Soul

by Little Miss Attila on March 9, 2011

. . . Train.

It isn’t that we hate trains, and it isn’t even that we are less romantic. It’s simply that we are less inclined to give in to our romanticism.

{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }

Foxfier March 9, 2011 at 8:36 pm

There’s only one answer for that.

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ZZMike March 9, 2011 at 11:35 pm

I certainly don’t hate trains. I’d really love to ride the Orient Express from end to end. But passenger rail service in this country is deplorable. Because our rail beds are so old, and in such disrepair, Amtrak trains can rarely go over 50 or 60 mph. (There are a few sections of track where they can go up to around 100 mph, but those are extremely rare.)

And since Amtrak has to take second slot to freight trains, its motto is “Never having to wonder when your train will get there”. On the Pacific Coast route, a train from Seattle to Los Angeles can easily be 24 hours late. (Too bad for you if you have to make a connection.)

Some years back, my wife was on a train (I think the Pacific route), and at one point, after a long delay, the restaurant car had to stop serving food.

Not because they ran out of food, but because they ran out of order blanks.

It’s not unheard of for the train to stop in the middle of the desert and wait for a helicopter to come out with a new crew and take the old one away – because they reached their 8 hours (or whatever the time limit is).

As for high-speed rail, it’s a bad solution for a problem not easily solved. Nowhere on earth does high-speed rail run without a huge government subsidy.

For the first leg of California’s high-speed rail system, “the initial planned 123-mile route from Bakersfield to tiny Borden in rural Madera County as a “train to nowhere.”

(I’d like to know who bought up the land along that route.)

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Bloodaxe March 10, 2011 at 8:35 am

I like trains too. Especially the old steam engines. They were cool. But as far as daily transportation goes I’ll stick with my trusty Chevy, thank you. Trains would be OK if you live right next to a station and your destination is right next to a station and they run exactly when & where you want. My Chevy does that. Trains don’t. High-speed rail is just another liberal fantasy. Libs are basically Bolsheviks. They regard the the rest of us- “the masses”- as a vast herd of sheep. And they are a pack of wolves.
I am a sheepdog. I don’t like wolves.

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Foxfier March 10, 2011 at 9:41 am

Oddly, I do live pretty-much next to a station, and pretty-much next to the place I want to go, and since we only have one car I thought I’d give it a try so Kit and I could visit her grandparents….

Price was great, but my folks picking us up at 11pm on a dark platform in a small-ish city, in the bad part of town was…er… questionable. And it did take half again as long as just DRIVING. The bus ride back was slightly better; faster, though the folks on it were freaky and the issue of where the stations were was still a problem.

Looked into it to go visit my husband’s grandmother; it would cost more than flying, take three days, and food or a place to sleep was extra. (And now I find from ZZMike that it’s a good thing it was such a bad idea, or we might have been left hanging halfway there.)

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Michael Teuber March 11, 2011 at 1:33 am

For many people trains are romantic. There is nothing romantic about forcing someone to buy you one. No matter how shiny it is.

Romantic is believing in our individual right to whatever marvels we produce.

Even money our neighbors could be using to buy us bullet trains.

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