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continued from page 60
Problems remain. One of the reasons rail travel
can feel outdated is that journey times are often
of the last century—or worse. The Brattleboro Reformer notes that in 1938 one could travel the
Connecticut Yankee (one of a number of options) from
Brattleboro, Vermont, to New York in four hours
and 42 minutes. Today, there’s only one train, and
it takes around six hours—when it’s on schedule,
which about 75 percent of the time it’s not.
McCommons points out that Amtrak has its own
issues, among them aging equipment and mismanagement (not to mention underfunding). But,
ironically, it’s also a victim of the success of freight
rail. In North Texas, “one of the most congested
freight areas in the country,” McCommons recently endured a not atypical eight-hour delay on the
Texas Eagle. There were track issues; in summer,
rails expand and rail beds buckle. But much of
the problem was simply congestion. Near the town
of Longview, six different rail lines coalesce into
a massive bottleneck. The new intermodal trains,
which carry containers directly off of cargo ships,
are often too large for sidings—so when two trains
are on the same track, “it’s Amtrak that has to get
over,” McCommons says. Sometimes Amtrak trains
have to go past stations and then back in, slowing
things further.
But other trains, like the Hiawatha, which runs
from Milwaukee to Chicago, or the Capitol Corridor
route, from Sacramento to Oakland, California, have
good on-time rates, he says, because the states “sat
down with railroads. They’ve negotiated. They’ve
invested money, along with railroads, to make infrastructure so trains can run.” Most ambitiously, a
November 4 ballot looms in California to approve
nearly $10 billion in financing for a dedicated high-speed line (backed by Governor Schwarzenegger)
that would put Los Angeles within two and a half
hours of San Francisco. The model would be something like Spain’s rapidly growing AVE network,
which can blaze from Madrid to Barcelona in just
over two and a half hours—and has been blamed for
a recent decrease in domestic plane travel.
But, in his time riding the rails, McCommons
says he has “learned that you don’t necessarily
need high-speed lanes. You need trains that are
frequent, that go faster than a car, or as fast as
a car. That’s what people want. We don’t necessarily need 110-mile-an-hour trains if we could
just get trains that are on time and go every hour.”
The high-speed future may be coming—and with it,
perhaps, a glimmer of the cultural excitement seen
in Art in the Age of Steam—but in the meantime,
McCommons argues, we will profit simply by getting back to the past. “What we have today is something that we already had decades ago. In fact, what
we had decades ago was better.” —Tom Vanderbilt
Art in the Age of Steam: Europe, America and
the Railway, 1830–1960 is on view at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in Kansas City, Missouri,
from September 13, 2008, through January 18,
2009; (816) 751-1278, www.nelson-atkins.org.
