, with a layover in one of those cities overnight, you could make it uh a really nice period of time for sleeping. Once you get on board, get settled in, lay down, you could get a full out eight hours of sleep with a layover somewhere in the middle and wake up well rested in DC.
SPEAKER_03:Another route that we have talked about that would make great sleeper car service would be LA to Phoenix. And what you may be thinking is this is already served by the Sunset Limited, which comes with sleeper cars. And if you look at the timetable, it actually makes sense as a sleeper train because it leaves Phoenix around 10 p.m. and arrives in LA around 7 a.m., which is perfect for an overnight sleeper service. The downside to that is that this train does not run every night, it has limited service, so just a couple days a week. And as far as the price goes, if you want to reserve a room on this train, it is around$324. So not the cheapest uh experience.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, and that's for one person. And I I mean uh Amtrak's prices do fluctuate, like it is uh it adjusts based on demand and whatnot. It is good to know though, that that that one actually does run over that night service. But again, it would be interesting to see them play around with the different options like we've talked about um throughout the episode. So another that I was looking at, uh we've seen a lot of success with the new Borealis route that currently runs from Chicago to Minneapolis. I think it'd be really interesting to test out a night Borealis. So during the day, that route runs seven hours and 24 minutes. At night, if you slowed it down a little bit intentionally, make it an eight and a half hour journey or so, it could be a perfect timing for a night train that leaves a little bit later at night and arrives, you know, early in the morning uh in Minneapolis. You could even slow it down even more if you wanted to. It's interesting, it's not all about speed with these. Like you could it it, I think it's more about the convenience. Like, can you can you have people arrive before things start the next day? And can they be well rested when they get there?
SPEAKER_03:So another option would be Chicago to Kansas City. This again is already served by a train. It takes roughly seven and a half hours uh to get between these two cities. You know, I think here we just take the Kansas City streetcar and throw some beds on it and just you know continue it all the way up to uh to Chicago.
SPEAKER_02:Kansas City streetcar extensions all the way to Chicago. That's uh that's phase four. There are like a lot more little options you could play with too on this, too. We were just trying to like find a couple that realistically could fall into the night time frame. I would love to say like you could do New York to Chicago or something like that as just the night train, but it takes way too many hours to do on a train still today. It's just like not fast enough service to do it as an overnight, unfortunately. Um, another kind of smaller one, and this is one that doesn't currently connect via passenger rail service, so I'm guessing a little bit on the travel time, but Chicago to Nashville thought could be an interesting one. Doing some estimating using like other routes in the area and whatnot, it could end up being somewhere like 13 or 14 hours, which again for the overnight service still works just fine. Um, you can leave sometime after dinner and arrive at eight o'clock in the morning. Very curious to hear from folks. Obviously, like we could have gone through and picked a bunch of city pairs and talked about them, but it's pure speculation at this point. So I would love to hear what cities you would like to see connected by night trains in the U.S. down below. Um, we'll kind of check them out and maybe we can revisit this in the future with kind of uh some updated info. And maybe if folks from Dreamline reach out, we will we'll do a follow-up episode and we can get someone from their team on board. Uh Dreamstar. Now you got me saying Dreamline.
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SPEAKER_02:Yeah, Chris went harden designed his own wallpaper, which is amazing. I love I love that.
SPEAKER_03:Um, transit-themed background.
SPEAKER_02:Yes, yes. Uh with all of that being said, though, thank you all so much for watching and enjoy the rest of your transit tangent Tuesday Tuesday.