Needing to book days in advance makes it unusable for short-notice trips (vs. driving), and due to the demand they basically doubled prices. It's now more expensive to take Acela than it is to take a plane; that wasn't the case a decade ago.

Rail should be easy to use.

I live in Switzerland where people are so comfortable taking the train they treat it like an extension of their living room.

Only in rare cases do I even book tickets in advance, like when going to Milano… otherwise I just use the Fairtiq app, which is a nation wide system for paying for tickets, including busses and trams…

You swipe right before you step on, swipe left when you step off and the system automatically calculates the best ticket for you.

There isn’t a “fully booked”.

Switzerland is also the size of one of the smallest states in America.

And, what’s your point?

Its easy to do in a small area, harder in a big area like the US.

I visited Switzerland recently and loved the train network. One really awesome feature was that the train stations basically doubled as shopping malls. Which makes a lot of sense, imo!

We'd leave our room for the day, have breakfast at a restaurant or coffee shop in the train station, then jump on the train to whatever outing we had planned. At the end of the day, we'd take the train back, pick up some groceries at one of the grocery stores in the station (I saw at least two major grocery stores in our station), and then head to the room and make dinner. I also needed to visit a pharmacy at one point during our stay, and the only pharmacy open at that sleepy hour was at the train station.

The train stations are really major hubs for the towns. Even if I didn't need to take the train that day, I was still likely to make a trip down to the train station for something. It's smart.