SENATOR BIDEN'S ACELA. Infinite Regress reacts favorably to a frequent train rider on the Democratic ticket. Illinois Review (via Reverse Spin) is less impressed.

Indeed, had it not been for my shortsightedness in getting a regular ticket, Senator Biden would have traveled in what was essentially a private rail car. No wonder he is the number one supporter of taxpayer support of the nation’s bankrupt passenger train industry.

First class as hideaway for the influential may be the reason for Acela. Consider this Washington Monthly article that criticizes Acela for being an expensive way to run a train not a lot faster than the steam-powered Yankee Clipper that yet attracts the Powers That Be.

The bartender says that travelers are choosing Acela Express for other reasons.

Acela draws a different sort of trade, he said, gesturing around, implying that his train was expensive enough for the busy business traveler to escape crying kids, fat guys chomping on smelly sandwiches, or grandmas brandishing an endless ream of photos. Indeed, Acela just doesn't have room for those guys. It has only 304 seats, compared to 700 on the European TGV trains---another reason the tickets cost so much. By granulating its audience through fares that grow to nearly match the airlines,' Amtrak has made Acela a kind of rolling gated community, a clean, comfortable place where business can be conducted.

There's a somewhat longer passage at p. 123 of John Stilgoe's Train Time that makes the same point.

Acela offers an intellectual feast to any sociology-minded passenger, especially in first class. The train is relatively expensive to ride and its food service exorbitant, for all that the food tends to be good. When the train is not full, business-class passengers drawn to each other by visual cues -- similar books, Blackberries or other wireless devices, even upscale shopping bags or European newspapers -- often strike up conversations; they may change seats or walk to the snack car together for muffins or sandwiches or wine. The alert eavesdropper discovers that seat changes often lead to the exchange of telephone numbers or business cards. Certain recurrent phrases float through conversations, usually relating to the decided superiority of Acela trains over ordinary Amtrak ones or the freedoms offered by unassigned seats. Strangers remark to one another how discerning Acela passengers are, something that matters more and more as the sun goes down and windows become mirrors that reveal much about what money buys. Perhaps making connections among like-minded others matters a great deal to passengers in their twenties, not only in terms of career or business but socially. Acela rolls like a private club, its tickets the price of entry, and hosts a definable cohort of well-dressed, upwardly mobile men and women in their late twenties.

I could carp that tax dollars are going to underwrite first-class services contrary to the intent of the original Amtrak legislation, but that's not the point of what is becoming Book Review N^o. 36. Train Time's subtitle is Railroads and the Imminent Reshaping of the United States Landscape. I'm tempted to suggest that if you want the full review, all you have to do is be a regular reader of Cold Spring Shops, because the ideas in Train Time often turn up in my posts. Sometimes that's been a direct use of the material. John is an O Scaler and we have on occasion compared notes on things that run on 12" = 1' rails as well as things that run on 1/4" = 1' (or on occasion 7 mm = 1') rails. Much of the information in Train Time is in plain sight for the ferroequinologist. But a ferroequinologist with a Harvard professorship is privy to conversations among movers and shakers contemplating, for example, abandoned railway grades that have commercial potential, either for commuter lines or for new freight corridors in a way that a faculty member at a mid-major is not. Thus, one line of analysis in the book. In like manner, access to the Eastern Establishment permits confirmation of hypotheses about the ability of the well-off to buy privacy that can be formulated but not easily tested using public material such as old train timetables. I'll cut John some slack for mis-stating some of the details of the Maine service. (It is no accident that an all-sleeping car Bar Harbor Express ran until 1960, and conspiracy buffs will have to reconsider their belief in a ruling class in that Patrick McGinnis was able to gut that service, first on the New Haven and then on the Boston and Maine, without disappearing.) That quest for privacy also offered the entrepreneurial a chance to identify future sites for residential or industrial development, the observation platform of a private car offering a much better view than that available from a jet.

The first-class train is not the only instrument of reshaping, particularly in an era of rising fuel prices that will pinch regional and local air carriers. There is also the potential for bulk freight and for express, two types of traffic that are incompatible with each other and to some extent with the passenger trains. Train Time suggests (and it's easy enough for a researcher to follow up) that much of the intermodal freight network continues the old railway express business in a new guise. That Penn Central used to have van trains with MAIL symbols and that Chicago and North Western timetabled their Falcon trains as First Class was not for show: these were inheritors of the Overland Mail tradition if without express messengers and armed postal clerks. (These, too, we might see again, if regional airports close and keeping reserve planes up all night just in case a little too much "absolutely, positively" cargo hits the counter in Chico or Chicago gets too expensive. A train with a crew that can sort and set off parcels at intermediate stops, often without stopping, can get it to a lot of places overnight.) Professor Stilgoe concludes by suggesting that many of the dot.com profits are being invested, or being held to be invested, in new railroads.

