I wish I could declare that train travel was absolutely wonderful, but I’m afraid I can’t do that. Oh, it was dramatically better for me than plane travel, and substantially better than bus travel, but I still found myself wishing I had driven instead. The problems started even before I woke up last Wednesday; when I arose I found an email from Amtrak telling me the train was two hours late. Since I was due to arrive in Chicago at 3:15 PM and speak at 7, this eliminated my time for going to the hotel to check in first. And by the time I arrived at the station it was worse; we departed three and a half hours late. My resourceful student contact at Loyola was not worried, though; she changed the time of the event on the Facebook page to 7:30 and came out to the station herself to meet me. By the time the train finally arrived it was four hours late, and we arrived at the lecture room at 7:45; I began to speak even before removing my cloak and sweater, and fortunately nobody seemed to mind having to wait the extra fifteen minutes. Of course, by the time I got to the hotel at 11 PM I was famished, having had nothing since 6 AM except a handful of Fritos offered to me by a very nice older gentleman on the train who also insisted on helping me with my bags.
My train troubles were just beginning, however. The next morning I took more trains to meet Aspasia Bonasera for brunch, and if the Amtrak had been as punctual and smooth-riding as those Chicago commuter trains I wouldn’t be writing about this. Alas, that was not the case; though I did fine the first day and even wrote tomorrow’s fictional interlude, we kept getting delayed by freight trains and by the time I woke up on Friday we were five and a half hours behind schedule. I’m a very light sleeper, so I was pretty tired, but I had breakfast with some very nice folks and got a lot of writing done while crossing the vast stretches of North Dakota. By dinnertime, though, I was starting to feel a bit lightheaded, and the meal didn’t help; I went to bed straight after dinner and woke up about 11 PM with the sure and certain knowledge that I was going to be sick. The only good thing I can say about it is that, since I’m not afraid of trains as I am of airplanes, I didn’t have the usual panic attacks which invariably accompany airsickness; I was just sick, and reacted with annoyance and frustration rather than the usual little-girl crying and lugubrious moaning which characterize the same condition when experienced at great altitude. I do, however, think that altitude had something to do with my illness; when I got sick we were crossing Montana and climbing toward the Continental Divide (I think), so I’m willing to bet the lower air pressure and oxygen content pushed me over even though I’d made it through Wisconsin and Minnesota without trouble. Another issue was that some fool turned the heat up, and though the roomettes can be made warmer they can’t be made cooler; warm air aggravates motion sickness, so as soon as I woke up sweating and kicking off the blanket I was sunk.
By morning there was nothing left in my stomach, but that didn’t stop my body from trying to expel it several times; I could do nothing but lie still all day, watching the scenery pass. Fortunately, it was exceptionally beautiful; Washington state is lovely, and being able to see where I’m going in daylight goes a long way toward controlling vertigo. When I arrived I was cheered by the lovely sight of my friend Mistress Matisse, there to pick me up; she soon deposited me at the place I’m staying while here, which is mercifully close to the train station. My wonderful hostess, Jae, immediately packed me into bed and set about preparing some homemade soup, and when I awoke later in the evening I had a bowl and rebuilt my strength. The very next night I had a presentation at the Foundation for Sex Positive Culture, but we’ll save that for next week’s diary entry along with the rest of my adventures in Seattle!
It’s such a great shame that Amtrak are so unreliable as to timing. It’s perfectly possible to manage a railway to run to time, or at least not several hours late. Even the Italians manage to run something far more reliable than Amtrak.
The problem with Amtrak is that they’re run as a “tourist experience” and you’re not supposed to care how late they actually arrive, because you enjoy being on board so much.
Yes, but the Italians have a nationalized system, don’t they? The Italian State Railways? So they can harmonize the schedules because they control both passenger and freight. I think the problem is that Amtrak doesn’t own the infrastructure they need to run the trains (I’m sure people would scream bloody murder if the government were to take over the railroads), and are therefore at the mercy of the private freight handlers that do own it.
Others can go on a “well, then the government should just get out of running passenger trains” tear if they like, but I wonder, would any of the major freight railroads (the ones that fled from passenger operations and led to Amtrak’s creation in the first place) suddenly decide to invest in passenger trains today if Amtrak were to suddenly disappear? Or would they simply be glad to be rid of an extra train using their tracks?
Italy is also much smaller than the US and probably has separate freight and passenger tracks (which allows much faster trains, though even 300 km/h trains would take some time crossing the continent).
The fundamental problem with Amtrak is that they do not own the rails on which they run. Those rails are run by the freight-train companies.
