(The Dallas Morning News published the following travel column by Larry Bleiberg on its website on July 14).
DALLAS — Somewhere in Rhode Island the train topped 150 mph. Farms, lakes and small towns blurred by the window. We were flying across the ground.
That was when Amtrak’s Acela was at its best: offering high-speed rail service in the United States.
I took a trip on the train recently, from Philadelphia to Boston, and the next day from Boston to New York. The service was fast and efficient, although not flawless. But it showed the promise of high-speed rail in our airplane-loving, auto-obsessed nation.
Acela was introduced 2 { years ago by Amtrak on the busy northeast corridor, between Washington, D.C., and Boston. It has had its challenges. After a well-publicized opening, Amtrak had to temporarily suspend service last year after finding mechanical flaws, now corrected.
Because it passes through some tunnels and over bridges more than a century old, there’s a limit to how fast these trains can run. My Boston-to-New York train offered just a 30-minute time break over traditional train runs. The Philadelphia-Boston trip was about 40 minutes faster.
The train, however, is comfortable. Seats are wider than on planes. You’re free to walk the corridors. There are power plugs at every seat, and a stroll down the corridor looks like a laptop computer trade show.
But the biggest advantage the train has over planes is where it starts and stops. Train stations are in easy-to-reach downtown locations. I walked from my Boston hotel to the Back Bay station in less than five minutes. Depending on the time of day and the traffic, I could have taken 10 times as long to reach Boston’s Logan Airport. Trains don’t have the same security hassles, either. You just show up and step aboard.
That said, Acela isn’t perfect. My train to New York was delayed for several minutes because of a fire on the tracks in front of us. At least we were free to wander through the cars while we waited. In the snack bar/lounge, quite a social scene was forming. It looked like a bar set from “Sex and the City.”
The train also is a victim of its popularity. I was heading to New York on a Sunday night and was joined by hundreds of others who had spent the weekend in New England. Because I didn’t grab a seat in a “quiet” car, I was subjected to one side of a long cellular phone conversation. Unlike on planes, passengers are free to use phones for their entire trip. Thus I heard a high school girl’s long-winded advice for English essays on college-entrance exams (bottom line: “Lord of the Flies” always works), and that the boy she met a party thought she was a hottie.
Still the train was perfect for the Boston-New York run. Travel time was about 3 hours. A plane would have taken just over an hour. But once you factor in transportation time to airports and security screenings, the time spent on the train wasn’t much more, and it was less of a hassle.
The Philadelphia-Boston run probably didn’t make sense: It took just over five hours. The time-saving of flying, which takes just one hour and 15 minutes, would have been worth it.
And that’s the key to high-speed rail. There are some places where it makes sense, and many where it doesn’t. Studies have recommended developing similar routes in our nation’s population centers.
The U.S. Department of Transportation has proposed several high-speed corridors: from Washington, D.C., through the Southeast, from San Francisco through San Diego, a Midwest hub based in Chicago, a system in Florida and one, yes, in Texas. For more than a decade, Texas has considered creating high-speed service connecting Dallas, Austin, Houston and San Antonio.
The effort has been opposed by airlines and some landowners along the route. There are complex arguments on both sides, but it is worth noting that if a private consortium had been able to attract government support and financing by a 1994 deadline, we too would have another travel option in Texas. The trains would have started service three years ago.