Now, if we could get rid of those cartel-era speed restrictions (and the book has some insights on who made those happen. Hint: the public roads are not safe for 100 mph driving, and faster trains increase the shortest-possible-profitable-hop for airplanes.)

(Cross-posted to 50 Book Challenge).

GETTING THERE THE SENSIBLE WAY. Popular Mechanics sounds out John Stilgoe on Passenger Rail.

While Amtrak could potentially upgrade the speeds of its existing California-based trains to 110 miles per hour (from a 79-mph average), at that speed they won't get travelers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 2-1/2 hours—as fast as an airplane would if you count time for check-in, security and transport from airports to city centers. Still, the price for the bullet train line is far higher than all available funds from the stimulus. This project will need at least $27.5 billion ($12 billion to $16 billion in federal dollars, $9 billion from bonds raised by the state of California and $6.5 to $7.5 billion in private capital) just for the first phase—building track that will run from San Francisco to Anaheim (San Diego and Sacramento are not included in this phase). The total cost for the project is estimated to be between $40 billion and $45 billion.

This kind of hefty price tag has experts outside California thinking twice about a future American landscape full of high-speed trains. The U.S. doesn't need new 200-mph-train routes to divert passengers from airlines, says John Stilgoe, Harvard professor and author of Train Time. Stilgoe believes that there will be a huge resurgence in train travel in the next fifty years, without high-speed projects that require entirely new track to be laid down. His research models, based on real-world travel patterns, show that "a lot of people want to travel at [speeds no faster than] 100 miles an hour for distances up to 150 miles," he says. "Improving the current train infrastructure, and in some places really upgrading it (so there can be Acela trains between cities like Chicago and St. Louis or between San Francisco and L.A.) can be done with existing technology."

Cliff Black, Amtrak's head of communications agrees. "Absolute top speed is not as important as reduction in operating time," Black says. "An incremental speed improvement from 79 mph, which is our normal top speed outside the Northeast, to 110 mph will give us many hours of reduced running time over a broad spectrum of routes."

I've referred to Professor Stilgoe's work previously. I'm pleased to see that incremental, feasible improvements to existing passenger trains is emerging as Amtrak's preferred option.

THE TRIUNE NATURE OF AMTRAK. Thus does James Coston, of Chicago's Corridor Capital, parse The Passenger Transportation Problem.

In 1971, Amtrak The Father.

You would not know it from what happened subsequently, but Amtrak was popular in those days.

Passenger loads were large, and Operations was struggling to find extra cars for the trains during peak periods.

Every night we put out an 18-car Broadway Limited. The Zephyr and Empire Builder? Same thing. Each train had the longest consists the Union Station platforms could hold.

At the ticket window and over the telephone I turned away hundreds of applicants for coach and sleeping-car space.

Out on the platforms I saw weekend trains leave for Detroit, St. Louis, and Quincy with seven cars or more. Sometimes Amtrak borrowed extra cars from the commuter railroads around Chicago, something that’s no longer possible now that one commuter agency, METRA, owns the entire fleet.

What was happening was that the American people believed that the federal government was going to save the trains—and grow the train system. Pre-1971, when Americans saw the railroads eliminating trains, they got the message and stayed away. Post-1971, when they saw the federal government committing itself to saving trains and growing the service, they started coming back.

I call the Amtrak we knew at that time “Amtrak I.” This is the period when Amtrak looked the way Congress originally designed it, as a pure Train Operating Company—a single nationwide carrier that owned trains but no tracks and had to rent track space from the privately owned railroads.

I don't recall that Amtrak quite as fondly. The rolling stock, all the talk about "making the trains worth traveling again," was clapped out, timekeeping systemwide left a lot to be desired, and many of the remaining trains were subject to the tender mercies of Penn Central or Missouri Pacific or Southern Pacific or Union Pacific dispatching, and to Burlington Northern's fragile permanent way.

SUBURBAN SPRAWL WAS A LONG TIME IN THE MAKING.

I'll start 2025's attempt to post fifty book reviews with John Stilgoe's Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene.  Although the book features a train on the dust jacket, and railroads in the subtitle, it's not ferroequinology.  Nor is it urban planning, although I intend to argue that amateur or professional urbanists will gain a great deal from a close reading.

