PASSENGER TRAIN ADVOCATES, NOT NECESSARILY RAIL PROFESSIONALS. A Destination: Freedom reporter attends Berlin's InnoTrans.

This was not a trade show merely with booths and displays, and well-dressed, smiling, multi-lingual models; this trade show had dozens of full-sizes pieces of equipment, including a dozen or more complete trainsets from manufacturers all over the world, including the Russians, who proudly unveiled their version of the TGV at the show, and, surprisingly given our recent history, from North America, whose ElectroMotive Diesel, formerly a part of General Motors, is selling highly reliable freight locomotives by the score to European logistics companies.

This correspondent is so obsessed with scoring political points that the presence of the world-conquering Type 66, an SD-70 modified to fit Britain's interurbanish clearance diagrams, is occasion for Euro-snobbery. Those vaunted European express trains come with an opportunity cost: the complete neglect of Europe's freight railroad network. A trade fair for rolling stock manufacturers is not the place to find out that those "logistics companies" are sometimes private companies spun off from the nationalized railroads with management and working capital provided by North American companies. It is no accident that Estonia's freight diesels and Britain's EW&S Class 66 units have the same general paint scheme.

The correspondent takes too limited a view of investment.

The trip was also designed to investigate some of the important advances in transportation technology and applications made by the Europeans in recent years, which, if America decides at last to invest in its own infrastructure once again and end the decades of neglect that have helped bring about the present economic calamity, may play a role in jump-starting and then sustaining our revival.

In this correspondent's world, the 70 mph replacement for the Kate Shelley bridge, the quadrupling of the Powder River line, and the doubling of the Santa Fe from Kansas to California never happened, because Congress never appropriated the funds.

I have to hammer reports like this because passenger rail advocates who take the government and the freight railroads to task without understanding how very different the technologies and the business models are make their own work, and my work supporting their efforts, more difficult.