OpenRailwayMap VS www.submarinecablemap.com

Looks nice but it's probably not really usable for navigation. I checked the Netherlands and Germany. You'd need more details for safely navigating on the water. But it definitely has potential.

There are also some other specialized open street map based maps for

- rails: https://www.openrailwaymap.org/

- cycling: https://www.opencyclemap.org/

- sea map (competes with this I guess, and is a bit more detailed for navigation): https://map.openseamap.org/

And probably loads of other ones.

This might be a good place to share: https://www.openrailwaymap.org

The other thing to take into account is where they would need to build routes to make it happen. Looking at https://www.openrailwaymap.org/, there's some spots that need to be filled in to make a Pittsburgh <-> Erie line. But, I could see Meadville and New Castle being at least two of the stops on the way.

The Amtrak plan I linked shows it following the Norfolk-Southern Harrisburg line. It would come from Reading and Phoenixville, through KOP, then join up with the Trenton line near Rte1 and head towards 30th St. From there it looks like it would follow the remainder of the Keystone route. You can follow the path here too:https://www.openrailwaymap.org/

^ This is just not true. For reference.

France has an excellent high speed rail network it has less need for domestic flights. Other countries in the EU could learn from that.

Germany particularly is a basket case. If you take the "high speed" train from Berlin to Köln, it takes nearly five hours, the train stops lots of times, and with the exception of a few tens of kilometers never hits anywhere near its maximum speed. Combined with all the delays, cancelled trains, strikes, etc. It makes for a bit unpredictable experience. Domestic flights are well under 1 hour, typically. Even with the hassle of getting to and from airports, it's way faster.

https://www.openrailwaymap.org/ has a nice map that you can show the maximum speeds on rail segments. Spain and France are the best. I've taken high speed trains in both and their high speed trains go the maximum speed most of the journey. Germany is notable for just not having a lot of rail suitable for its trains to drive their maximum speed.

Germany could do a lot better. But it will require massive investments.

I think the idea of a night train is more attractive than the reality of it being very slow, expensive, and relatively uncomfortable (at least I never managed to sleep well on one).

IMHO domestic flights in many countries can start transitioning to fully electric hops in the next decade or so. Anything under 700 miles is fair game for that. The battery technology is getting there. So, investing in lots of rail might not be the smartest thing.

Open Infra Map; shows major electrical lines, power plants, gas & oil lines, and telecom/data centers. Gets its data from Open Street Map: https://openinframap.org/

Open Railway Map; shows railroad lines. Also gets its data from OSM: https://www.openrailwaymap.org/

This is even better: https://www.openrailwaymap.org

Hillsboro, Oregon's network connections have a lot of advantages. It's worthwhile checking it out here: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/ --Katie

Now you can say that you've 'seen' the internet. You can see the map here

Looking at this site there are 3 companies that own/operate undersea cables to the US

This unfortunately won't get you the whole picture, but using some tools you can determine how your traffic is routed in one direction, and possibly the geographic path it takes as well. For example, in mine, I can see based on the names that I know my traffic is going through Equinix San Jose (equinix-sj), then likely to Palo Alto (pao1, palo), then to Los Angeles (lax). By looking up who owns what IP addresses, I can also see that my traffic goes from my local ISP (Sonic) to Telia, then to Amazon. While concerning, you can effectively ignore all of the hops that say "Request timed out." as those just mean the hop wasn't responding to pings (or in the case of the very end, the game server itself likely doesn't respond to pings). Unfortunately though, this is only half of the picture, as this doesn't let me see the path from anets servers to me. For that, I would need an AWS instance with similar routing rules to anet's servers. Still, this may be useful, as I'm guessing your traffic is using a submarine cable to get to anet's servers in the US. These unfortunately often have issues or maintenance that can cause measurable connectivity impacts - I'm in the US and we have a node on the NLNOG Ring, and we get alerts of connectivity issues with Europe on a regular basis.

Well. Significantly more than that due to latency from switches etc and also because of the fact that there's so little land along the equator, meaning there's only one cable that travels roughly equatorially. It's from Fortaleza, Brazil to Kribi, Cameroon: https://www.submarinecablemap.com/

If you set up a bunch of good first-surface mirrors, I'm pretty sure you could get to pretty much the speed of light. You'd have to put them pretty high up in the air to avoid hitting things (a problem for cables as well, obviously) but putting the beam 2km in the air would still only lengthen the path by 4pi km, or .03%.

I have always found it very neat that the propagation speed of a light wave in glass is roughly the same as electrical waves in a coaxial cable. Both are shockingly slow compared to air/vacuum, but for completely different reasons. In both cases the advantages in signal integrity are immense.