GETTING THE OBJECTIVES RIGHT. Megan McArdle is taking requests, including "Why does [passenger] rail suck?" Some of her post focuses on the government's schizophrenic role in funding on the one hand and doing environmental protection on the other hand, and there is a followup on the peculiarities of fully allocated cost accounting as well as a response to Chris Lawrence weighing the costs and benefits of a less dirigiste structure for government. Vermont Tiger's Geoffrey Norman offers a less cheerful view of public servants.

When the Chris Dodds of the world are running the railroads, they'll get sleepers and eat off good china in the dining car.

The rest of us will be packed into boxcars and eating stale bread.

That's not far from the perception many Midwesterners have of Acela Expresses for Boswash and standing-room-only three car Horizon rakes in Illinois and Indiana.

But it's a response to the lead-in to Chris Lawrence's post inviting me to weigh in that I'll work on here. Consider the example Ms McArdle uses to introduce the procedural thicket.

Why isn't there a high speed train from New York to Chicago? Well, first of all, this would greatly anger legislators from New York and Michigan, who like the fact that the Chicago train must pass through Buffalo and Detroit, even if this assures that almost no one with a job will actually use it.

She rules out partial privatization of Amtrak.

Amtrak can't be even partially privatised, because then who would run trains from New York through Buffalo and Detroit to Chicago in a speedy eighteen hours?

Here's why the objective of the rail system matters. At one time, The Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central reached New York from Chicago in sixteen hours (for one brief shining moment, in 15:30) with steam power. (The Pennsylvania had the more direct route, but east of Pittsburgh comes The Mountain, while New York Central used Lake Erie and the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers to run a longer distance at a faster speed.)

Going the great way around struck some railroad promoters as silly, particularly because that New York Central train headed west by way of Albany, which left the passenger at a greater air distance from Chicago than he or she was at Grand Central Terminal.

Thus, the figure of merit for a genuine high-speed train service linking Chicago and New York begins at ten hours.

Promotional poster image from Mary MacLane's Air Line historical photos. Click to enlarge.

If your objective is to provide a high-speed rail line that permits ten-hour timings, your railroad will be an undertaking of Biblical proportions. Ev'ry valley shall be exalted, every hill made low, the crooked straight, and the rough places plain.

Air Line proposal map from Mary MacLane's Air Line historical photos. Click to enlarge.

On the other hand, that's only a 90 mph railroad. Upgrade it for field-shunted Electroliners and you're in New York about 7 1/2 hours after you've left Chicago, and if you give it the fourth-generation Electroliner treatment and you can have your coffee in New York and meet a client for lunch in Chicago. On the other hand, you've laid out a railroad that misses the intervening cities, precisely the problem that would prevent politicians in those cities from committing public monies to be treated as a third-rail equivalent of flyover country.

(A historical note before I get back to the objectives: there really was an attempt to build the Chicago-New York Electric Air Line, which rather cheekily advertised its initial service between Gary and La Porte, Indiana. The aforementioned Mary MacLane has assembled a comprehensive Air Line website, including a page of contemporary images of its ruins. La Porte County in Indiana is home to two historical associations that include Air Line material on their websites.)

The problem of blending long-distance and short-haul corridor services has long challenged railroads. Those sixteen-hour flyers tended to be overnight sleeping car trains that called at Pittsburgh or Buffalo at times used by the military to begin invasions, and New York Central's Twentieth Century Limited, perhaps the most famous of the flyers, rolled through Cleveland without stopping. In the year or so leading up to the Penn Central merger, New York Central conducted a speed test with a jet-assisted rail diesel car, announced its plans to restructure its passenger train service, discontinued the Twentieth Century Limited, and introduced a memory-pattern service between Buffalo and Grand Central Terminal. No other corridors were set up at that time. The Pennsylvania Railroad discontinued the Broadway Limited and renamed the General as the Broadway Limited. After the merger, the resulting railroad was too overwhelmed with other problems to be able to set up promising corridors such as Pittsburgh-Cleveland-Detroit, Pittsburgh-Columbus-Indianapolis-St. Louis, Cincinnati-Indianapolis-Chicago, or Cleveland-Columbus-Cincinnati. A Trains speed survey of the era noted that those cities would have merited Trans-Europ Express service, the precursor to the TGV and ICE and Eurostar and Great North Eastern. Even with the skimpy offerings, the Penn Central timetables offered more frequent New-York Chicago services over more routes (via Pittsburgh on The Pennsylvania Railroad, via St. Thomas and Detroit west of Buffalo on the Michigan Central, and via Cleveland and Toledo on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern). The grubby day trains that remained in Ohio and Indiana all died before Amtrak, although the memory pattern service east of Buffalo persists under the same Empire Service label.

