Train Time

It’s past time this country sat down and had a deep conversation about its transportation problem. Yes, that’s right; one of our biggest problems in this nation is transportation. We’re so used to being able to easily move ourselves around like never before. We expect shipments of goods to fly across the country to us as soon as possible. But we’re facing truths that we’ve swept under the rug for too long. The following list is the obvious; the rise in price of a barrel of oil has increased gas cost that hurt our ability to cheaply move in car and airplanes. Trucking firms have to pass on the cost of gas to the consumer as it costs more and more to ship thinks across country via the highway. Meanwhile trucks congestion is at an all time high in metropolitan areas and on cross country highways. Airlines have drastically increased fees, tacking on fuel surcharges, extra baggage fees, and all the while cutting back routes, decreasing services and comfort and having a difficult time staying on schedule. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we have a transportation problem that’s going to come crashing down on us all.

But as the defeatists spread this message all over the media, Harvard Professor John R. Stilgoe has a unique solution, let’s go back a century to when the transportation of the country was ruled by… wait for it… locomotives. His solution starts out by visualizing a young boy walking along old, unused train tracks in a country field. Where once these lines had constant use now these tracks have weeds and tall grasses growing between the slats. They’re an unused and wasted part of our past. With the infrastructure already there, Stilgoe argues that our best way forward in this country, would be to rebuild the trains. Sure, we still have freight trains crisscrossing through the countryside, and we still have Amtrak taking passengers from Chicago to New York to Washington. But what we have today, compared to what we had yesterday, are a fraction of the ability to use trains to their fullest potential.

Sometimes the myths of the past are all we know. We all know the romance of the old west, where trains cut through the desert, went into every little boom town, and were a prime target for horse riding bandits. We are aware of how trains were the main mode of transportation before cars, they dominated cross country travel before the quick and easy airlines we now take across country for vacation or work. Trains ran up and down the coasts, left and right across the divide. They were the first networks that could move information, people, and packages from Boston to San Francisco using standard routes and timetables. Every large city had a grand, central station that its residents used as a gateway, every small town had a little depot to carry one or two passengers away for the day, picking up the mail in the process. The only limitation was that the trains had to run on tracks that were unmovable, and if a train got behind a slow moving freight, there was no way around.

But after the first World War, something changed and trains were no longer fashionable. The mass production of automobiles gave more and more people a chance to own one as the nation moved into WWII production. Post-war air travel was propagandized as the new hip way to travel faster than ever before. Interstate highways made it easier for tractor trailers to find shorter routes from point A to point B. So train use fell. The first to go was passenger service, then mail cars, and slowly freight use, while still around, became less of a choice for many companies. The government meanwhile was over regulating the train industry, while giving financial breaks to the airlines, highways departments, and shipping companies. Eventually bankruptcies and mergers were the end story for some great, major rail lines.

So why does Professor Stilgoe want bring back trains and make them a more important part of the US infrastructure? Because the ways trains are set up, they’re cheaper, faster, safer and better for the environment. Cargo carried on trains will free up lanes of our over clogged superhighways making them safer and quicker for cars. You can get a bigger load to go a longer distance, at a faster speed on a train. The quick moving Acela from Boston to Washington transports people in fewer than five hours, and ridership is up all along Amtrak’s routes. More remote parts of the country are seeing that trains can help get tourists into areas hard to travel to by car, such as the mountains of Maine. Others are using their locomotive history to draw viewers to museums and onto refurbished trains that ride from one country town to the next. It’s fun for all.

It’s time to say that we finally understand that you can’t just pave more roads, or you can’t just add more airplanes in the sky. Bring back the trains as a major mode of transportation. It’s an old solution, which if made new, would help out a lot of people. Fund it. Use it. Benefit from it.