riding the rails
My family did
a lot of travelling by train when I was young. I have fond memories of
riding the Southern Railway's Crescent from New Orleans to New
York, and thence to Boston on the New Haven, as a young child with my
mother, and, later, of travelling with my father to the World's Fair in
New York on the Erie-Lackawanna's premiere train, the Phoebe
Snow. I have vivid memories of those trips: the Doppler-shifted
ding! ding! ding! of warning bells at highway crossings; the seemingly
endless track receding into the distance from the back of the last car;
loud vestibules full of rattling and screeching; delicious food in the
dining car; strange lights in the window suddenly looming out of the night
and then vanishing; and the constant clickety-clack of steel wheels on
jointed rails, punctuated by distant blasts of the locomotive horn. These
experiences made me a train lover for life; there is no better way to
travel.
There was a time when everybody rode the train, when travel meant a relaxing, enjoyable ride past woods and fields, over rivers, and through small towns and great cities. Travel by train meant comfort, good food, and excellent service. There were no security hassles, no cramped, uncomfortable seats, no bland, microwaved food, no clear air turbulence, and no jet lag. Nor were there speed traps, drunk drivers or traffic jams, and you never lost your way. Wide awake or fast asleep you would be carried to your journey's end. When I got off the train I knew I'd travelled hundreds of miles; I'd seen them slide by, mile by mile, each filled with wonderous sights. I could not see a train pass without wondering where it was going, what delightful sights awaited its passengers. It was the only way to travel. For me it still is.
Alas, the legendary trains of my childhood are gone; I remember standing trackside with my mother on a gloomy day in the fall of 1966, waving to the Chicago-bound Phoebe Snow as it rolled by on the last day of its run. The Interstate Highway system and a short-sighted, wasteful transportation subsidy policy did them in. There are only a relative handful of long-distance passenger trains left in the United States now, all of them run by Amtrak, a public corporation funded -- barely -- by the federal government. Amtrak has been starved for both capital and operating funds as long as it has existed by successive Congresses and presidents that did not see passenger trains as a national asset. The Bush regime wants to eliminate all long-distance trains. Yet many trains are sold out weeks or even months in advance, and Bush himself travelled extensively by train during his campaign.
Of course, Bush's train wasn't an Amtrak train; it was provided him by Union Pacific, a rich, powerful corporation that wants no passenger trains on its tracks except for those it provides to special friends like Mr. Bush.
The fact is that the special favors America bestows on airlines and highways -- but not on trains -- do it little good. Some 40,000 Americans die in automobile accidents every year, and the pollution and waste automobiles generate affect us all. More than thirty million acres of American land are now paved over with asphalt -- either for highways or airports -- and enormous quantities of oil have to be pumped out of the ground every day to fuel our cars, trucks, and airplanes. Much would be saved if enough trains still ran to make rail a viable alternative.
When the airplanes were grounded after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the trains still ran. But there were not nearly enough of them to meet the demand.
If you feel as I do that trains are still a vital part of our national transportation infrastructure, join the National Association of Rail Passengers and write or call your Senators and Representatives in Congress. Act now.
See also the National Corridors Initiative Web site.