The View From Here . . .
By Bob Morgan, Jr.

Last weekend, I was in Washington for a professional conference, accompanied by young Robert. The lad and I took Amtrak home and the trip proved to be a bit too eventful.

It was Mother's Day evening and the train figured to be crowded in any event. However, when we got a little past Baltimore, there was a long delay as passengers from another, apparently disabled, train were herded on our train. A new empty coach was added to the train, but there was considerable confusion and crowding. Then, just before we got to Penn Station, it was announced that the existing train crew had worked for already worked for 12 hours and were not permitted to continue in service. Even though the trip had less than 15 minutes to go, we had to wait a considerable amount of time (I'm guessing 20-30 minutes) waiting for the new crew. All told, we were about 90 minutes late in the end.

The point here is not to whine about our travails on Amtrak (indeed, people who have been stuck on airline runways for hours will not be very sympathetic), but to offer the story as an introduction to some thoughts on railroads as a viable mode of transport in 21st century America.

Although I have had rather too many Amtrak experiences similar to the one last Sunday, overall train is a very civilized way to travel. The boarding procedures are simple, you can move around the cabin and the train, there are frequently interesting things to see outside. Two across seating in coach certainly is superior to the alternatives. And there still is a certain romance to train travel. I still have vivid memories of overnight trips to Florida and Georgia as a child.

Another plus to railroads is that it tends to be fuel efficient. This is important whether or not one is a firm believer in current global warming theories. At the very minimum, less dependence on foreign oil is in the strategic interest of the United States.

Of course, most other countries have train systems that are considerably more advanced than in the United States. The French TGV trains, for example, regularly travel around 200 miles an hour and railroads in most countries have much more frequent schedules than does Amtrak. Indeed, even in my last foreign trip to Morocco, train service was quite frequent and efficient.

Still, what is not needed is a massive program to upgrade the existing Amtrak system. Much of the current route is outdated or the product of political pork spending. To use a good example, to get to Cincinnati from New York on Amtrak, rather than going through, say, Pittsburgh, one must travel through Washington and then take a very leisurely tour through rural West Virginia. While the preservation of the West Virginia route is no doubt a tribute to the political skill of influential legislators like Robert Byrd, this literally is no way to run a railroad.

It probably makes sense for Amtrak to sell or abandon long, underutilized routes through underpopulated areas and instead concentrate on improving service between nearby city pairs, where downtown to downtown train travel would actually be faster than either travel by train or car. For example, rapid service from Pittsburgh to Cleveland to Columbus to Cincinnati, and then down to Atlanta through Louisville, Nashville and Chatanooga, would probably be relatively popular and cost effective in ways that some existing lines will never be.

We do need to improve our railroads, but only in a smart way.