continued from page 58 the dangers of traveling on the
railway, what happens to pretty girls if they’re unsupervised, the hustle and bustle of modern life.” In
America, Kennedy says, which “one hundred years
ago had almost as much track as all the rest of
the world combined,” the art was more about the
“heroic scale of the enterprise” and the railroad’s
mythic place in the course of westward expansion,
as illustrated in paintings such as Albert Bierstadt’s
1873 Donner Lake from the Summit.
“We don’t necessarily
need 110-mile-an-hour
trains if we could just get
trains that are on time.”
While all this might seem merely steam-shrouded
history, Kennedy, who describes himself as a train
buff at heart (“one of these weird people who like
walking along deserted railway lines”), points out
a curious fact about Kansas City: “It’s still an
important rail hub. It’s the second most important after Chicago.” But it is not passenger trains
that are entering the city—it is huge freight trains,
run by the likes of Burlington Northern Santa Fe
Railway. Far from being outmoded, freight trains
are an increasingly viable business. Warren Buffett,
famously, has been buying rail stock and now owns
nearly one fifth of BNSFR. He has invested with
good reason: trains are not only more efficient than
trucks; they’re more efficient than they were even
a few decades ago—by some 80 percent.
“A lot of the railroads are jammed up with freight,”
says James McCommons, a nature writer and English professor at Northern Michigan University, who
is completing a book, called Waiting on a Train,
about the future of the rail in the United States.
“They’re moving low-sulfur coal out of Wyoming,
grain shipments, containers of goods from Asia.”
There’s just one problem: the trains are moving
record amounts of freight—on fewer rails.
This is happening just as passenger rail, perpetually on the verge of extinction, is also beginning to seem more viable because of rising fuel
prices and intractable congestion. Amtrak’s ridership, says David Johnson, assistant director of the
National Association of Railroad Passengers, is up
nearly 11 percent this year—May saw the single
largest ridership in its history—and is poised to
break the 27 million mark for the fiscal year. “This
would likely be higher,” he says, “if Amtrak had
more equipment.” Small signs of rail resurgence are
everywhere: on the New York–Philadelphia route,
Amtrak earned record revenues in 2007; the segment of the Pacific Surfliner that runs from San
Diego to Los Angeles often has as many as 100
passengers standing. Transportation departments,
once focused on highways, are floating plans to connect places like Chicago and Iowa City, and Oklahoma City and Kansas City. continued on page 62
