waiting on a train by james mccommons [book preview]

8/14/2019 Waiting on a Train by James McCommons [Book Preview]

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Media Inquiries contact: Ruby Ferm at: [email protected]

For more information go to:http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/waiting_on_a_train:paperback

America once had a passenger railroad system that was the envyof the world. Now we have one that the Bulgarians would beashamed of. The task of reviving it could not be more importantif we wish to keep people moving around this continent-sizednation, especially as the airlines crap out and our system ofmass Happy Motoring founders on the shoals of peak oil. Theinfrastructure of our rail system is lying out in the rain waiting tobe xed; the project would put scores of thousands of people towork at meaningful jobs at all levels; and the fact that were noteven talking about it shows how un-serious we are as a society.This book is one small step toward the giant leap of consciousnessnecessary to repair our battered country. James HowardKunstler, author of World Made By Hand and The Long Emergency

WAITING ON A TRAINThe Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service

James McCommonsForeword by James Howard Kunstler

Pub Date November 2009

$17.95 US, $23.50 CAN Paper ISBN 9781603580649 6 x 9 272 pages Nature & Environment World Rights

304

Will America ever get passenger rail back on track?

During the tumultuous year of 2008when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set rider-ship records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in Californiajournalist JamesMcCommons spent a year on Americas trains, talking to the people who ride and work therails 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, governmentregulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simplequestion: 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 govern-ment 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 andfinancial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads.

While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forwardin Americaand what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportationsystems. Against the backdrop of the nations stimulus program, he explores what it will take tobuild high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realizedin America.

James McCommonshas been a journalist for more than twenty-five years and published hundreds of articles in magazines andmajor newspapers. A former senior editor at Organic Gardeningmagazine, he specializes in ecology and travel writing. He grew

up in a railroad family and has spent thirty-five years riding trainsin America. He currently teaches journalism and nature writing atNorthern Michigan University and lives in Marquette, Michigan.


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WAITING ON A TRAIN

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WAITING ON A TRAINThe Embattled Future

of Passenger Rail Service

James McCommons Foreword by James Howard Kunstler

Chelsea Green Publishing Company White River Junction, Vermont

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Copyright 2009 by James McCommons. All rights reserved.Foreword copyright 2009 by James Howard Kunstler. All rights reserved.No part of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form by any means withoutpermission in writing from the publisher.

Project Manager: Emily FooteDevelopmental Editor: Jonathan CobbCopy Editor: Cannon LabrieProofreader: TKIndexer: TK

Designer: Peter Holm, Sterling Hill Productions

Printed in XXXFirst pr inting, MONTH 200X10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 09 10 11 12 13 14

Our Commitment to Green PublishingChelsea Green sees publishing as a tool for cultural change and ecological stewardship. Westrive to align our book manufacturing practices with our editorial mission and to reducethe impact of our business enterprise on the environment. We print our books and catalogs

on chlorine-free recycled paper, using soy-based inks whenever possible. This book maycost slightly more because we use recycled paper, and we hope youll agree that its worthit. Chelsea Green is a member of the Green Press Initiative (www.greenpressinitiative.org), anonprot coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the worldsendangered forests and conserve natural resources.

BOOK TITLE was printed on PAPER, a XX-percent post-consumer-waste recycled,old-growth-forestfree paper supplied by PRINTER.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataMcCommons, James, 1957- Waiting on a train : the embattled future of passenger rail service / James McCommons ;foreword by James Howard Kunstler. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-60358-064-9 1. Railroads--United States. 2. Transportation--United States. I. Title.

HE2741.M196 2009 385.220973--dc22

2009030142

Chelsea Green Publishing CompanyPost Ofce Box 428White River Junction, VT 05001(802) 295-6300www.chelseagreen.com

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c o n t e n t s

Foreword Prologue Baltimore On the Oldest Railroad in America

Part 1: Through the Rockies and Sierras California Zephyr Here Come Your Game Boys

and Microwaves | 000 Sacramento All You Got Now is Amtrak | 000 Train World Foamers and Trainspotters | 000 Real Railroad World The Birth of Amtrak | 000

Part 2: Pacic Northwest North Dakota Across on the Hi-Line | 000 Essex, Montana At the Izaak Walton Inn | 000

The Cascades Locomotive Problems | 000 Seattle The N word: Nationalization | 000 Amtrak Cascades Its All About Frequency | 000 Oregon Funding Rail with Vanity Plates | 000 Empire Builder The Best Kept Secret in America | 000

Part 3: The Midwest Chicago A Third-World Train Set | 000 Madison Everything Has Six Zeros In It | 000

