It's Time to Rebuild Our Passenger Railroad System

The most remarkable thing about this journey was how we managed to avoid anything scenic. The initial run was overnight from New York to Chicago in the November darkness. In Chicago, we had such a long layover -- all day, really -- that I was able to tour the Art Institute, the Field Museum and even take in a movie before we resumed our journey on a different train.

We rolled through Iowa and Nebraska all night, and I woke up somewhere along the bleak prairie outside of Denver. In that city, we parked on a siding near a stockyard all day long for reasons never explained and departed at dusk for the leg through the Rockies.

Things finally got interesting the next morning in Sparks, Nev., when we entered the Sierra, but the Radar Range cuisine had introduced some malign flora into my guts, and I spent most of that final leg in the bathroom.

Since then, train travel in the United States has become a pretty bare-bones affair. Amtrak has become the laughingstock of the world. Most Americans now living have never even been passengers on a train -- for them it's as outmoded as the stagecoach.

The final three-decade blowout of the cheap fossil-fuel fiesta led to the supremacy of the automobile and the fabulous network of highways that provided so much employment and so many real-estate development opportunities. This is all rather unfortunate because we are on the verge of experiencing one of the sharpest discontinuities in human history.

We're heading into a permanent global oil crisis. It is going to change the terms of everyday life very starkly. We will be a far less affluent nation than we were in the 20th century. The automobile is now set to become a diminishing presence in our lives. We will not have the resources to maintain the highways that made Happy Motoring so normal and universal.

The sheer prospect of permanent energy-resource problems has, in my view, been the prime culprit behind the cratering of our financial system for the simple reason that reduced energy "inputs" lead inexorably to the broad loss of capacity to service debt at all levels: personal, corporate, government. It's quite a massive problem, and it's not going away anytime soon, which is why I call it "The Long Emergency."

There are many additional pieces to it, including very troubling prospects for agriculture, for commerce, manufacturing -- really for all the "normal" activities of daily life in an "advanced" civilization.

I think we're going to need trains again desperately. Among the systems in trouble (and headed for more, very soon) is commercial aviation. In my opinion, the airline industry as we know it will cease to exist in five years.

Combine this with the threats to our car culture -- including resumed high fuel costs and the equal probability of scarcities and shortages, along with falling incomes and lost access to credit -- and you have a continental-sized nation that nobody can travel around.

Rebuilding the nation's passenger railroad has got to be put at the top of our priority list. We had a system not so long ago that was the envy of the world; now we have service that the Bulgarians would be ashamed of.

The tracks are still lying out there rusting in the rain, waiting to be fixed. The job doesn't require the reinvention of anything -- we already know how to do it. Rebuilding the system would put scores of thousands of people to work at meaningful jobs at all levels. The fact that we're barely talking about it shows what an unserious people we have become.

Rebuilding the American passenger-railroad system has an additional urgent objective: We need a doable project that can build our confidence and sense of collective purpose in facing all the other extraordinary challenges posed by the long emergency -- especially rebuilding local networks of commerce and relocalizing agriculture.

There's been a lot of talk about "hope" in our politics lately. Real hope is generated among people who are confident in their abilities to contend with the circumstances that reality sends their way, proving to themselves that they are competent and able to respond intelligently to the imperatives of their time.

We are, in effect, our own generators of hope. Rebuilding the American railroad system is an excellent place to start recovering our sense of purpose.