(The following column by Tom Belden appeared on the Philadelphia Inquirer website on November 30, 2009.)
PHILADELPHIA, Pa. — The first train I ever rode pulled out of the station when I was about 4 years old, yet I can remember the experience almost six decades later.
Passenger trains are that way for a dwindling number of us, conjuring memories of riding in clattering cars with a rhythmic rumble, or using them to go to college, or take a new job, or visit a sweetheart.
But it is not just nostalgia that makes me and millions of others believe that at some distant point, this country will have a larger and better passenger-rail system, one that could compete in cost and convenience with driving or flying several hundred miles.
The Obama administration is the first in decades to have embraced greater emphasis on rail travel, for both people and freight. Congress, at President Obama’s request, has given the Federal Railroad Administration $13 billion in economic recovery and development funds this year, much of it to be doled out in early 2010 for high-speed rail projects around the country.
In the meantime, the day before Thanksgiving, Amtrak’s busiest day of the year, about 125,000 people, 70 percent more than on an average Wednesday, were expected to ride trains over the railroad’s existing, limited network.
The Thanksgiving weekend requires Amtrak to use every piece of equipment it has to meet demand, and people aren’t riding just in the Northeast Corridor, where we have the most service. More railcars were needed around Chicago and in the Pacific Northwest, too.
Now, 125,000 is far fewer than the number who flew or drove that day, but consider how many more highways and airline routes there are. This country’s rail network began shrinking after World War II, and it has lagged most of the developed world since.
So is it realistic to think we can catch up? A multitude of politicians, state and local transportation officials, engineering firms, construction workers, and ordinary citizens seem to think so.
Buoyed by the prospect of the new federal funds available, they appear more supportive of developing corridors for fast trains than at any time since I started writing about transportation more than 30 years ago.
The support comes primarily from a widespread belief that trains are a more fuel-efficient, environmentally friendly transport mode than airplanes and autos, and that air and highway congestion will only get worse without more of them.
Many local officials are salivating at the prospect of creating thousands of jobs in rail design and construction, and at the knowledge that new rail corridors have always driven real estate development and other economic activity along them.
For the speedy trains to attract enough riders, many cities also will need to provide more options for public transit around stations, the kind found in Philadelphia and other cities that never lost most of their rail service.
To get this new industry under way, however, the federal rail agency is going to have some hard decisions to make. It is sorting through 278 expressions of interest, called pre-applications, from 40 states and the District of Columbia to spend $102 billion on high-speed rail projects.
Yet only $8 billion out of the $13 billion appropriated is available for new high-speed rail projects in this round of funding. Obama has proposed allocating an additional $1 billion a year as a continuing appropriation, but it is going to take billions more than that to turn plans into reality.
Among the spending decisions are how much should go to upgrade existing rail lines so that trains can go 90 to 110 m.p.h., while sharing track with freight trains? And how much should go to states, like California and Texas, that dream of building entirely new “superspeed” lines, with trains zipping at 200 m.p.h. or more?
Both types of service are heavily used in Europe and Asia, where high-speed trains have been available for decades.
To get anywhere with their dreams, supporters of high-speed rail also will need to fend off critics, such as conservative think tanks that have published studies this year questioning the whole effort.
The critics contend that because this country doesn’t have the population density or public-transit systems of Europe and Asia, high-speed trains will never attract enough riders to pay for their own operations, much less the cost to build them. To the doubters, that means passenger trains cannot make a meaningful contribution to reducing greenhouse gases.
Spending billions of dollars on Amtrak, and now the new rail systems, will always be an easy target, with critics calculating that rail gets a much larger taxpayer subsidy than highways or airports do.
But governments have paid for transportation infrastructure since the Romans started building roads. I don’t expect to see arguments over which mode is subsidized more settled in my lifetime.
This much seems clear to me: A majority of Americans believe we need a balanced transportation system, with a variety of affordable options for different types of journeys.
How else do you explain the fact Amtrak, as limited as it is in most places, still enjoys strong political support after 38 years? I believe it is because many people agree with a former federal transportation official who told me once that Americans view passenger trains the same way they do the national parks.
“They may never visit Yellowstone,” he said, “but they still want it to be there.”