FREQUENCY AND CONNECTIVITY ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN SPEED.

John Phelan of the Center of the American Experiment takes a train ride, but finds the ride unimpressive.

Last week I took the train from the Twin Cities to Chicago for a work trip. I enjoyed it, and it set me wondering whether we ought to expand rail travel in the United States. Would this journey be a viable alternative to driving or flying for my family of four?

To answer that, I thought it would be interesting to compare journeys. Take three ways of traveling between the Twin Cities and Chicago – plane, train, and automobile – and compare the practicalities and costs of each.

It transpires that one of his Minnesota sparring partners, Laura Mitchell, was thinking about the same thing.  "A ‘progressive’ discovers that rail isn’t a viable option for the United States."  Why?  She wanted to take her family to Chicago and discovered all sorts of troubles.  Mr Phelan has some fun with her discomfiture.

That is the sound of Ms. Mitchell’s train of “public health and climate, racial & economic justice for all” smashing into the buffers of reality like the Silver Streak.

What she is painfully, publicly, and belatedly discovering, is that a train journey between one station and another is only part of the story. Unless you live right next to the station and are traveling to a destination right next to the other station, you have to consider the journey at either end; to the station and from the station to your ultimate destination.

He then invokes an earlier column dealing with the difficulties, in the States, of getting to the originating station.

You can, in fact, go pretty much directly from Buckingham Palace to Edinburgh Castle by train. You walk 10 minutes to Green Park tube station, then travel on the tube for six minutes to King’s Cross St. Pancras, where you board a train to Edinburgh Waverly. Once you arrive there, its a 10 minute walk up Market Street to the Castle. From Buckingham Palace door to Edinburgh Castle door you’ve travelled about 400 miles in a little over five hours and you’ve walked for just 20 minutes. I’ve made a very similar journey from London to Edinburgh many times.

Let us return to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when Nigel Gresley and K. F. Nystrom vied to run the world's fastest trains.  Yes, the current East Coast Main Line service is faster than the old Flying Scotsman, while the Empire Builder is slower than the Morning Hiawatha was, plus it's a crapshoot whether the Builder, particularly eastbound, will be close to time.  That "potential for delay" in Ms Mitchell's considerations is real.

The greater problem, though, is that there's only the one train on the former Milwaukee Road.  Yes, there is talk of a second train, but there has been talk of that second train for years.  On the East Coast Main Line, however, there are hourly trains taking about five hours between Edinburgh Waverley and London King's Cross, and they make intermediate stops.  Mr Phelan doesn't grasp that.

Ms. Mitchell says that “we need to invest in making our sustainable transit cheaper and faster to truly compete with car & plane travel,” but this is delusional. The only way to make the train trip between St. Paul and Chicago quicker would be to cut out all the intervening stops but that also cuts out a lot of passengers. All the people who get on in La Crosse will have to travel to St. Paul to board the train, and how will they get there? If they are driving, they might as well just drive to Chicago. Neither will lopping off a load of paying customers make the service cheaper since the fixed costs will have to be spread over fewer customers.

The United States isn’t Britain. Its transport needs are, therefore, obviously very different. Educations rarely come as clearly as Ms. Mitchell’s, but they do come.

No. The value of the Northeast Corridor is in its frequency.  The Acelas are creaky rolling bank vaults, and the Afternoon Zephyr of years ago offered timings that would embarrass the Acela while calling at East Winona, LaCrosse, Prairie du Chien, and East Dubuque.

Nobody, though, not Minnesota's Passenger Rail advocates, not Our Streets Minneapolis, not the state departments of transportation for Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Illinois, is ready to take a stand for free rein to 110 along the old Milwaukee Road with capacity to handle, oh, I'll behave myself today, trains on two hour headways.