Part 4: The Middle Atlantic Lakeshore Limited But I Dont Want a Burger | 000 The Acela Express Aboard Americas Fastest Train | 000 Washington, D.C. Running Out of Capacity | 000 Norfolk, Virginia Make Those People Go Away | 000 Raleigh, North Carolina A State-Owned Railroad | 000

The Carolinian National Train Day | 000 Union Station, Washington D.C. When Railroads

Were Bad to the Bone | 000 The Capitol Limited America Rides These Trains | 000

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Part 5: California The Southwest Chief On the Transcon | 000 Pacic Suriner On Board the California Car | 000

The Coast Starlight A California Train Inside and Out | 000 Capitol Corridor Trains in the Streets of Oakland | 000 Caltrans, Sacramento A Billion Dollars Ready to Go | 000 High Speed Rail Authority, Sacramento

Building another Hoover Dam | 000 California Railroad Museum, Sacramento

Railroads Become Road Kill | 000 Amtrak Western Division, Oakland Freight that Talks | 000 California Zephyr A Stunning Long Way to Go | 000 Colorado River Yak-Yak on the Radio | 000 Denver Waiting for Those Freighters | 000

Part 6: TexasThe Texas Eagle Diner Lite | 000

Longview, Texas Dont You Get it? We Dont Care | 000

Houston A Pitiful Harvest By Bus | 000 Dallas A Texas T-Bone Bullet Train | 000 BNSF Headquarters, Ft. Worth We Care. We Really Do | 000 Texas Eagle No Mac and Cheese | 000

Part 7: The NortheastThe Hiawatha Deadly Days | 000

The Capitol Limited A Complete Washout | 000

Union Station, Washington, D.C.The Big Lie of Protability | 000

Amtrak Headquarters Broken Governanceand the Amtrak Haters | 000

Philadelphia Trains with People in Them | 000 Boston I Was Your Governor | 000 Cambridge Mega-Regions: 100 Million More People | 000 The Downeaster Maines Very Own Train | 000 Lake Shore Limited Can I Sit Somewhere Else? | 000 C h e

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Part 8: The Gulf Coast City of New Orleans On the Main Line

of Mid-America | 000

Meridian, Mississippi Interstate II in Just FifteenYears | 000 New Orleans Rail: The Red-Headed Stepchild | 000 CSX Headquarters, Jacksonville Wheres the Vision,

Wheres the Money? | 000Tallahassee Left Without a Cadillac | 000

Silver Meteor A Bed and 600 miles | 000Virginia Beach Railpax: Set Up to Fail | 000

Washington, D.C The Freight-Railroad Boys | 000

Epilogue Pittsburgh On Train Time Again | 000

Index | 000

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2009 Kalmbach Publishing Co., TRAINS: Bill MetzgerThis material may not be reproduced in any formwithout permission from the publisher.Source: Amtrak. Not to scale. Not all stations shown.Capitalized cities in the inset maps represent end pointsfor the corridors shown.

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f o r e w o r d

The world economic asco, which I call The Long Emergency, may bespeeding us into a future of permanent nostalgia in which anything that is notof the present time looks good. I say this to avert any accusations that I amtrafcking in sentimentality where the subject of railroads is concerned. For

the moment, any suggestion that a railroad revival in America might be a goodthing is generally greeted as laughable for reasons ranging from the incompe-tence of Amtrak, to the sprawling layout of our suburbs, to our immense invest-ment in cars, trucks, and highwaysmotoring culture now overshadowing allother aspects of our national identity.

This said, I will hazard to engage in a personal sentimental journey to thememory bank of my many adventures on trains, starting with the best: my

yearly journey from New York City to summer camp in New Hampshire,

which I repeated for several years beginning in 1959. Apart from my delirious joy at getting out of the city for two whole summer months, the trip itself wasmagical. The camp rented two Pullman sleeper cars. They smelled deliciouslyof machine oil and freshly washed linens, and were air-conditioned to arcticlevels of temperature. Whatever wasnt luxuriously plush was polished to a highsheen, including a lot of chrome and brass.

We departed from Pennsylvania Station about 9:00 p.m. for the overnighttrip. Most of us stayed awake until the wee hours terrorizing the porter withour water guns, visiting in each others berths (sharing troves of Zagnut bars,Raisinets, and sometimes even booze lched from our parents liquor cabinets),and watching the cavalcade of the New England landscape scroll through thewindow in the moonlight, past the tobacco-growing sheds of the ConnecticutRiver valley, the ghostly switching yards, and the quiet streets of nameless smalltowns. Eventually, the rocking train lulled most of us to an hour of sleep.

