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Clackety-clack. They’re coming back

WAITING ON A TRAIN:
The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service—
A Year Spent Riding across America
By James McCommons
272 pp. Chelsea Green $17.95

Reviewed by Carter Jefferson

Two weeks ago Warren Buffet, one of the richest men in the United States, paid $34 billion to buy BNSF—Burlington Northern Santa Fe, the second largest railroad company in the country. I’ll bet a vast number of hedge fund proprietors, and you know how bright they are, thought he was nuts. A railroad? What’s that? But his people had figured out something very few others knew. What almost nobody knows about American railways would fill a book—this one.

James McCommons wants us to realize that the next great age of rail is on the way, with plenty of political battles, graft, and piles of confusion to come. But he hasn’t written the kind of boring treatise you might expect of an author who wants to inform Americans about railroads. Instead, he’s given us an adventure story that should enthrall readers. He’s there, telling about his journeys all over the country, a hundred conversations with movers and shakers who gave him inside information, and his chats with dozens of riders he met along the way. The solid information, and there’s lots of it, comes out like plums from a Christmas pie.

McCommons lives with his wife and three children in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he teaches journalism and nature writing at Northern Michigan University. In 2008 he spent every minute he could spare riding trains, even though to reach a station he had to drive 300 miles. Sometimes the family came along, but mostly he went alone, and found a great deal of fascinating company.

Nuggets of history, sociology, economics, and current politics show up on every page of his book. Until the 1820s, the United States was far from united—few people traveled more than a few miles from home. Then the railroads started to grow.

By the 1920s—when the railroads were at their peak with more than 1,000 companies operating over a network of 300,000 miles of track—they carried 1.27 billion passengers annually.

The automobile nearly killed the railroads, and by 2008 most people under thirty had never seen a locomotive; most of those a good deal older had never ridden on a train. Who needed railroads when they could glide along the Interstate at seventy miles an hour, or fly across the country in only a few hours? Then came the gasoline shock. Nobody paid any attention to Jimmy Carter when he said we ought to figure out how to stop depending on foreign oil, and we kept on driving and flying everywhere. The start of the Iraq-Iran war in 1981 scared prices up again, but not for long. Then, in July, 2008, we paid $4.86 a gallon (inflation adjusted) while the economy seemed to be breathing its last. That got people’s attention.

McCommons tells us that four big companies—BNSF, CSX, Northern Pacific, and Norfolk Southern—own most of the rails that remain; half of them rusted away or were turned into bike trails. Passengers stopped showing up in the late 1960s, and Amtrak was the “solution.” But one conductor told McCommons, “The other railroads hate Amtrak—just hate us. We’re in the way.”

He was being impolitic. It’s rare to hear Amtrak officials be as blunt. Passenger trains and freights run on a shared right-of-way, meaning they are on the same tracks. Outside of the Northeast Corridor, Boston to Washington, DC, and a few other places, Amtrak doesn’t own any track. It is a guest, and the freight railroads are reluctant hosts.

Moreover, McCommons says, it’s pretty well acknowledged that Amtrak does a lousy job. It lives on government subsidies that Congress cuts as much as possible, and thus has nothing like the amount of money it would need to make train travel pleasant. The freight lines can’t afford to take good care of tracks, and their trains don’t mind a few bumps, so Amtrak has to travel slowly, with care. All those dead tracks would be useful now, but the freight lines can’t pay to reclaim them. Finally, since Amtrak was established the railroads have made sure that their cars full of goods from Asian factories move fast, and passenger trains get out of the way.

When McCommons traveled from Chicago’s Union Station to Sacremento, all went pretty well until Salt Lake City, and then the troubles began. It took all day to cross Nevada.

And then it got worse. The dining car ran out of food, the lounge out of beer. Passengers who had missed connections or were fretting about relatives waiting for hours to pick them up barked at the crew. The chagrined workers threw up their hands, almost as if to say, “What did you expect from Amtrak?”

McCommons points out that oil is certain to get more and more expensive. Trains are far greener than cars or planes, he says, using half the fuel to carry passengers and goods millions of miles. Cities far from airports could once again be served with decent transportation. New businesses spring up near every active railroad station.

Most of what I’ve covered so far you could learn in the first chapter of this book, but you won’t stop there. What about ways to solve the problems McCommons raises? Nationalize the railroads? Spend billions repairing tracks and adding more? Build factories in the U.S. that will produce “train sets”—locomotives and cars—so we can stop borrowing to buy them from foreign nations? Improve Amtrak? McCommons has heard all those and more. Wait until all this gets to Congress! But some of it is there already, and the battle has begun.

One way or another, McCommons insists, the trains are going to come roaring back. Warren Buffet apparently thinks so, too. Anyone who reads this book can only cheer, and devoutly hope he’s right. Otherwise, unless you’re quite rich, you’ll be staying at home. If you buy this book, you may look at the world differently, and Chelsea Green, not your average foreign-owned publisher, undoubtedly needs all the money it can get.

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Carter Jefferson, a Navy veteran of World War II—barely—and the Korean War, is editor of The Internet Review of Books. He remembers riding thousand of miles on crowded trains that actually were on time, but that was a while back.

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