Which have no incentive to help Amtrak run on time.
Also, those freight-train companies maintain the rails (*their* rails) for the sake of freight.
Most railroad companies have been glad to shed passenger service, because those whiny passengers keep demanding silly things such as a smooth ride. The freight companies no longer have to worry about that stuff.
And Amtrak has to be grateful that they get to use those rails, at all.
What ordeals you have to go through on your mission, Maggie, in a country that seems just as much anti-train and anti surface infrastructure as it is anti-sex!
I think that at least with train rides you would find the ordeal less challenging if you were in Western Europe. This is train paradise. The anti-sex work wave is rising her dangerously, but the train service is getting better and better, in frequency, (high) speed, punctuality, and luxury.
Fortunately, for your mission you do have cyberspace and don’t always need to take the road like a wandering minister of only one century ago.
Your train adventure does remind me of my train travels through Italy and the Balkan in the Sixties. One day in Rome, the train from Palermo arrived with a 24(!) hour delay and no one found it unheard of. Those were the days that people in those countries even moved and brought their whole family and belongings with them. Imagine what the train inside looked like. Wonderful memories!
But our railroad network with its punctuality also includes the millions of untold memories of those one-way horror trains to the extermination camps. Unspeakably cruel ordeals with a terrible death welcoming you at your destination.
Mankind. Stupid Police Regimes and the fate of outcasts, as sex workers and migrants everywhere find out increasingly. Meanwhile some other members of the same species put a spacecraft on a comet. Use of money. Many others again spend only peanuts to find help and distraction, relief and happy moments with a sex worker. Mankind.
Keep on going, Maggie. Thanks for all you do on your journey.
Even as a tourist experience it can be beyond frustrating. One year my family and I were going up to MI to visit friends, so we decided to take the train to Chicago and then along the lake. We arrived at our destination a day and a half late. I will never do that again.
Ah, as a Dutchie who travels by train daily I feel your pain. Hope you have a wonderful time in Seattle!
American passenger trains were much better almost until the day Amtrak was launched in 1971, and far more numerous. After the 1941 war billions of tax dollars went into airports, the air traffic control system, and “free”ways. By contrast, only 7 % of the railroads were built on land grants and in any case all American railroads carried government cargo (during two world wars, remember) at half rate until 1946.
In the face of heavily subsidized competition the private railroad companies could not charge fares high enough to maintain their passenger service, let alone afford to replace the postwar cars when they began to wear out in the ’60’s. Had the government not ruined the network of independent railroads we would have passenger train service second to none, as we had for decades.
I have traveled extensively on Europe’s passenger trains, and I can tell you that in the ’70’s and ’80’s the European trains were inferior to what we had just a few years earlier. Feature cars like lounges, dome cars, and observation cars that had been common in America were all but nonexistent. I make a partial exception for the handsome all-first-class Trans Europ (sic) Express network, but the TEE’s weren’t what most people could afford to ride. Now the European governments have infested heavily in high-speed rail. Those new trains are indeed fast, and often air-competitive, but they lack the amenities of earlier years in the US that made train travel here so pleasant.
Until well into the 1960’s many American railroads prided themselves on their passenger trains. You could ride on competing routes with distinctive, often customized equipment. Across the Northwest from Chicago to Seattle in the 1950’s, for example, you had your choice of three routes with several frequencies each: the Empire Builder (the real one, not Amtrak’s) and the Western Star on the Great Northern, the North Coast Limited and Mainstreeter on the Northern Pacific, and the Olympian Hiawatha and the Columbian on the Milwaukee Road. Oh yes, and the through Chicago-Seattle cars on the Union Pacific’s City of Portland. That’s just one example, with four routes.
Dining car food was made mostly from scratch on board, right down to your morning bran muffins. Railroads knew that they could win or lose shippers and travelers on the quality of those meals.
Don’t take my word for it. Take a look at the Streamliner Schedules website http://www.streamlinerschedules.com/welcome.html and see what we’ve lost. Or take a look at authoritative works like Arthur Dubin’s Some Classic Trains and More Classic Trains, or Lucius Beebe’s The Trains We Rode. These days there are many new books with color photographs that really show you the gorgeous liveries those trains wore.
I ride Amtrak whenever possible just because I enjoy scenery even if it’s just farmland, but the food and the equipment are a far cry from what I enjoyed on pre-Amtrak trains in 1967 and 1970. True, many railroads had curtailed or downgraded their passenger trains by then, but some still took pride in the service. The Silver Meteor I rode in 1970 only eight months before Amtrak carried several sleeping cars (the roomettes were bigger in those days, Maggie; my family and I had a bedroom suite in the comfortable “budget” sleeping car because there were four of us), a unique and stylish Sun Lounge car for sleeping car passengers, a white-tablecloth dining car, a number of coaches, and a tavern lounge observation car for the coach passengers (I think you could get an inexpensive light meal there as well as drinks and snacks).