Professor Stilgoe served the faculty of landscape architecture at Harvard at the time Metropolitan Corridor was published.  He also has experience in military intelligence and an affinity for vintage O Scale modelling.  The preface to Metropolitan Corridor engages in a great deal of product differentiation, concluding with "This book offers only an introduction, an addition to the vocabulary of visual analysis of the built environment."  That follows a disclaimer, "The following pages look as closely as possible at the physical presence of the railroad industry and its infrastructure and seek to interpret the public attitude toward them.  Dividing object from creating system may be unwise, but to research the origin, growth, and place of corporate finance in this period is to produce another book."  Presumably inter alia Alfred Chandler and Ken Galbraith had that covered.

I intend to focus Book Review N^o. 1 on supporting the outrageous claim of the post's title.  First, though, let me note that there's a lot in Metropolitan Corridor for culture-studies and assorted humanities types to learn from.  My elaborations will come after the jump.

First, where do you find the metropolitan corridor?  Do you look in Lionel catalogs?  Do you read pulp magazines?  Perhaps today's "theorists" might rediscover inductive pattern-recognition rather than arguing, on the basis of tight and empirically empty priors, that Sir Topham Hatt is a tyrant, or that there's too much sex-stereotyping in the toy department at Christmas.

Second, how do you describe the metropolitan corridor?  Do you paint it "with mixed emotions"?  Depict it as a smoky despoiler of all that is beautiful?  Sneak a pickpocket into the Gare St-Lazare?  Or show the giant conquerors of space, time, and drudgery?  Most of the artistic establishment might accentuate the despoilation, although there is enough celebration of the accomplishments to fill Milwaukee's Grohmann Museum with such paintings.  Do you write of it as soul-crushing, or do you affirm it?  Yes, the high school American Literature curriculum is a heavy dose of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis and general "bourgeois bland sucks" and yet, concurrent with the publication of Babbitt, p. 77, came civic boosters establishing "Babbitt clubs."  Les deplorables, an echo in time.

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.

WISHFUL THINKING? The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel publishes its interpretation of the Midwestern high-speed rail proposal, which I analyzed in detail two weeks ago. The newspaper focuses on the Wisconsin components of the project, which include speeding up the On Wisconsin to 110 mph (something that could be done on the Milwaukee stretch almost immediately but would take some work on to Madison), followed by improving the Madison - Portage- Twin Cities section, and finally restoring the Valley 400 line through West Bend, where some of the tracks have been lifted, and pushing on to Green Bay.

Now look carefully at the Illinois section of the map. The 79 mph line to Omaha via Des Moines is illustrated as diverging from the Burlington north of Princeton and striking out for the Quad Cities. My railroad atlases show two abandoned Burlington lines, one diverging at Mendota and another at Zearing, joining to pass through Ronald Reagan's birthplace of Tampico and joining the still-operating east bank line of the Burlington to reach the Quad Cities. Because the map shows an existing stop about where Mendota is, the Zearing connection is the more likely resurrection of an old rail corridor, if the map is accurate. Might those be some of the real estate plays John Stilgoe alludes to in Train Time?

If the plan envisions keeping trains on one corridor for as long as possible, as is the case with Britain's West Coast Main Line throwing off connections to Birmingham or Manchester or Liverpool from the main stem through Milton Keynes and Crewe and Carlisle, the simpler expedient would be a connection from the Burlington to the Rock Island at Wyanet, which is west of Princeton and near the Hennepin Canal.

Sometimes, what is unseen is as instructive as what is seen. Note the feeder us service to Cedar Rapids from Iowa City (oh, for a lightweight interurban) and from Des Moines to Ames and Fort Dodge. Project a line east from Ames through Cedar Rapids: you find Northern Illinois University. You've also uncovered a 90 mph capable railroad that, going west, has a 70 mph crossing of the Des Moines River. Regular readers will recognize me calling out, once again, the passenger-train-unfriendly Union Pacific, which has of late taken to running long, slow stack trains through DeKalb on interurban headways.

Then locate Kirksville, Missouri, reached by a feeder bus from Quincy. Kirksville is on another 90 mph capable railroad, the Santa Fe's Kansas City-Chicago mainline, which at one time had an emerging-corridor level of passenger train service.

I continue to endorse these high-speed rail plans, but the Sprecher stays in the cooler until the cartel-era speed restrictions are repealed and the track upgrading begins.

ON MY WORKBENCH.

Well, that has been a stressful week on the current events beat, combined with some ongoing dental work that might not be completed until Oktoberfest season, and then the Brewers had runners thrown out at home three games in a row.

There's been time, though, to put the Victor E. Garden in, and resume work, now that the workbench has been put into a somewhat organized state, on Pullman cafe-sleeper Harvard Club.  (Has that project languished since the move to new quarters?)

DAVID ALFF IS A LOUSY FERROEQUINOLOGIST.

Washington's Post gave a Buffalo researcher in the "cultural history of infrastructure" space to argue, "Joe Biden’s love of Amtrak tells us how he would govern."  I'd like to think that such a researcher might at least be able to mention en passant fellow O Scaler (and Harvard professor) John Stilgoe, but no.

