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02/14/2005: "Romance of the Railroad"

I’ve always loved railroads. My folks tell me I used to line books to make a choo choo. The train trip my Grandmother took me on from Phily to Florida was a definite high point of my very young life. During the years I lived in Europe I often took the train, and only a few years ago did a two-week Eurail trip through Italy and Germany with the family, a wonderful experience. And now I catch a total of six daily trains, counting subways which of course you should because New Yorkers call them trains. You don’t say “I took the subway,” you say “I took the R Train.” In fact, I’m writing this on a train. It’s also very historic. Trains first stitched the country together. I remember being impressed with the story of the explorer Fremont who, not many years after his arduous journey across the West, repeated it on the train in a fraction of the time and far, far greater comfort. From and environmental standpoint it beats other means of transport hands down. It represents a strategic hedge against international events like the oil shocks that brought car travel to a standstill. Many of my colleagues stranded by 9/11 far from home on business trips took the train back when the planes stopped flying. So why is Bush trying to kill Amtrak, our national rail system? How could it be the money, if the amounts involved are a tiny fraction of even some of the more obscure tax cuts he’s trying to ram through? I read a great line today from the columnist Gene Sperling who compared Bush’s cuts to a Dad who tells his teenager that he has to eat cheap generic peanut butter because of a family austerity program, at the same time that Dad has gone out and bought a new Hummer. The political reason behind the cuts, the message that Karl wants to send, is that Amtrak is a very Blue State program, on many levels. We already talked about the environmental angle, plus most riders get on and off in Blue States on either coast, and the people who ride in the other states have color, and it’s not the color of Bush’s base! Advanced trains are closely associated with foreign countries like Japan and the EU, and we all know how the Right Wing feels about FCs. I’m thinking he’s embarrassed that trains in, say Italy, are so much more advanced than the US. In other words, a gap in America’s otherwise perfect record of technological superiority. Maybe it’s a Texas thing, that there’s something unnatural about traveling in straight lines while sitting next to strangers as opposed to riding across the plains on your faithful steed. In any case, if Bush gets his way the country will have a way to travel from Earth to Mars, but no train to take from DC to NYC!