A lightweight article, then followed by many insightful comments:
When you look at domestic surface modes, in the big-picture sense, America has an inadequate amount of railroad route miles of track. While roadway pavement in the U.S. has historically increased, the amount of track has been cut back. Railroad route...
www.dailykos.com
Like this “insightful” comment?
“I’d like to point out—as a way to bolster your already excellent argument, which, BRAVA—that trains could help us regain an awful lot of “me time.” My sister lives 1800 miles, or about 27 hours by train, away from me. Whenever I can take the train instead of a plane, I DO. The food is better, I can walk around freely, I’m not nickel-and-dimed to death, there’s plenty of foot room (I don’t even bother with a sleeper car because if you bring a blanket and pillow it’s perfectly comfortable to sleep in your seat!), and I can spend much of the trip chilling in the observation car with a book or my computer and latest piece of writing. There’s no internet—you’re completely unplugged.
Sometimes you meet little kids who are tired of Disney movies and are totally down to learn cat’s cradle or how to fold a piece of simple origami and you get to have a very human, if passing, connection. If there was an actual train connection from Phoenix to Tucson do you know how often I’d be down there to check out museums and stuff? At least once a month. But no, the [f’ing] GM auto conspiracy had to happen, instead. (That’s a real thing and learning about
it is literally what radicalized me into turning away from capitalism as an even remotely sane system of commerce.)”
Sounds like someone a little more into children and communism than we need to know about? I know I wouldn’t want to meet that guy on a train.
Anyway, I think they tried HS railroads in California, but the French company they wanted to build it all took like a billion dollars and basically did nothing. Whoopsie daisies!
In my area, all you see are rail road tracks being closed and in some cases actually removed so beta males can ride bikes on their paved over road beds
Most of the abandoned ones not paved over have 6” trees growing through them. It’s cause all our industrial base went to China, buuuut I guess this is off topic of rail roads, so.