February 26, 2011
I,I,I, ME, ME, ME....:
All stations but America: why the US can't fall in love with rail (Shilpa Kameswaran, 23 February 2011, OpenDemocracy)
Determined to explore the North American rail networks and to understand why there never are sighs of the slightest enthusiasm to partake in train journeys in the United States, I set off for a whole week on Amtrak’s historic and most admired long train routes – The California Zephyr and the Coast Starlight.The tapering trapezium of the John Hancock tower diminished on the Chicagoan skyline this January as my train pulled out of the Union Station in downtown Chicago.
Making a journey from Chicago, Illinois across North-America to Emeryville, California covering 3,924 kilometers in 52hours on the ‘California Zephyr’ was for me the most hassle-free mode of continent exploration.
Originating in the mid-western city of Chicago the Zephyr passes westwards through the states of Iowa, Nebraska, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California. The passenger train route of the ‘California Zephyr’ started in 1949 is the eighth longest train route in the world and one of America’s most scenic, second only to Amtrak’s ‘Coast Starlight’ which sprints 2,216 kilometers along the Pacific ocean from Southern California to Oregon and Washington State covering the west coast's entire length.
Yet, shockingly three-quarters of my Superliner train all through both journeys was unoccupied, more shockingly, the sleeper-roomette and dining car services were first-class plush and fantastic and most shockingly an overwhelming thirty-six of the forty American peers I spoke with at the University of Chicago had never before heard of Amtrak’s ‘California Zephyr’ or ‘Coast Starlight’ all along while growing up in sub-urban America. What they had heard of were the shorter train routes and the dilapidated Amtrak stations at the little towns on these interior routes.
Why might a locomotive that lustfully loops around the upper Colorado River valley in the Rocky Mountains, the Wasatch Mountains, the Pequop Mountains and the Sierra Nevada mountains through forty odd tunnels be so insignificant and infamous?
As an economist I’ve often pondered if the general state of public transport and the specific state of passenger trains in the United States tells us a story about the priorities of the populace. Is the American love affair with trains over with altogether? Or did it never exist in the first place?
A brilliant piece of journalistic writing in the New American titled ‘Amtrak and the Railroads’ goes on to summarizes the frustration an average American feels towards the Amtrak passenger trains – “Amtrak and its lobbyists at the National Association of Railroad Passengers (NARP) at the recent commemoration of the third annual National Train Day are supposedly celebrating “America’s love for trains,” the day could not boast a more ironic host than the railroad nobody rides. Worse, Amtrak’s sponsorship was as shameless as Dracula’s funding a fashion show concentrating on décolletage: The government that owns Amtrak has sabotaged, subsidized, and sucked the life from American railroads since the industry’s inception.”
In more common conversation it is often argued that the federally subsidized monopolistic Amtrak passenger trains charge its commuters an exorbitant price to be able to pay their unionized staff inflated salaries. An individual return ticket on the California Zephyr costs $550 which is exactly twice the cost of a return ticket on a domestic airline from Chicago to San Francisco. Also, the Amtrak passenger trains aren’t exactly the fastest trains in the world and can take almost five to ten times the duration to reach a destination compared to an airline. While the operating speed of the Eurostar trains between London and Brussels or London and Paris is an overwhelming 186mph, the average operating speed of Amtrak’s Superliner trains is a mere 47mph. And most obviously an American would argue that it is more economical to rent or own a car and drive across the continent’s gloriously connected convenient six lane expressways from coast to coast than make an expensive yet, rigid slow train journey in which you are merely a passive observer with no control at all.
Yet, the disastrous economic and political consequences that the nationalized Amtrak passenger trains pose to it’s customers might not have everything to do with why their Superliner trains lack complete luster in the minds of the Americans. The real reasons may go beyond how much time it takes to reach LA from Seattle on the Coast Starlight or how much currency it would cost to buy a seat on the California Zephyr from Chicago to Emeryville.
The real reasons may have to do with the real overriding philosophy of ‘individualism’ and the ‘indestructible importance of the individual’ on which the entire nation has been built brick by brick for generations. The real notions of the individual against nature, the individual’s conquest, the individual’s adventure, the individual’s unstoppable power of exploration, the individual’s immeasurable power to define leisure at her/his will, the individual’s pride in his/her personal exclusivity which have been reiterated and reconfirmed in recurring frequency by the media, the arts, the entertainment and most significantly by science and technology in North America surely and stably add up to why the idea of scuttling and scampering in a nine compartment passenger train with hundreds of other fellow passengers is unbearable to the average American who wants his holiday to be solely exclusive and not shared.
The highway is a solvent, rail a cohesive.