America is a car country. We always have been, and we probably always will be. But as much as we all love driving, we have to recognize that there are some downsides to not having a first-rate rail system like Europe or Japan.

Monorails used to be the vision of futuristic travel. Now, that mode of transit has been mostly reduced to inter-terminal airport travel and family theme parks. Take a step back in time and gander at these bullet-shaped babies in action.

Why isn't Europe in complete chaos over the empty skies? High-speed rail. This doesn't help people trying to fly home to Boston, but we've got a solution for that as well. [Infrastructurist] (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)

Shortsighted planning brought an end to America's great railway stations, robbing the country of great architecture and contributing to highway overcrowding. The Infrastructurist recently chronicled the most beautiful victims. —Ed.

Atlanta's transit agency switched over to a color-coded system for their train system last year and renamed the line running through the heart of the Asian-American community the "Yellow Line." You don't wanna know where the "Pink Line" goes. [AJC]

One of the biggest complaints people have about taking Amtrak is that they don't have their car when they get where they're going (that and the delays/long trips). Since the 1970's there's been a solution in the form of the Auto Train, which allows passengers to take their cars with them. The train only operates from…

Admit it. Few companies have a line as awesomely-named as "Bunn-O-Matic." But General Motors did. The Electro-Motive Division, a group which constructed mighty-powerful locomotives that used stonking diesels to generate spasm-inducing, death-killing amounts of electric power to rotate the wheels of some of some of the…