We pulled into our destination, White River Junction, Vermont, near thecrack of dawn, and then we bleery little insomniacs were stuffed into an oldU.S. Armysurplus troop truck for the last leg of the journey across the river toNew Hampshirethen a wonderfully backward corner of the country with nointerstate highways and lots of men with beards. The reverse trip home at theend of August was fun, too, in the same way, except for our tragic fate of havingto return to the rigors of school.

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xi i foreword

I rode the Long Island Railroad commuter line a lot in the 1960s because Ilived in Manhattan with my mom and stepfather and was exported on Saturdaystwice a month to visit my father in the suburbs. While it became routine, it wasnever dull watching the endless lumpenprole precincts of Queens County, withtheir unimaginably dreary asphalt-shingled shoebox houses, numberless autoscrapyards, and chaotic shopping boulevards of colorful folks from foreign lands.I often rode back Monday mornings with my father, along with a thousandother identical men in suits and hats. Up until 1963, the great old PennsylvaniaStation still existed, and one rose out of the transportation bowels of the city,with those ranks of suited and hat-wearing executives, like a conquering legion

through a set of triumphant vaults to the great global engine that was New Yorkin the postwar decades.Train service went straight to hell by the late sixties. In college, I took the old

New York Central from Rochester to New York City a few times, but by thenthe rolling stock had developed the ambience of a lavatory, with trash every-where, and the upholstery rotting, and odoriferous men snoring across the rowsof seats. There were mysterious delays all along the way. The old Beaux Artstrain stations in Syracuse and Albany had not yet been turned into banks, but

you could no longer buy so much as a stick of gum in them. The inducement todrive, instead, on the brand-spanking-new New York State Thruway, was huge.

By the mid-1970s, American passenger rail, in near total disarray, fell underthe baleful sway of Conrail and Amtrak, both apparently created on a Soviet-management model, with an extra overlay of Murphys Law 1 to insure maxi-mum entropy of service. In 1974 I took the San Francisco Zephyr from New

York to Oakland, California. It was, of course, uncomfortable, lthy, and cold,with worn-out rolling stock, iffy linens, and onboard food consisting of mystery-meat sandwiches prepared solely in a Radar Range. The most remarkablething about this journey was how we managed to avoid anything scenic. Theinitial run was overnight from New York to Chicago in the November dark-ness. In Chicago, we had such a long layoverall day, reallythat I was able totour the Art Institute, the Field Museum, and even take in a movie before weresumed our journey on a different train. We rolled through Iowa and Nebraskaall night and I woke up somewhere along the bleak prairie outside of Denver.In that city, we parked on a siding near a stockyard all day long for reasons neverexplained, and departed again at dusk for the leg through the Rockies. Thingsnally got interesting the next morning in Sparks, Nevada, when we enteredthe Sierras, but the Radar Range cuisine had introduced some malign ora intomy guts and I spent most of that nal leg in the bathroom.

1 Murphys Law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.

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Foreword xiii

Since then, train travel in the United States has become a pretty bare-bonesaffair. Amtrak has become the laughingstock of the world. Most Americans nowliving have never even been passengers on a trainfor them its as outmodedas the stagecoach. The nal three-decade blowout of the cheap fossil-fuel estaled to the supremacy of the automobile and the fabulous network of high-ways that provided so much employment and so many real-estate developmentopportunities. This is all rather unfortunate because we are on the verge ofexperiencing one of the sharpest discontinuities in human history.

Were heading into a permanent global oil crisis. It is going to change theterms of everyday life very starkly. We will be a far less afuent nation than

we were in the twentieth century. The automobile is now set to become adiminishing presence in our lives. We will not have the resources to maintainthe highways that made Happy Motoring so normal and universal. The sheerprospect of permanent energy-resource problems has, in my view, been theprime culprit behind the cratering of our nancial system for the simple reasonthat reduced energy inputs lead inexorably to the broad loss of capacity toservice debt at all levels: personal, corporate, government. Its quite a massiveproblem and its not going away anytime soon, which is why I call it The

Long Emergency. There are many additional pieces to it, including very trou-bling prospects for agriculture, for commerce, manufacturing, really for all thenormal activities of daily life in an advanced civilization.

I think were going to need trains again desperately. Among the systems introuble (and headed for more, very soon) is commercial aviation. In my opin-ion, the airline industry as we know it will cease to exist in ve years. Combinethis with the threats to our car cultureincluding resumed high fuel costs andthe equal probability of scarcities and shortages, along with falling incomes andlost access to creditand you have a continental-sized nation that nobody cantravel around.

