Text Size:
A|
A|
A
Email
Print
I reached James McCommons in Albuquerque between trains. The man is always between trains.
Mr. McCommons just wrote a book about his year riding the rails, and his piece in the current issue of the Saturday Evening Post includes an account of an Amtrak trip from Chicago to Pittsburgh to New York.
The 900-mile trip took 22 hours. In the 1930s, the Pennsylvania Railroad's "Broadway Limited'' made the same run in 16 hours -- and passengers didn't have to endure the likes of the present Pittsburgh stop.
"At 5 a.m., the 'Capitol Limited' dropped me and a handful of passengers in downtown Pittsburgh, where we had a two-and-a-half hour wait before boarding the 'Pennsylvanian' to New York,'' Mr. McCommons wrote.
PG STORE
"The station was chilly; food came from vending machines; and outside the city was still asleep. I walked a few blocks but failed to find a restaurant for coffee and breakfast.''
Our pitiful stop encapsulates the demise of American rail travel. The luxury apartment building, The Pennsylvanian, was a grand station for the Pennsylvania Railroad back when it was the largest company on Earth. The Amtrak station lurks below it, almost apologetically, with all the charm that plastic chairs and stale candy can offer.
Pennsylvania has received a $750,000 federal grant to pay half the cost of a study into improving Pittsburgh-to-Harrisburg rail service. Right now, there's only one daily train in each direction (compared to 14 daily trains between Harrisburg and Philadelphia that run fast and nearly filled).
Mr. McCommons, whose book is "Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service,'' says Pennsylvania is way behind states such as Washington and North Carolina, which were doing these kind of preliminary studies 15 and 20 years ago.
The study could begin in a month or so, once the Federal Railroad Administration approves its scope, and should take a year to complete. The buzz these days is all about high-speed rail, but nobody needs a study to know not to ride a bullet train headed into Altoona's Horseshoe Curve. This study will look at a range of options.
As Toby Fauver, the state's deputy secretary for local and area transportation, put it, we may want "the cupcake but not the whole wedding cake.''
The difficulty here is that, unlike the line from Harrisburg to Philly that's owned by Amtrak, the tracks and right of way between here and Harrisburg are Norfolk Southern's. And America's freight rail system is as good as its passenger system is bad.
There's room to add more track to accommodate more passenger trains; the Pennsylvania Railroad had four tracks in its heyday and now there are only two for most of the stretch. But simply adding another line won't solve everything.
"One of the problems with a dedicated passenger rail line along our right-of-way is that we serve customers from spurs on both sides of the track,'' Norfolk Southern spokesman Rudy Husband said. "A dedicated line might sever us from existing or future customers'' or at least hinder their service.
Passenger trains can go up to 79 mph on the existing line, but mingling faster trains than that with the freights is a safety concern.
You don't need a 150-mph train to beat the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The current train to Harrisburg takes 51/2 hours. Deputy Secretary Fauver would like to get that down to 31/2 hours. If a third track were added, freights and passenger trains could share all three lines, and riders could sleep, read, have a drink, surf the Internet and do other things they couldn't (or at least shouldn't) do behind the wheel.
Of course, Pennsylvania would have to find the money, which won't be easy even when the state has to kick in only 20 percent. Gov. Ed Rendell has called a special legislative session to deal with the chronically underfunded transportation infrastructure, and don't expect that situation to be all better when this study is finished.
But other states are moving in this direction. Ohio is studying how to improve the line from Pittsburgh going west, and Pennsylvania is supporting that and similar efforts to improve service from Ohio through Erie to New York state.
Uncle Sam, for the first time, is investing billions in passenger rail. In a few years, Pittsburghers will be turning to trains for the same reason Norfolk Southern's business is booming, and the same reason 1.2 million passengers ride between Harrisburg and Philadelphia each year: the price of gasoline makes a train the smarter way to go.
