They’re making an American “Train to Busan” but America has no trains

Somehow I don’t think “Vermonter to Springfield” has the same ring to it

Katelyn Burns
3 min readAug 31, 2021
Photo by Bruce Tuten, Flickr

I love trains. Sometimes I sit on my couch and watch mass transit videos on YouTube for hours on end. Not many people know this about me.

Funnily enough, I usually don’t like movies or TV shows about trains. I think the last train-related movie I saw was “Unstoppable,” starring Denzel Washington. But alas, I’ve never seen “Snowpiercer” or a host of other train movies.

That includes “Train to Busan,” a Korean zombie horror flick set on a high speed train. Essentially, the film portrays a zombie outbreak on a train from Seoul to Busan, South Korea.

The film scores a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and won a host of Asian film awards in 2016 and 2017. Earlier this week, news broke that producers were in the process of making an American version of Train to Busan. But I find the idea kind of hilarious. The US has one “high-speed train” route in the entire country, the Acela, which services the country’s northeast corridor. But “High-speed” is a bit of a misnomer for the route.

Thanks to substandard track, the Acela can only hit it’s top speed of 150 mph in parts of western Connecticut and Rhode Island, instead…

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Katelyn Burns

Political journalist. The first openly trans Capitol Hill reporter in US history. Writing about more than just trans issues. Follow her on Twitter @transscribe