Rebuilding the nations passenger railroad has got to be put at the top ofour priority list. We had a system not so long ago that was the envy of theworld; now we have service that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of. Thetracks are still lying out there rusting in the rain, waiting to be xed. The jobdoesnt require the reinvention of anythingwe already know how to do it.Rebuilding the system would put scores of thousands of people to work atmeaningful jobs at all levels. The fact that were barely talking about it showswhat an unserious people we have become.

Rebuilding the American passenger-railroad system has an additional urgentobjective: we need a doable project that can build our condence and senseof collective purpose in facing all the other extraordinary challenges posed by

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xi v foreword

the long emergencyespecially rebuilding local networks of commerce andrelocalizing agriculture. Theres been a lot of talk about hope in our politicslately. Real hope is generated among people who are condent in their abilityto contend with the circumstances that reality sends their way, proving to them-selves that they are competent and able to respond intelligently to the impera-tives of their time. We are, in effect, our own generators of hope. Rebuildingthe American railroad system is an excellent place to start recovering our senseof purpose.

james howard kunstler

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p r o l o g u e

Baltimoreon the oldest railroad in america

Patches of snow lay along the tracks. The late afternoon sun, ickering stro-

belike through the trees, momentarily froze each image, as if slowing downthe reel of a movie. Through the bare branches streamed redbrick warehouses,grafti-marked retaining walls, parking lots ringed with razor ribbon, and tinybackyards littered with barbecue grills and play sets. Wisps of smoke ventedinto the cold air from the chimneys atop the row houses. From its backside,Baltimore looked worn and forlorn.

The wheels clattered away on the rails below as John Hankey, a historian andone-time locomotive engineer, talked into my ear, pausing whenever the loco-

motives whistle blastedtwo long, one short, another longat road crossings.Once, when the horn sounded especially insistent, even frantic, John grippedhis seat and said, Thats not good. A moment later, we passed some bushes ona trash-strewn hillside and saw kids scrambling upslope away from the train.

The commuters dozed and chatted, most of them on their way to WashingtonsUnion Station. A man sitting nearby opened the Washington Post to a story ofthe president-elect, holed up in Chicago, naming new cabinet members andconjuring up economic remedies. At the end of this crazy year, we certainlyneeded to take the cure.

John and I had boarded the MARC (Maryland Rail Commuter) train atCamden Station, next to Oriole Park, the site one of the countrys earliestrailroad terminals. Camden Yards was once a major passenger station with asprawling complex of warehouses and loading docks, freight terminals, repairshops, and switching yards for the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad (B&O). Priorto the Civil War, the Camden Line had been the only rail link to the capital.Abraham Lincoln passed this way en route to Gettysburg and then again whenhis funeral train took his body back to Springeld, Illinois, for burial.

And here on this stretch of track, I was nearing the end of my own long jour-ney. Over the months of 2008, Id ridden some 26,000 miles by rail researchingand writing about the future of passenger railroading in America. I was on theCamden Line this bright December day for the chance to pass over the oldest

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xv i prologue

continuously operated piece of railroad in North America. Passenger trainshave run this route for 179 years.

CSX Transportation, one of the giant freight railroads, now owns the CamdenLine, but it was built by the B&O. After the war of 1812, the country hadexpanded westward. Goods and people moving to and from the interior couldnot easily reach Baltimore and other East Coast cities, so trade shifted to theOhio and Mississippi rivers and, ultimately, New Orleans.

Seeing their commercial business dwindling, most East Coast cities gambledon new, westward canalsfollowing New Yorks success with the Erie in1825but Baltimore decided to build a railroad. In 1828, no one in America

knew much about railroading; the technology was still developing in Britain.Steam locomotives didnt exist here, and there was no steel to speak of. The rstrails were fashioned from stone and wood; the track bed cut by hand using Irish,German, and slave labor.

Many hills around Baltimore contain large amounts of clay. Black powderhad been so ineffectual in moving the soilthe charges just kind of went poofin the clay, said Johnthat crews working day and night had to dig with justhand tools. One day in 1828 a hill gave way, and one of Hankeys Irish ancestors

was buried alive. Death while working on the railroad wasnt uncommon. I, too,had an ancestor who had been killed on the job.

For the rst few miles from Camden Station, we followed the original 1830railroad bed. The right-of-way had been widened, more ballast added andmodern tracks and signaling put in, but this was where the concept of railroad-ing in America had rst proved itself.

The tracks sashayed sharply to the left and then to the right. This is 1830railroading, Hankey explained. Steam locomotives werent yet available, sothey initially ran with horses pulling a car. They optimized for a level grade anddidnt care about curves, which is precisely the wrong equation. Better to go asstraight as you can even if you have to climb a grade.

