TRAINS, PLANES AND AUTOMOBILES

It started to rain as we began to walk the streets of Lucerne, Switzerland on a week day morning. As we approached the train station, which was only a block from our hotel, Anita suggested that we use our Eurail pass to visit Bern, the capital of that lovely country. Good idea. We hurried into the station, read the board and found that a train to Bern was scheduled to arrive in five minutes. It was right on time.

As I was placing our raincoats in a compartment above our seats, I asked Anita, “I wonder how long it will take us to get to Bern?” Before she could answer, a voice in a seat behind us said, “It will take exactly one hour and six minutes and you can bet on that.” He was a journalist for the Los Angeles Times and proved to be a good and accurate traveling companion for exactly one hour and six minutes when the train pulled into the station at Bern.

In four of the five trips we have made to Europe, we traveled by train, using a Eurail pass rather than renting a car. The trains in that system are fast, clean, and on time.

I thought about the European train system as I watched on television hundreds of thousands of air travelers stranded in airports on the east coast and in the midwest when fierce blizzards and blinding snow storms forced airlines to cancel flights. Some travelers – husbands, wives, babies, children, grandparents, handicapped people – lived in airports for two or three days.

Like many of you I am watching the news and the debates between Senators Clinton and Obama. Like you I have heard them mention the sad state of the economy and other issues such as job insecurity, education, health care, gasoline, and our deteriorating infrastructure.

I wonder, however, why the candidates have not spoken specifically about the advantages of train travel when discussing the oil crisis. Maybe the reason is that there are no advantages. So I Googled the topic and found several sites that discuss train travel. The Oklahoma Passenger Rail Association <http://www.oklahomarail.org/rail_advantages.html > points out several ways that “a modernized intercity rail passenger system could help shore up our transportation system”:

• One seventy-five foot wide rail corridor can carry the same number of persons per hour as a sixteen lane expressway.

 

• Rail travel is six times safer than highway travel and worldwide, the safest mode of all.

 

• Needed transportation capacity can be added to many corridors for a lower cost with modernized or new high speed rail.

 

• Trains consume less energy and emit less pollutants per passenger mile than most other forms of travel.

 

• Increased travel by rail stimulates economic activity and spurs private investment in urban areas and central business districts around rail stations.

 

• Rail service grants the freedom of mobility to those unable to easily use our air and highway systems because of age, physical disabilities, health problems, or economic circumstances.

 

• Rail is the most comfortable and enjoyable form of intercity travel.

 

• It allows more room and requires fewer restrictions on personal freedoms than other modes.

 

• While not immune to terrorism, the effects of such acts on passengers are smaller in scale and unlikely to affect areas and people outside the rail corridor. Because of the strength and resiliency of U.S. rail equipment, security needs and inspections are not as strict as that required for aircraft.

 

Are you hoping that one of the presidential candidates will propose something that will really change our way of life such as a modernized train system? Don’t bet on it. The oil companies and the automobile industry will see to it that it doesn’t happen.

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