Waiting on a Train:
The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service--A Year Spent Riding across America
by James McCommons and James Kunstler
Overview
From the Publisher
During the tumultuous year of 2008—when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California—journalist James McCommons spent a year on America's trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism.
Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible?
Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads.
While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America—and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.
My thoughts
Having read Britain's equivalent of this book and learned a great deal about rail travel, I decided to read America's version of the same story because quite frankly, I knew nothing about it. Sure, I'd heard of Amtrak. I even know one family - one, in all my 50 years of living - that actually took an Amtrak vacation. It was a disaster. As I read about it in my friends' Christmas letter, I laughed at each of their disasters until I had tears rolling down my face! I had forgotten about that experience until I cracked open the cover of this book.
I commend the author for a book that was well-researched and is a fascinating insight into passenger train travel in the United States. It sounds like my friends' adventure on Amtrak many years ago could very much be the same story told today. The trains are unreliable, sparce, have limited availablity, can be dirty and crowded, and may run out of food in the dining cars. Or you may have a pleasant experience and encounter few problems. Train stations may be run down, if available at all, or they may be in the process of being restored to yesterday's grandeur. If you don't like politics, stay away from the top of railways, especially high speed railways, because they've got politics written all over them.
Somewhere midst the difficulties and politics, I found myself warming to train travel. Not only warming, but falling in love with the idea. I don't look at trains the same way now as I did before I started this book. I actually want to ride a train now. (Though I met someone else who did and said it's not the romantic adventure one might think and that, in fact, it is terribly disappointing.) OK, fine, I'll have to head out with the understanding that it's not a luxury mode of transportation. But I still want to try it, and the next time someone laughs at a politician promoting rail travel in the US I'm going to listen to what s/he has to say. Automobile travel is fine, but it might be nice to let someone else do the 'driving' while I visit with my family, play cards, read a book, or dine en route to our location.
The book was an eye opener, and I highly recommend it even if you don't think you're interested in railways.
Favorite Passage
"Amtrak is like a platypus. It's made up of all these different parts and assumptions which together really don't make any sense. It got off to a shaky start in the seventies, and when people thought it would go away, it didn't. And for all these years, it's had the dumb luck to survive."
