As Americans fill trains, frustration grows

Looking up at a list of delayed trains at Boston's crowded South Station on a summer afternoon, Peter Pesis asks why passenger trains in the United States are so slow, so crowded and so prone to delays.

"This is not like Europe," sighed the 38-year-old Greek native who has lived in New York 15 years and often rides the nation's only high-speed train, Amtrak's Acela Express, between midtown Manhattan and Boston.

Rising costs of traveling by air and car, brought on by record oil prices, drew a record 2.8 million people onto America's cash-strapped passenger railway network in July, the largest of any single month in Amtrak's 37-year history and up nearly 14 percent from a year earlier.