Amtrak epitomizes Biden’s ideological commitments to incremental governance, dealmaking and compromise. In fact, the country’s passenger rail system owes its survival to the same brand of consensus politics Biden learned in Newcastle, Del. This conciliatory approach to getting things done, known as “the Delaware Way,” held that personal rapport could overcome partisan division and that corporate benevolence could bring about economic justice.

It is more accurate to think of Amtrak as a perpetual muddle, but I digress.

Afraid that the entire rail industry would rust into oblivion on his watch, President Richard Nixon signed into law the National Railroad Passenger Corporation in 1970. This act allowed ailing railroads to jettison their failing passenger operations in return for investing in a new “quasi-public corporation” that would run those trains in their stead. Part joint-stock company, part socialized utility, Amtrak would be responsible for patching together a new nationwide passenger network and running it at a profit — something no railroad had achieved in decades. Congress would cover operating losses temporarily until Amtrak could put trains back in the black.

There is nothing quite so permanent as a temporary arrangement. Amtrak might have been part of a federal effort to rescue the railroads: the freight part turned out OK thanks to deregulation and a consolidation of the eastern trunk lines that was only fifty years and a whole lot of false starts in the making.

With its futile profit mandate, tenuous subsidy and ragtag roster of hand-me-down trains, Amtrak struck many as a joke: a bleak parody of hapless bureaucracy and sad remnant of America’s storied railroad past. Even an Amtrak customer brochure implored riders to “please be patient. It’s going to take time.”

Against daunting odds (and Nixon’s own cynical belief that the railroad would collapse after he left office and was no longer on the hook), Amtrak survived. By slashing 50 percent of its inherited routes, Amtrak doubled down on a bare-bones system until passengers began returning. Amtrak purchased new locomotives, refurbished coach interiors and began slapping its jaunty American flag paint scheme on all trains. Between 1973 and 1976, Amtrak acquired most of the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington from the bankrupt Penn Central, which could no longer maintain the high-speed line’s tracks, bridges and catenary.

Professor Alff is a youngster in an English department, thus we can forgive him for not noting the Arab oil embargoes inducing passengers to return (I would expect that of a transportation economist of a comparable age), and yes, there has been a lot of money put into the Acela corridor over the years, but has he ridden a train from Buffalo to anywhere lately, or tried to get between Chicago and the Cities?  The farther you get from Delaware, the less good Amtrak looks.

In keeping with the civic corporatism that characterized the Delaware Way, Amtrak would atone for capitalistic neglect to make free enterprise work for the American public again. Funding the National Rail Passenger Corporation, Biden argued, was a matter of preserving competition in domestic travel markets prone to monopoly control by buses and planes. He predicted that Amtrak would eventually shed its subsidy to become independent. After voting for a transportation appropriations bill in 1986, Biden addressed the railroad’s naysayers: “I look forward as much as anyone to the day when Amtrak states that it no longer needs any assistance.”

Like the Postal Service, federal mortgage companies and other government-owned corporations, Amtrak has proven abhorrent to its critics as it has grown indispensable to its users. Biden would lead congressional opposition against “numerous attempts … to wreck the Amtrak System,” ranging from Reagan-era budget cuts to George W. Bush’s attempt to privatize passenger trains. He defended Amtrak’s annually-imperiled subsidy against deficit hawks, “the cement folks and the asphalt folks” who favored roads to rails and his cross-aisle friend Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who denounced Amtrak as “the great train robbery.” Critics complained that the government was over-investing in an antiquated mode of travel at a time when most Americans drove, flew and bussed between cities.

Perhaps the way forward is to, oh, introduce more capitalism into transportation, by spending less public money on uneconomic roads, and treating the productive roads as assets.  That' though, is the antithesis of whatever this civic corporatism is, or for that matter, the propensity of politicians to tax, regulate, and spend other peoples's money.

Amtrak satisfies nether a left-wing desire for radical infrastructural development nor the right’s championing of free enterprise and austere budgets. Amtrak ensures that Americans will have trains to ride. It also guarantees those machines will never be mistaken for Japanese Bullet Trains or French TGVs. An uncompromising proponent of compromise, Amtrak Joe wagers that a “leaner, cleaner, greener 21st century” requires all the trade-offs and contradictions embodied by a corporation for the people.

Now there is a ringing endorsement. (And I bet Mr Biden's chartered train had chartered catering, too, not the glorified box lunches sleeper passengers now get.) Meanwhile, in Florida the Brightline service could show Amtrak Regional a thing or two, and it's private money developing a service in Texas that might some day be mistaken for a Japanese bullet train.