"Buffalo was served by more than 300 passenger trains a day, and of course the [New York] Central's traffic was dominant. Between Buffalo and New York, four railroads offered sleeping car service over six different lines." Night Trains: The Pullman System in the Golden Years of American Rail Travel, Peter Maken.
Night Trains is a great book that discusses the Pullman Service in the US. At the end is an appendix that is a freeze-frame snapshot of all Pullman trains on the rails on a Midnight in March 1952. The appendix produces an amazing picture of thousands of trains at predetermined spots across the country on a huge interconnected web of steel. Trains in which people are sleeping, dozing, or staring out the window at whatever landscape they can discern at the late hour. Idyllic? Maybe on the surface or from a satellite's-eye view of the rail map, but certainly not for all - with labor unrest, automobile travel via super highways on the horizon, and racial tensions beginning to percolate. America's love affair - or perhaps better put, America's weekend fling - with railroads soon would end. It wouldn't end with a crash, but with a steady decline punctuated by individual bankruptcies and abandonments.
One could get from Buffalo to NYC on the New York Central Railroad in under 8 hours at the fastest. Today, it takes just over 8 hours to travel the same route (stops included). So, we could say that the trains are not much slower than they were at the height of passenger rail in the US, or we could say that things have not progressed at all during a time in which passenger rail speeds in Europe and Asia have increased significantly. So which is it?
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