I once went skiing in Leysin, Switzerland, and tweaked my ankle on the mountain. I didn’t want to face the luggage-handling on a bum foot so I took my ski gear to the tiny local mountain trolley station, checked it in there a day ahead of my flight, and didn’t see it again until I picked it up at Narita. Freaking beautiful system. Everyone should have it. Hell, in America you could require TSA agents to be stationed at every podunk rail station in the land, where they could make you take off your underpants or whatever for “security,” and spin the whole thing as a jobs program.

The US has gotten a lot better in terms of airport rail links, but there is still a long way to go before (for example) New York, LA, Chicago, and Houston approach Hong Kong, Singapore, or Tokyo levels of service.

Also, it is nice that Cleveland has light rail or whatever, but what most foreign visitors will see in terms of US airports will be NY-NJ, LA, Chicago, DC, maybe Atlanta so you have to focus on those.

As it happens, the Atlanta airport is quite decent in terms of rail connections, probably due to the improvements brought in for the 1996 Olympics. The airport connects directly to MARTA. MARTA, with only two lines, manages to cover a surprising amount of places worth going to in a sprawling, car designed, metro area. It also actually keeps to its schedule. Its a well designed system, and its quite possible to leave the airport on a layover, get lunch or a beer near a MARTA station, and get back in time to catch your flight again.

The New York airport connections seem designed to ensure taxi drivers can gouge as much out of tourists as possible. For example, there are bus connections, but they seem to be secret. I live in New York, have tried to find the bus connections, and keep on being misdirected by airport workers or sent by signs to the wrong places. That said, PATH service to Newark would be a huge improvement, the PATH after all goes to downtown Manhattan, and also as far into Midtown as 6th Ave. and 14th Street, not ideal but at least it connects with a number of subway lines. An terminal which would integrate PATH with a number of other subway lines is very slowly being built downtown. The airtrain is “faster than walking”. The problem is that its a light rail line that is separate from the subway system, so you have to pay an extra fare and schlep your bags someways. But it does connect with commuter rail if you are in a hurry, and even the subway connections are not too bad. But as is standard for New York transportation infrastructure, its not designed for ease of use.

DC to Boston has the Acela service, which is running HSR trains on non-HSR tracks. They’ve been talking about doing proper upgrades on the tracks so they can run at a decent speed, but the fact that the HSR trains have to share track with regular commuter trains makes that less than entirely feasible. There is some vague talk about trying to build a second rail line alongside the existing Northeast Corridor, but I don’t think anyone is pushing the plans hard enough. The current idea just seems to be to upgrade and replace the existing track as much as possible.

If he ever saw them. HSR from San Diego to SF, and from DC to Boston, would be useful.

“Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai) ran a bullet train late Monday evening carrying diplomats and railway officials from such countries as the United States, Britain and India in hopes of better marketing the technology overseas.
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Over the weekend, Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama handed promotional DVDs about bullet trains to U.S. President Barack Obama when he was in Tokyo. The DVDs were made by the Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism Ministry and JR Tokai.”

I hope they impressed the hell out of Obama, because I can’t wait for America to have HSR.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nb20091118a4.html

The first few times I used Narita it was like that if I remember. However the first few times I used it I was in a car or bus, so the issue did not arise. IIRC, the station opened when Terminal 2 did.

DCA is great – a metro stop right outside the airport takes you into to central DC. And it’s short. I haven’t tried it, but LAS looks like you could walk to some of the Strip hotels….