In a few minutes, we dropped down to the Patapsco River valley and passedVinegar Hill where, in 1829, Irish laborers went on strike and rioted becausetheir bosses had skipped out with their pay. The railroad asked for the militiato put down the rebellion and arrest the leaders, an early example of the heavyhand railroads were to play for many decades in business and labor history.

Seven miles from Camden Station, the line split. The old B&O mainlineveered off to the northwest and our MARC train ran southwest toward thecapital. And then we were crossing the Patapsco on the Thomas Viaduct, aspectacular stone bridge more than six hundred feet long, built in 1835 on acurve and constructed of Roman arches. Talk about infrastructureit was an

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Prologue xvii

engineering marvel of its day, and heavy freight and commuter trains still passover it today. A fteen-foot obelisk, dedicated to the B&O president, board ofdirectors, and the bridge architect, Benjamin Latrobe, stood at the east end ofthe bridge.

They had just opened up the line to Washington and already were puttingup monuments to themselves, Hankey remarked.

And so they should, I thought, because in the next few decades, the UnitedStates became the greatest railroad nation on earth, building on and contrib-uting to an empire of capitalism. Trains penetrated the wilderness, movedgoods and people, tied together a nation, helped win a civil war and later

two world wars, and created a modern, mobile industrial society. Railroadswere the engines of economic growth in the late nineteenth century. By the1920swhen the railroads were at their peak with more than 1,000 compa-nies operating over a network of 380,000 miles of trackthey carried 1.27billion passengers annually. The Pullman Company, which invented and oper-ated the sleeper cars, was the largest hotel operator in the world, catering to40,000 guests every night. The railroad was a reliable, efcient, high-capacity,all-weather, and democratic mode of transportation, said Hankey. It enabled

America to become one nation and expand on a continental basis.Then, about fty years ago, unlike the rest of the world, the United States

decided the country didnt need trains anymore or the infrastructure of raillines that reached out to nearly every town, every factory, and every citizen. Itwasnt so much a conspiracy as a happenstance of neglect, poor planning, andthe usual messiness of democracy and capitalism. The U.S. was the only indus-trialized country in the world to have an entirely private rail system and whenthe private business model didnt work anymore, we just let the railroad go toseed, not knowing what we had until it was nearly gone. The rise of the auto-mobile and assembly line, the discovery of cheap oil in Texas and Oklahoma,and the governments drive to subsidize and build a sprawling road networkenticed Americans from the railroads. There was psychology at work as well.For a headstrong country that saw itself as the epitome of modernity and tech-nological innovation, trains seemed old-fashioned, pass.

At Union Station, Hankey and I got off the commuter and walked over toAmericas fastest train, Amtraks Acela Express, waiting to be boarded for therun north to New York and Boston. In 1999, Amtrak bought twenty Acela trainsetsmeaning locomotives and carswhich were designed and built overseas.Though capable of 200 mph, Acela rarely hits 150 mph, and

on a typical trip averages only 88 mphno faster than many steam locomo-tives running between major cities eighty years ago.

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xvii i prologue

Acela is the best America can do at present, which isnt very good at all whencompared to the French, the Germans, and the Japanese, and now the Chineseand the South Koreans and Taiwanese and Spaniardsall of whom have beenbuilding high-speed trains and infrastructures for years.

How this state of affairs had come to pass and what we can do to improveupon it had taken me a good amount of time to sort out. I read extensively,interviewed dozens of experts like Hankey, and spent weeks on the rails travel-ing the country, talking as I went with the people who ride and work the trains.

There was much to discover. Although I had family connections to rail-roading, I knew little of the industry, its history, and the reasons why Amtrak

emerged as the sole operator of intercity passenger trains. My travels on Amtraksometimes fullled my low expectations of a railroad run on a shoestring, but Ialso went to places where its services work quite well.

I experienced the difculty of getting around the country without a car andalso came to understand that our modes of travel rail, aviation, and highway--are ridiculously separated from one another. Connectivity matters.

And nally, despite the popular zeitgeist that Americans wont ride trains,are in love with their cars, and the United States is just too big for rail travel,

I sensed the country was at a turning point with passenger trains and ready torediscover rail.

As it turns out, that was truer than I could have imagined.

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California Zephyrhere come your game boys and microwaves

The odyssey began in early 2007 when I got a magazine-writing assignmentthat would take me from my home in Michigans Upper Peninsula to Seattle,Washington. I could have own, but I asked the editor if she would pay for a

train instead. Sure, she agreed, if the cost didnt exceed a jet. It was a bit more,but I made up the difference because it was a chance to climb aboard a long-distance train again.

