Slow Trains

As the images above show, there is a correlation between the decline in the quality of train travel in America and the decline is sartorial awesomeness of Don Cornelius, the host of Soul Train.

There is a fascinating piece in Slate today about how trains in this country have regressed since the 1920s, in the sense that they are slower now and the service is less reliable (and no barbers on board). I know that I am letting the terrorists win when I say this, but WHY, WHY ARE WE SO INTO CARS AND SUBURBS AND LEAFBLOWERS (seriously, have you ever raked leaves? It is a nice activity, especially on a crisp Fall day)?!!! Read the Slate article. It is interesting. Then come back here and read the rest of this post.

(Our loyal reader knows that I'm always on some train ish, so let me warm to the topic a little bit:)

Here is my question: What with how most airlines are not profitable and the seats are uncomfortable and flying is the least fuel-efficient way (other than actually drinking gasoline while riding a diesel-powered mule) to go anywhere and most airports are about as convenient to business districts as, say, Windsor Locks is to Hartford, and now that everything is all interconnected with computers and satellites and blackberries and laptops and space lasers, why can't train travel become the choice for business? I mean, I know that people in the northeast corridor like to take Acela, but other than that train travel is only for tourism and me. There's no reason that a business trip from Hartford to Chicago or Georgia couldn't happen by train. I mean, sure, you'd have to leave earlier, but if you carried your computer and if Amtrak could figure out how to get wi-fi to work on their trains (right now there's wi-fi but it's not connected to the internets; good work, losers), people could just be working during that time (and also seeing this great nation of ours, drinking and playing cards with rough characters in the evenings, having whirlwind romances, and solving mysteries; even a cross-country flight doesn't afford time for all that).

Train travel for business would reduce congestion at airports, it would use less fuel, and it would reintroduce romance and mystery to our lives as a society. I mean, train travel has given us some of the greatest cinematic rides of all time, like Strangers on a Train, The Lady Vanishes, The Station Agent, and The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (among many many others). Commercial airlines, by contrast, have given us tawdry, explosion-saturated schlock like Air Force One, Con Air, and Passenger 57 (although that part where Wesley Snipes is on the plane phone with the terrorist who is somewhere else on the plane and he asks him if he's ever played roulette and the terrorist is like, yeah, why, and Snipes is like, "Always bet on black" is awesome, because up until that point, the fact that the terrorist was white and Snipes was black seemed sort of tangential - if anything, it seemed a lot more important that the bad guy was foreign and Snipes was American - but suddenly, BAM, there's a weird racial element in the movie, one that basically doesn't resurface at all; I always supposed that one of the screenwriters had been saving up that line and just couldn't find anywhere else to use it (I bet it was Dan Gordon - he worked on Highway to Heaven during the 80s, and you can bet Michael Landon never would have said anything like that (except maybe during the episode where Rudy Ray Moore guest-starred (quadruple parentheses!))).) (I will concede that Airplane is a spectacular movie, but that's mostly because it makes fun of airlines.) Plane travel is all bland, corporatized utility that leaves you feeling dirty and grumpy, while train travel is personal, uplifting, literary. And with all this tricknology, we wouldn't have to sacrifice our vaunted hard-working, family-ignoring, money-worshipping efficiency for the aesthetic advantages of rail. In fact, by turning a weekend-long business trip by air into a week-long rail sojourn, you give workers that much more time when they're unable to do anything but work and be apart from their loved ones, so it's a win-win. Also, it's way easier to bring your bike on a train than on a plane, and a lot easier to ride your bike to and from the train station than the airport.

Now can some rational person explain to me why no company will ever start using railroads for all its business travel? (I realize there's a chicken-and-egg problem here, in the sense that passenger rail service has become shitty because of the rise of automobiles and interstates, and now it is not cost-effective, so companies won't do it, but until companies do it, it will never be cost-effective, but I'm hoping some economic genius will tell me there's some other, soluble problem, so that we can all join together, solve that problem, and sort the rest out with oodles of federal stimulus money.)