(Source: High Country News opinion column by Forrest Whitman, November 4, 2015)
PAONIA, Colo. — People in the Western United States like their trains, or so E.M. Frimbo, The New Yorker magazine’s great rail writer with the unusual name, liked to say. But Frimbo believed that Westerners lost track of what happened to so many railroad lines: We spent the last half of the 19th century building them up, then spent most of the 20th century ripping them out. He warned that there would always be a cry to make passenger trains “pay for themselves.” He was right, as that all too often has meant concentrating on trains on the East Coast, where most of the riders live.
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