I also wanted to bring along Kelly, my oldest son, then thirteen, to introducehim to the landscapes of the West and to train travel, too. He barely remem-bered the trip we had taken from Toledo to Harrisburg when he was ve, andI had not been on a train since.

When we boarded the California Zephyr at Chicagos Union Station that

March, I didnt know this one trip would encompass so much of the promise in,and the trouble with, passenger-train service in the United States today. Havingridden Amtrak for some thirty years, I knew we would likely encounter somepoor service, missed connections, long waits, and run-down equipment. Still,the train offered great scenery, the camaraderie of fellow passengers, a reprievefrom driving or ying, a great safety record, and an exotic experience.

So few intercity passenger trains run today that most Americans have neverboarded one. Amtrak doesnt come through their town, or it comes just oncea dayperhaps in the middle of the nightor every other day. Rarely is thetrain on time, and more recently, its often been lled and with no availableseats. Where I live in the Upper Peninsula is isolated, and no matter how greata renaissance rail may undergo in this country, I dont expect a passenger trainwill come that far north again for a long time.

Until 1969, the Chicago and North Western Railways Peninsula 400 ranbetween the Upper Peninsula and Chicago, making the trip in about six hours,an hour quicker than I can drive it doing the speed limit. But no more. Thenearest railhead for a passenger train to me today is Milwaukee, 273 miles to thesouth. There, I could pick up the Hiawatha, an Amtrak success story. Makingseven trips daily to downtown Chicago and back, the Hiawatha is a corri-dor train between major cities that are too close for efcient air service andconnected by a deteriorating interstate highway lled past capacity.

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4 through the rockies and sierras

The departments of transportation in Illinois and Wisconsin subsidize theHiawatha service and have spent millions building stations and helping theCanadian Pacic expand its track system to accommodate both freights andpassenger trains. The DOTs want to lure some commuters off the roadways,and also give people another mode of travel. The trains run on time. They areclean, lled with passengers, and increasingly popular since gas prices skyrock-eted in 2008.

We boarded the train at the Amtrak station near Milwaukees airport, MitchellField, having left the automobile in long-term parking. Commuters jammedthe Hiawatha, tapping on Blackberries and yakking on cell phones. An atten-

dant wheeled a cart down the aisle, and I bought a coffee and opened a news-paper. Frozen farm elds rolled past the window. Now, all we had to do was sitback and riderst to Chicago, then to Sacramento by sleeping car, and then,after a few days in California visiting a childhood friend, north through theRedwoods and Coast Ranges to Seattle. Thousands of miles, eighty-plus hourson the rails, a panorama of western landscape, and a melting pot of human char-acters to encounter along the waythe trip guaranteed adventure. I told Kelly,By the time we get home, youll know youve been somewhere.

I had pulled him from school for ten days. He carried a knapsack of comicbooks, an iPod and Game Boy, school texts, and a thick folder of homework.But he was too excited that morning for algebra and instead peered out thewindow looking for the Sears Tower and Chicago skyline.

At Union Station, we checked our bags at the Metropolitan Lounge, reservedfor rst-class sleeping-car passengers, and went upstairs to the Great Hall withits Romanesque columns and hard, wooden railroad benches.

Because of its central location in the Middle West, Chicago has long beena railroad town. At one time, the city had ve railroad terminals, but UnionStation was the busiest. In the 1940s, it handled more than 300 trains and100,000 passengers a day. Today, its still busy, with commuters riding Metraand a few thousand passengers traveling on one or another of Amtraks 50-oddtrains that run in and out of Union Station each day.

The Great Hall was cut off from the regular ow of passengers when Amtrakremodeled the station in 1989 and moved its waiting areas and lounges below-ground. Amtrak constructed the comfortable, classy Metropolitan Lounge, butherded its coach passengers into the unimaginatively named Lounges A and B,which are frequently jammed with passengers and luggage, and claustrophobicin comparison to the airy, cavernous Great Hall. Veteran passengers ee to thehall and wait up there for their trains, but unsuspecting newbies, who want tostay close to the boarding area, miss one of Americas great indoor spaces.

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California Zephyr 5

Kelly and I sat on the benches, tilted our heads back and looked at the winterlight ltering through the overhead skylights. Homeless people slept on nearbybenches, their faces and hands obscured beneath soiled jackets, sweaters, andblankets. They resembled long piles of unwashed laundry. They smelled, too.Train terminals offer refuge during the day, and in my travels I encounteredhomeless lying in Oaklands Jack London Station, sleeping upright in the artdeco chairs of the L.A. terminal, and squatting in corners of New Yorks PennStation. Kellys sad expression and stolen glances at those men were disquieting.What could I say?