The National Association of Railroad Passengers (www.narprail.org) – admittedly not a free-market group – used to have maps showing the tragic shrinkage of the intercity and long-distance passenger rail network since 1962, when we had over 88,000 route-miles, with many competing routes, often with multiple frequencies. Nearly all cities and towns, and even villages had service. Amtrak now has about 22,000 route-miles with mostly single frequencies outside the corridors.
The brightest hope in the US right now is the All Aboard Florida privately-funded high-speed line starting soon between Miami and Orlando, mostly over the route of the Florida East Coast Railway. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_Aboard_Florida If it is successful, you may well see many similar projects.
I say privatize it all – Amtrak, the airports, the air traffic control system, and the Interstates. It’s too late to reverse all the damage done by bad transportation policy, but a level playing field would help even now.
Very interesting. Then what, in your view, do you think would have happened had the government decided not to create Amtrak at all?
“Had the government not ruined the network of independent railroads we would have passenger train service second to none, as we had for decades.”
How was it ruined? By the artificially low shipping rates? Or by a population that, after decades of privation and rationing, wanted (and for better or worse, got) private cars with all the room they could dream of and planes that could go faster than any train currently on American rails?
“I say privatize it all – Amtrak, the airports, the air traffic control system, and the Interstates. It’s too late to reverse all the damage done by bad transportation policy, but a level playing field would help even now.”
That goes back to my original question. Hypothetically, say Amtrak were to be dissolved next week and all the equipment sold off. Who do you think would be interested in purchasing it? Do you think BNSF would buy the equipment used on the Empire Builder and start running it, or Union Pacific would reinstate the City of Portland?
I’m not trying to be snide or play ‘gotcha’ here. I’m a train buff myself and have used Amtrak. I can speak to the headaches involved (I traveled on the route Maggie took recently and was stuck in some town in Montana for five hours because a freight train had broken on the single line ahead of us). Even with the delays, it’s roomier than an aircraft and allows relaxation unlike a private car. And the food is still pretty good in my view.
That being said, I’d gladly go back to those postwar (or even interwar) days, if I thought there was any indication that the private sector had an interest in doing so.
May 1, 1971 – the date Amtrak was created – was pretty late to be saving the American passenger train. The point of power was right after World War II. If I had been running things, airports and limited access highways would have been built by private enterprise, and operated as regulated private industries like the railroads and utilities. But that didn’t happen. And the American passenger train lost a rigged game.
By Amtrak Day, 1971 the Interstate system of “free”ways was mostly complete, as were the airports and the air traffic control system. The actual rail network was still mostly intact, but much of it was in horrible shape, especially here in the Northeast. But even on the eve of Amtrak we still had over 40,000 route-miles of intercity and long-distance passenger service. It’s possible we could have turned things around even then if everything had been privatized. Investment would have flowed into railroads instead of out of them.
What would happen if all modes were privatized tomorrow?
I think the few remaining big railroads – and after all the mergers and abandonments there are now only four – would re-start passenger service and do a much better job than Amtrak. As I said, the Florida East Coast is going to start its own passenger service soon, and I hear that another private route is planned for Texas. But those are small potatoes compared to what we lost.
The domestic air industry would finally be made to pay its own way, as it hasn’t done since it was founded in 1913. Sure, much long-distance business and priority traffic would continue to fly, but there’d be no more publicly subsidized bus-level transcontinental airfares.
People would still drive the Interstates, but truck sizes would shrink or truck user fees would increase to offset the immense damage 18-wheelers do to roads and bridges. Better yet, sell off the Interstates to private investors and have them pay taxes on their rights of way and other facilities, as railroads have always done. As regulated industries the privatized roads could set their own user fees.
Meanwhile, American passenger transportation is lousy and will remain so unless there are major changes.
I should add that there were no “decades of privation and rationing”. That happened during the four years we were in World War II. Even in the depths of the Depression the railroads were adding new streamlined trains with much faster schedules and then-novel air conditioning.
It’s true that cars and planes offer certain advantages. Passenger trains offer their own advantages, as you indicate. On a level playing field these markets would have sorted themselves out, and travelers would have made their own choices regarding speed, comfort, and flexibility.
Now airplanes are flying buses, the Amtrak network is skeletal and minimally adequate, and the roads are congested and deteriorating. A triumph of public policy!
