ON THE SUNSET LIMITED, in Texas — “It is quite a privilege to travel like this,” says Sara Bendfords, a 28-year-old philosophy student at the University of Stockholm, as we sit in the Sunset Limited’s lounge car, watching the pecan groves crawl past the window. Indeed it is, according to the New York Times.
Never mind that the white-gloved service of rail’s glory days is long gone. Rail travel in this country has never been as luxurious as it is today. The Sunset Limited, the nation’s only coast-to-coast train, offers up the most sumptuous of offerings in this harried age: a total disregard for the constraints of time. The Sunset Limited takes three more hours to make its way from Los Angeles to New Orleans than it did a half-century ago, and that’s on the 47 percent of trips when it arrives on time.
Most passengers don’t mind. They seem to relish belonging, if only for the journey, to a renegade leisure class for whom schedules are a pesky nuisance best ignored. The crew has long given up, and blames Union Pacific, the railroad that owns the track and dispatches traffic, for the Sunset Limited’s frequent delays.
Roy, our conductor, entertained me with a story about a woman who became hysterical over being late for a dental appointment she had arranged for two hours after the official arrival time in El Paso. “Have you ever heard of such a crazy thing, scheduling something on the day of your arrival?” he asked.
The Sunset Limited’s ridership seems to hail from five disparate constituencies: vacationing families, young foreigners seeing America the way Americans have long seen Europe, those nervous about flying, travelers with disabilities, and rail buffs, whom crew members call “foamers.”
Gene Matranga, traveling with his family, last took the Sunset Limited a half-century ago, when he left his native Louisiana to become a NASA flight engineer in California. “I had heard terrible things about Amtrak,” he said, “but our trip has been fabulous. I hope they don’t kill it.”
As if on cue, the train, which took 20 hours and averaged 40 miles an hour from El Paso to Houston, made one of its periodic mystery stops, this one outside Luling, Tex. The backyard swings seemed to be within our reach, and the messy porches spoke of an intimacy that Interstate highway travel cannot afford. The train is a trusted old visitor, for whom there is no need to tidy up.
When Mr. Matranga’s grandson asked why we had stopped, his father responded that it was probably to make way for a freight train. “Those things that make money get priority,” the boy was told.
That neatly sums up Amtrak’s quandary. The railroad is under a Congressional mandate to become self-sufficient by the end of this year, but it is losing record amounts of money, despite higher ridership levels. The long-haul trains carry only 18 percent of Amtrak passengers but account for 75 percent of the railroad’s losses. The Sunset Limited is the most heavily subsidized train, at a rate of roughly $350 per traveler.
George Warrington, the railroad’s beleaguered president who resigned two weeks ago, warned earlier in the year that most of Amtrak’s national service would have to be scrapped this fall unless Congress provided Amtrak more money. Passengers are aware that the future of long- distance trains is in peril.
That knowledge punctured the overall sense of nonchalance and made the trip feel somewhat like an overnight vigil for a dying patient. On my bowlegged walks back and forth between my sleeping alcove and the lounge car, I overheard such snatches of conversation as “cutting our nation’s arteries” and “nothing compared to what the government spends on aviation and highways.”
Crew members are concerned and bitter, but they agree with Amtrak critics that things cannot go on like this, that the country should commit sufficient resources to rail, or let it die. Amtrak has requested $1.2 billion for the next fiscal year, which would do neither.
“You’d think the whole country was going broke on account of Amtrak, the way they carry on in Washington,” said R. P. Baker, second in command to the conductor. He also blames management for its emphasis on the Northeast corridor, where Amtrak’s new Acela Express service has proved a major success.
“They spend billions up there building that `bullet train’ and buying the people fancy new teal-and- gray uniforms because the politicians are all up there, while we get starved out here,” he said, oblivious to the fact that the Sunset Limited was meandering at that moment through the most politically supercharged state in the country.
Notwithstanding his frustration, the case for spending tens of billions of dollars in coming decades to build relatively short high-speed rail links in the Northeast and other densely traveled markets across the country is compelling on economic grounds. The case for spending a lot less — hundreds of millions a year — to keep subsidizing trains like the Sunset Limited is a lot tougher to make.
It’s all well and good to sit in New York and rationally conclude that Congress ought to stop considering long-distance rail service in the same category as more cost-effective short runs. But the enormity of what could actually happen this year — that after a century and a half, these stringy passenger rail routes that have helped bind the country together could be erased — struck me late at night in Alpine, Tex., a town lying on the Sunset Limited route, but 57 miles from the nearest Interstate.
Rick Kelly, an owner of a small car rental agency, is involved with the local Chamber of Commerce. A loyal Republican, he cannot understand why the United States is the only industrialized country that balks at subsidizing its passenger railroad. Mr. Kelly said the community cared deeply about its direct link to such faraway places as Los Angeles and New Orleans, even if few residents ever rode it.
Indeed, looking back at the Superliner’s imposing, ghostlike silhouette, I could only begin to fathom the train’s significance to this town. I do not know the fear of isolation.
The building of the transcontinental railroad and the golden spike are central to the nation’s story. Setting arguments about efficiency aside, it is difficult to imagine that we are ready to sunder these links.