We boarded the train as an ice storm whipped into the city, jamming up

rush-hour trafc on the Dan Ryan Expressway and delaying ights out ofOHare and Midway. Sleet pelted the train as it gathered speed through thewestern suburbs and onto the frozen cornelds of northern Illinois.

After the conductor punched our tickets, we walked forward to the diningcar and ordered dinner. While we ate, the storm morphed into a full-blownmidwestern blizzard. Looking into the blur of snow, I told Kelly stories aboutother train journeys.

His mother, Elise, and I, were once aboard a train traveling from Detroit to

Chicago. The locomotive stalled for hours in a sweltering corneld. And therewas that cold night we spent riding across Kansas when the heat failed in thesleeping car. As compensation, the sleeping-car attendant brought us bottles ofred wine, which we drank in sleeping bags zipped up to the neck.

In the early 1970s, Amtrak ran the Rainbow Trains. The consists a techni-cal term railroaders use as a noun to describe the composition or arrangementsof the locomotive and carswere a hodgepodge of old, hand-me-down equip-ment inherited from a dozen different railroads. The toilets, known as holesin the oor, ushed right onto the tracks, and you could watch the woodenties rushing by underneath. In 1978 on the Sunset Limited in west Texas, Iwatched cooks working over smoky stoves red by charcoal briquettes. Theair-conditioning and exhaust fans had broken down, and the dining attendantsthrew open the windows at the ends of the car to clear the smoke. Heat fromthe Chihuahuan Desert blasted through the windows, and I ate with an oldrailroader who reckoned the engineer had the train running 95 to 105 mph.

I was in college then, on my way to Arizona to drive an elderly aunt andall her belongings back to a retirement home in Pennsylvania. In the loungecar, I met Sigrid, a blue-eyed, freckled blond running away from a possessiveboyfriend in Florida. A friend had gotten her a job in California on a sprawl-ing farm in the San Joaquin Valley, where she was to stand at the row end of abroccoli eld and vector in crop-dusting planes.

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Ill need to wear an aluminum suit with a mask. You know, because of thepesticides. And I have to wave these ags to signal the pilot.

Those are semaphores, I said, remembering a vocabulary word Id pickedup in an English class.

During a fueling stop in El Paso, we stepped onto the oven heat of the rail-road platform and took pictures of one another standing outside the stucco-covered station. We drank cold beer in the lounge car as the train ran throughDeming and Lordsburg.

In Arizona, right at dusk, we reached the ranching town of Benson. I wasthe only passenger getting on or off. The conductor looked me over and said,

Young man, this will be easy. Were going to slow the train to a crawlbutnot stop. When I say nowyou step off. Take a big step forward and then turnaround and Ill toss your knapsack.

When I caught the pack, he gave me an approving nod and then windmilledhis arm at the engineer leaning out from the locomotive. The train throttled uptoward Tucson. These days, Amtrak employees arent allowed to step on or offmoving trains, but back then a lot went on, including running trains 100 mphover tracks rated at 50. Nowadays with global positioning systems on every

locomotive and central dispatchwhere a person thousands of miles away cantrack a rolling train like an air-trafc controllertheres less freelancing.

When I looked up, Sigrid had her face pressed against the back window ofthe train. She waved good-bye. A dust devil scurried along the tracks. My auntwas nowhere in sight. I glanced across the street to a feed store where somegood old boys sat on a bench regarding me as another long-haired curiosity.

Sigrid got smaller and smaller and then disappeared into the desert. And Iknew I should have stayed on the train. Even now, I wish I had.

When the Zephyr with my son and me aboard crossed the Mississippi atBurlington that night, it was snowing hard. For a time in central Iowa, weparalleled Route 34, and I peered over to see cars spun out in ditches and trac-tor trailers creeping along. On a portable radio, Kelly tuned in the AP news, andwe heard that airports in Chicago, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Des Moines wereclosed, thousands of passengers sprawled in the concourses, and the effects onair trafc were rippling across the nation.

It mattered not at all to the Zephyr. The tenor of the locomotives seemed todeepen. It built up speed and sliced into the storm. That evening, we turned outthe cabin lights and gazed out at snowdrifts piling up in the empty main streetsof small towns. Pickup trucks sat in driveways and television lights ickeredfrom the windows of passing farmhouses.

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California Zephyr 7

All evening, our train braked into stations right on time. The conductors andattendants hustled folks aboard and we sped away into the countryside. This washow a train was supposed to runon time, efcient, and with only enoughdwell in the stations to get folks off and on. The countryside reeled past. Wewere making progress.