And thus the problem facing people who wish to expand Amtrak. That north central corridor service in the region west of Pittsburgh and Buffalo and east of St. Louis and Chicago would be a very different service from one predicated on longer distance high-speed service, such as Denver-Chicago (doable dawn to dusk with existing technology) or Chicago-New York. But perhaps people who wish to expand the passenger rail network as a way of coping with (permanently?) higher gasoline prices would do well to study old timetables. Thanks to that Vermont Tiger post, we discover editorialists at The Brattleboro Reformer doing just that.

It's 1938 and you want to take a weekday trip from Brattleboro to New York City. A glance at the Boston and Maine Railroad's turntable shows six trains to choose from.

The Washingtonian, the top overnight train run jointly by the Central Vermont, Boston and Maine, New Haven and Pennsylvania railroads between Montreal and Washington, D.C., leaves Brattleboro at 3:30 a.m. and arrives at Penn Station at 8:12 a.m.

If you're not that much of an early riser, Train 74, the Connecticut Yankee, leaves Brattleboro at 4:35 a.m. and gets you to Grand Central Terminal by 9:45 a.m. -- the quickest train to the city. Or you could catch Train 78, which leaves Brattleboro at 5:52 a.m. and arrives at Grand Central at 11:40 a.m.

If you're sleeping in ...

They conclude,"There is no reason for rail service to be worse today than it was in 1938." That was a very good year. The Milwaukee Road introduced the world's fastest steam locomotives. But perhaps there are good reasons for the rail service to change (somehow the Boston and Maine enlarging Hoosac Tunnel for double-stacks, which hadn't yet been invented, strikes me as an improvement in rail service.) All the same, the renewed focus on passenger rail is reason for advocates and policy makers to review the best practices, and the errors, of the late steam era.

TODAY'S RAILROAD READING. This week's Destination:Freedom has a great deal of substance. I commend in particular this interview with fellow O Scale King John Stilgoe and this squib about Norfolk Southern working with the Fitchburg Railroad. At one time, railroad policy makers envisioned Norfolk and Western absorbing Erie Lackawanna, Delaware and Hudson, and Boston and Maine as a way of introducing a second carrier into Penn Central country. That combination failed thanks to Boston and Maine reluctance as well as Hurricane Agnes erasing much of Erie Lackawanna and some of Delaware and Hudson. Now Norfolk Southern will get the old Troy and Greenfield through the Hoosac Tunnel and much of what remains of the Conn River. The conversation between John and Living on Earth's Bruce Gellerman is instructive.I'm very serious about where this country is going.

My book "Train Time" deals with the problems of trucks moving from Mexico to Canada, not stopping in the United States except to fuel, clogging up interstate highways in the Midwest and high plains that never used to see this traffic, and essentially making people wonder, ordinary tax payers wonder, why this cargo isn't on the Kansas City Southern, when you can run a freight train at 90 miles an hour, as happens frequently west of the Mississippi, it feels kind of sad to be sitting in a vehicle on a publicly-built highway where the speed limit's 65 or 70. And once people see freight trains moving at 70 or 75 miles an hour, they start wondering why there can't be a passenger train.

I haven't communicated with John for some time, and when we do converse, it's usually about things O Scale. All the same, we're thinking along similar lines.

West of St. Louis a lot of the nation's freight railroads are now adding a third track, because there's so many freight trains moving that they have to get the faster trains around the slower ones. Once we get the freight railroads back to the condition they were about 1950, I think Amtrak will have a golden opportunity to prove itself.

That might be asking for a complete change of attitude at Union Pacific and Norfolk Southern, and for better supervision and dispatching on the Chessie. On the other hand, in 1950 there were still a few 75 minute Hiawathas dispatched behind an A or F7 deputizing for a pair of E7s. To quote from a Broadway musical of about 30 years ago, one could also reach New York in sixteen hours, a lot can happen in sixteen hours.

My students figured out there was overnight mail service, first class mail, between New York and Chicago, for the price of a first class stamp. Nowadays you'd have to pay a lot of money to get something overnighted. But the real key is that meant there was very frequent fast mail service between places like New York City and Harrisburg, Pittsburg, Cleveland. We've forgotten all of this.

And Emergency Fast Package Service.

You could order a refrigerator, for example in the evening, and it would be delivered to your house at noontime the next day. You could do that in 1929. You can't do it today.

I wonder if some of those real estate inquiries the book (which I must add to the stack of things to review) refers to are looking at the interurban rights of way.

LEAD US NOT INTO PENN STATION, BUT DELIVER US FROM CHRIS CHRISTIE? Trains (behind paywall) reports that New Jersey governor Chris Christie might be reconsidering his decision to cancel the North River Tunnel to Nowhere, a decision Destination: Freedom supports while several of the New York commentariat oppose.

