Let's Play With Trains

New York to Boston Amtrak Dispatch 2

We grow up playing with toy trains. There is something so pleasing about watching a train curve and wind its way around the living room, past the impromptu towns made of blocks and boxes, through the mountains made of blankets and pillows.

I find that pleasure undiminished as an adult riding an actual train. The gentle rumble and roll, the country rolling by (even when it frustrates me with its monoculture), soothes and inspire me. How productive would I be if I could commute five hours each way to work on a train, with a lunch break in the club car as the train paused between trips.

Somehow, after WWII, we made a choice to bypass and cripple our national train system in order to lay 4 million of miles of highway. We let auto lobbyists trump the toy train hobbyists inside us, and convince us to disregard our childhood love of trains. We threw away our natural wisdom that trains were a better way to travel. Our country has since been scarred and devastated by that choice and the world soon followed. Housing tracts, given birth in Levittown, grew like cancer throughout the land with the parasitic infection of strip malls never far behind. We spread, sprawled, and drove big cars from end to end. In the meantime, we used up millions of years of oil in a century, paved over much of our wet and wildlands, and warmed the planet up, possibly past the point of return.

How do we rekindle that child like love of trains? Can we reconnect America with the joy of travel by rail enough to inspire the building of a proper, high speed national rail system (clean energy run, while we're at it)? Imagine what fun we'd have.