Kelly changed into his pajamas, boosted himself into the upper bunk, and Ilatched the safety netting to catch him if the train made a sudden jerk. He wastired and giddy. A few hours out of Omaha, the train punched through the backside of the storm and into the clear skies of the Great Plains. Muted light of afull moon lled the cabin, and I sat up to see black, treeless land rolling away

and the red line of dawn on the eastern horizon. The attendant had a coffee potgoing and a fresh stack of the Omaha World Herald .In the empty lounge car, I read, drank coffee, and watched the day come to

light on the plains. Mornings are always magical on a traingoing to sleep inone town and waking up hundreds of miles down the line. When the Zephyrpulled into Denver that morning, we were ve minutes early.

Day two also went well. The train climbed the Front Range and plunged intoblack tunnels that emptied into magnicent snowy valleys. Along the Colorado

River, we watched deer and elk bound away from the tracks. A historian gaveshort lectures over the speakers about characters like Doc Holliday, the tuber-cular dentist, gambler, and gunslinger who succumbed in a Glenwood Springssanitarium. In the evening, the train descended the western slope, runningalong arroyos and beneath red buttes saturated by the setting sun.

But that night, in the Union Pacic yards outside of Salt Lake City, troublesbegan. While most passengers slept, the train idled for nearly four hours blockedby freight trains and hampered by switching problems. Behind schedule and outof sync with oncoming trafc, the Zephyr was at the whim of Union Pacicdispatchers in Omaha. Time and again the next day we were shunted ontosidings to make room for eastbound freights that rolled past laden with shippingcontainers off the docks of the West Coast.

Get out of the way because here come all your Game Boys, microwaves, andcheap Wal-Mart crap, a conductor grumbled.

Wed gotten jammed up in a supply line that stretched all the way backto Asia. The big railroads love this hook and haul business, in which goodscoming off container ships are put on trains and hauled cross-country. At thetime, before the great economic downturn in the late months of 2008, thisstream of stuff produced by cheap labor abroad, sold by big box stores, andfueled by consumer credit seemed endless. The shipping containers sportedlogos in Chinese characters and EnglishMaersk, China Shipping, and Costco.

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California Zephyr 9

trucks and good at moving items across the continent. The problem has beena lack of rail capacity. In the merger mania that permeated the industry afterderegulation in 1980, the railroads ruthlessly gobbled one another up, combinedoperations, abandoned redundant and little-used routes, and ripped out tracks.Today, most of the countrys rail infrastructure is controlled by only seven majorrailroads, also known as the Class 1 railroads, categorized by generating morethan $250 million in revenues annually. Most of the country is divided up bythe big four: BNSF, CSX Transportation, Norfolk Southern, and Union Pacic.Smaller shares, but still big pieces, are taken up by Canadian National, KansasCity Southern, and Canadian Pacic. As well, there are regional railroads and

short lines.Much of this contraction was, from a corporate and efciency point of view,necessary and good management, but there also were boneheaded decisionswhich realized short-term gains without looking ahead. Critics say the rail-roads got so good at downsizing, they forgot how to grow. Even worse, justsince the 1960s, nearly half of the nations rail infrastructure was abandonedor removed.

The freight railroads could use those tracks. And even though they are spend-

ing more than $3 to $4 billion a year to restore and improve the tracks, its notenough to keep pace. The Great Recession has offered some breathing butgridlock on the railroad will likely return, unless government steps in and alsoinvests in infrastructure.

With all the delays, it took us all day to cross Nevada. In Winnemucca, theZephyr got stuck behind a slow-moving freight, and we made just fty milesin three hours. Then, because wed been unable to reach Reno before federalsafety rules required a new crew, we stopped in the desert for ninety minutesuntil another crew was driven out from the city.

And it got worse. The dining car ran out of food, the lounge out of beer.Passengers who had missed connections or were fretting about relatives waitingfor hours to pick them up barked at the crew. The chagrined workers threw uptheir hands, almost as if to say, What did you expect from Amtrak?

Veteran riders of Amtraks long-distance trains just assume the train will belate. They dont book tight connections. They tell friends and relatives to callahead and check arrival times. And they try to stay patient. Yet even by Amtrakstandards, our progress that day had been ridiculous. It reached absurdity inSparksjust outside of Renowhere Amtrak tried to hook on a private rail-way car of gamblers bound for San Francisco. The car wouldnt couple, andevery time it bumped the Zephyr , the automatic brakes engaged on the trainand threw passengers against the seats and walls.

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We nally crossed the mountains into California at midnight, and when theZephyr inched into Sacramento sixty-two hours after leaving Chicago, it wasfteen hours late. It was an ignominious end to a trip that had had some tran-scendent moments.

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waiting on a train by james mccommons [book preview]

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