THE FUTURE:

Seeing the future in an old rail line (Mark Bowden, 3/22/09, Philadelphia Inquirer)

I like people who think big. Working without pay out of a cluttered little office off the back porch of his house just outside Oxford, Stevenson and his partner are reimagining the future of this region. Using a mostly dormant rail line that here and there along its route vanishes into a tangle of multifloral rose, milkweed, and rusted debris, they envision a project that would solve a number of long-range problems for this rapidly developing tristate corridor, where exurban creep is slowly colliding like tectonic plates, southwest from Philadelphia, west from Wilmington, north from Aberdeen, and east from Lancaster.

"If you look at projected growth patterns through 2035 it looks like somebody vomited all over Chester County," said Stevenson, a man given to vivid metaphor.

The line itself was built in stages in the mid-19th century, interrupted by the Civil War. Celebrated by grand-opening jubilees in towns along the way - Concordville, Chadds Ford, Avondale, Kennett Square, Oxford - the Philadelphia and Baltimore Central Railroad was a symbol of a modern world whisking travelers out of horse-drawn wagons and into a new century.

The new century, of course, brought the car, which starved the railroad of passengers. By the time Stevenson was growing up in Oxford after World War II, rail traffic along the line was a distant memory. For teenage kicks, he and his buddies would drive a car up on the rails, deflate the tires - the width of an auto matched the width of a railcar - and zip up to Lincoln University.

He is a burly fellow with a great white beard who retired from his work as a railroad architect in 1996. Saranetz has a long thick mane of white hair and worked for many years in statistical analysis and computer modeling, commuting back and forth into Philadelphia from Media - "I had a three- to five-minute walk to the train station; I was spoiled." They teamed up two years ago. Where others see an abandoned weedy corridor, perfect, perhaps, for a bike or hiking trail, these two see a priceless opportunity. They have put together planning charts, projected costs, maps, and a plan of action that is just this side of dazzling in its vision, if not its prospects.

At the rejuvenated corridor's southern terminus, Aberdeen, the U.S. Army plans to add more than 5,000 civilian jobs over the next two years. Restoring freight and passenger service to the rail line would help concentrate this coming tide of humanity in a neat corridor, revitalizing townships like Oxford that have been in long decline, preserving the area's rural appeal, providing a strong tax base for schools and municipal services for communities up and down the line, and easing automobile traffic on county roadways that are already strained to their limits. Serving commuters from three states, it would qualify for attention as a regional improvement, always a plus when angling for federal dollars.

"Sure, it's a little pie-in-the-sky," said Stevenson. "When we first started proposing it, the reaction was, like, bring in the doctors and the white jackets."

I doubt it will happen in my lifetime, but I hope to be proved wrong, and I love the idea of Stevenson and Saranetz hustling to beat the odds.