Originally Posted by
Spin
A train on 1000+ mile run doesn't make any sense. It is most efficient on 200 to 400 mile runs between highly populated city pairs.
A 1000+ mile route stops in dozens of cities along it's route though, creating dozens of possible city pairs to travel between or make connections to other services. Most pax don't travel from end to end but make shorter trips on the possible city pairs, many being 200-400 miles apart. Therefore one single seat will sell multiple times on one single run. This way, many smaller towns can be served too, where it is often very expensive to fly.
Of course, there are outliers where each route does have pax travel the whole distance or most of it; over 1000 miles. It depends on the route, of course, but on one of the New York to Miami runs, more than 20% of its riders go over 1000 miles. Of it's 33 station stops, the most popular city pair is between New York and Orlando.