American Keystone system is clunky and old-fashioned

I have just spent a few days in the United States, and used the train service from New York to Lancaster (Pennsylvania) - a near three-hour ride that was not cheap at $190 return (around £170), despite being booked three weeks in advance.

The north-east corridor of the United States is the only part of the nation that has anything like a European-style train service, connecting the various big cities of the region (Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston) with reasonably regular trains.

They are well used, but the system is very clunky and oldfashioned - kind of British Railways 1950s feel, although new rolling stock is on the way to replace the existing badly lit carriages which offer a rather bumpy ride.

The trains are massively overstaffed with several ‘conductors’ for a few carriages, who check your ticket and then put a label on the rack above your seat, which makes it remarkably labour-intensive.

The train I used, called the Keystone, runs between New York and the state capital Harrisburg, and is a near four-hour ride without any catering.

American platforms are bleak and often narrow places with no cafes or shops. And at bigger stations you are not allowed onto them until ten minutes or so before departure. The whole service, therefore, is perfunctory and not aimed at making the experience fun, pleasant or enjoyable.

With a bit of TLC, and some staff training in customer service, the whole experience could be so much better. Nevertheless, it’s a great way to travel around the North East - not least because fellow passengers tend to be friendly and chatty.

The service, too, shows that had the government worked to preserve more passenger services in the US, when they were ruthlessly cut by the large train companies in the 1950s and 1960s (see my book, The Great Railway Revolution, a history of the US railway system), they could well have been viable and useful in this car-oriented country. A terrible missed opportunity.