“I should add that there were no “decades of privation and rationing”. That happened during the four years we were in World War II. Even in the depths of the Depression the railroads were adding new streamlined trains with much faster schedules and then-novel air conditioning.”
Well, I was speaking about the general population, not what the railroads were capable of doing. Beyond that, and perhaps I’m not as well up on my history as I could be, those streamliners (to me) seemed like flashy projects meant to show how American technology and industry could still innovate after the Wall Street Crash, with premium ticket prices to match in order to recoup their investment. As functional as it may be, how much good could a flashy streamliner be if it doesn’t serve your community or you can’t afford to travel on it if it does?
“The domestic air industry would finally be made to pay its own way, as it hasn’t done since it was founded in 1913. Sure, much long-distance business and priority traffic would continue to fly, but there’d be no more publicly subsidized bus-level transcontinental airfares.”
So, what are your thoughts on the deregulation of the airlines that supposedly took place in the 1970s? I’ve read elsewhere where people speak wistfully about air travel in the 1950s and 1960s compared to today.
The general population traveled very well, with ever-better service and equipment, right up the Crash of 1929. Berths in Pullman sleeping cars were so cheap and ubiquitous that on some routes you had trouble finding an overnight coach seat. Elite passengers rode trains like the 20th Century Limited, the Overland, and the Chief, but there were lots of no-extra-fare services for everybody else.
In the Depression, levels of service remained high, with many frequencies, although some marginal routes and services were dropped or simplified. Many of the interurban electric railways, sadly, failed during the Depression and were abandoned, but they made up only a small fraction of the overall route-mileage.
From 1934 onward the railroads put streamliners into service as fast as they could develop and finance them. They were often cheaper to operate than the heavyweight steel trains they replaced, being faster and lighter. Many were all-coach, without sleeping cars even on overnight journeys, with sleepers being added later as streamlined sleeping cars evolved. So the budget traveler could afford to ride. The City of Miami, the Champion, the Jeffersonian, the Trailblazer, and the Pacemaker were among the long-distance coach trains, and offered economy diners and beautiful lounge cars.
The streamlined diesel locomotive appeared. The 1937-1938 E-series diesels of General Motors’ Electro-Motive Corporation could hit 100 mph, and do 2 million miles without a major overhaul. New steam locomotives, some with streamlining of their own, for a time almost matched the new diesels. The new locomotives were often assigned to the new coach streamliners.
Deregulation allowed the airlines more latitude in adding or dropping routes, and, I believe, in setting fares. But deregulation didn’t stop the huge in-kind subsidies to the airports and the air traffic control system. And the so-called Essential Air Services program continued to provide small-plane service to places like Ottumwa, Iowa, with enormous direct subsidies, even though you could easily drive to Des Moines and get a flight there.
As for air service in the 1950’s and ’60’s, it had some glamour from what I read. It was still reasonably comfortable and gracious in the 1970’s and later, within the limitations of air travel. I think good air service would have existed even without the open and hidden subsidies, but a coach air ticket would have cost as much or more than a first class rail ticket plus Pullman surcharge for a sleeping car room.
Every mode of transportation has its advantages. It’s a pity that America was deprived of the advantages of the rail passenger network that had been built up over so many years. The American passenger train lost a rigged game. Investigate for yourself, and see if you don’t agree.
I’m not disagreeing with you about the game being ‘rigged’. In a way it was the same in Britain (which I’m ironically more up on with regards to railway history despite being American), where railway buffs for years have bemoaned how their system was allowed to be decimated by the “Beeching Axe” in favor of air travel and ‘motorways’.
I guess I’m just skeptical about whether private enterprise, as it operates today, would choose to reestablish their own passenger services if Amtrak were to be abolished and, if they did, whether the American public would be patient enough to allow such services to get past the inevitable teething troubles that come from building something from scratch.
Private sector, governmental, or some kind of hybrid, “building something from scratch” is what needs to be done to make rail (or maglev) worthwhile in this country. Amtrack probably wouldn’t have the passengers it does if not for people who can’t stand to fly.
That is pretty abysmal. In Switzerland, if a long-distance train (e.g. Bern-Zurich, which is about 80 miles) is 15 minutes late, that makes the national news, it is so rare. These trains count as “delayed” after 5 minutes, and more than 10% being delayed in a year will require the head of the railway organization to explain to the government council why he failed to do his job properly.
What use is a train system that is not reliable?
(Of course, the Swiss are overdoing it sometimes: Buses and Trams in Zurich run on 30-second resolution precision planning. Most of the word is fine with using full minutes.)