Trains also reports that Amtrak and the shades of Samuel Rea invite passengers to a birthday party. The basement of the Madison Square Garden is celebrating its centennial. The platforms and some of the stairways to track level are original Pennsylvania Station, and a few glass blocks and tile driveways remain, if you know where to look. Behind the sheetrock in the obstacle course that serves as waiting room and train concourse are a few of the latticed columns that supported the roof of the original trainshed. (A few years ago, one such column was an impromptu art gallery, with photographs of the original concourse posted on the sheetrock.)

Beginning at 9:15 a.m., the public is invited to enjoy rare photo imagery, artifacts, and other items commemorating the station’s history, including the role Amtrak plays in the history of passenger rail travel. Representatives from Amtrak and its other Penn Station partners, NJ Transit and Long Island Rail Road, will be on hand as well as author Lorraine Diehl (“The Late, Great Pennsylvania Station”).

Passengers are still able to board first-class trains to Washington or Boston, North Jersey Coast locals, limiteds (change at Jamaica) to the Hamptons, and they're now able to ride a few trains to destinations on the Lackawanna Electric, but there's no Chattanooga Choo-Choo at a quarter to four, and no 5 pm departure of the Broadway Limited, into Chicago in sixteen hours.

ACROSS THE FIELDS. The mountain passes are behind us, and the Southwest Chief is on the home stretch on July 6. I'm up and about as the train is leaving Lawrence, a few minutes off schedule. The approach to Kansas City is slow, as the freight railroads are about their business exchanging cars. It's a good time for breakfast, much of the time spent making a stop that's included in the employee timetable at the fuel racks. Arrival at Kansas City 7:56:42 Central Daylight Time, again this is an approximate time. A small Southern Pacific 2-8-2, No. 745, and some cars of the Louisiana Steam Train Association are west of the station.

The Western Auto sign is a sure identifier of a Kansas City picture.


On the adjacent track is the consist of the afternoon St. Louis Mule, which provides the rail connection to Missouri River towns as far east as St. Louis. The Ann Rutledge for those towns as well as Alton, Springfield, and Chicago leaves at 7:30, a few minutes before the Chief's scheduled arrival. That's not quite as bad a gaffe as Amtrak's initial schedule, in which the National Limited for St. Louis, Indianapolis, Columbus, Pittsburgh, and New York left a few minutes ahead of the Chief, and there was no corridor train later in the day. But Amtrak and the railroads could do more for their credibility by scheduling trains to connect, and enforcing the discipline to make the connections more reliably. (Amtrak will not guarantee a connection with less than two hours between trains in Chicago. Although the Europeans pin Vienna to London in a day on six minutes in Cologne, there has to be a better solution. Send the Rutledge twenty minutes after the Chief arrives and make sure the connection stands up. There's an hour layover in St. Louis. There are neither border crossing formalities nor the Missouri Pacific handing off a train to the Alton. Come off it.)


A number of sleeping car passengers disembarked here, as did a sizeable troop of Scouts from Philmont. Departure from Kansas City at 8:16:32, 31'32" down.

Some steam servicing facilities remain at Marceline, Walt Disney's home town and supposedly the prototype for the Main Street portion of Disney theme parks.


La Plata 10:18:43 - 10:21:09. (The engineer reported his times as "sixteen-eighteen.")

The final stretch stop before Chicago is Ft. Madison, which is still a major terminal on Santa Fe.


Fort Madison 11:28:02 - 11:35:00. East of the station, one of the Santa Fe's big 4-8-4s, No. 2913, is preserved.

The last call for lunch comes out of Ft. Madison. The on-train service was exemplary. Special recognition to sleeping car attendant Sharon, who kept cheerful despite a bad cold, and to lounge car attendant Teresa, whose "I'm going on break so stock up now" and "I'm back from break and getting lonely" were helpful. Those positions are probably the most difficult to do well as the car attendants might be subject to call at any hour and the lounge car is open from 6:30 to 10:30 with short meal breaks.

Near Wyanet on Burlington tracks is the Hennepin Canal overpass.


This canal was an early application of concrete casting technologies later applied on the Panama Canal. Unfortunately, the Hennepin was built bigger than the old Illinois and Michigan canal and smaller than the Mississippi or Illinois River locks, rendering it uneconomic. It's a good linear park, with a towpath suitable for hiking or leisurely bike riding. You might want tires a bit more robust than those on a commuter bike and you'd probably have trouble training for a triathlon on it. (Perhaps a Hennepin photo study some day as it's practically in my back yard.)

The train was about 30 minutes late out of Galesburg, Princeton, Mendota, and Naperville, but there's a recovery margin from Naperville into Chicago.

The Sears Tower guards the south approach to Union Station.


Arrival Chicago about 3:16, four minutes to the good.