Trains

In response to Cell Study; Binding Study (I think I responded to both, really)

The Western United States was built on the railroad, but now nobody there takes the train.

There were 14.7 million Amtrak rides in the West last year, and 24.0 million in the Northeast. Those are figures don’t include regional rail, and that’s a region that has less people.

When I was in college in the middle part of this decade, I took the train up and down the Pacific Northwest corridor quite a bit, and I never saw a train car even half full. There’s an odd loneliness to taking the train, where you can walk through the station and into the car and sit down and look out the window without ever having to talk to someone, so long as you purchased your ticket beforehand. As opposed to, say, an airport, where you have to get checked by twelve people just to get in the goddamn thing that’s going to take you somewhere. Even on a bus, you have to get your ticket checked and wade through dozens of people to get to your seat (And maybe it’s just me, but every Greyhound I’ve been on is still packed to the gills).

On a train, you just sit.

I took the train to New York when I left Oregon this summer. There are so many towns built on the railroad that are now languishing. Train platforms have an almost ghostly feel in the West, abandoned not only in the sense that the people who used them are gone, but also in the sense that the prosperity brought by the platforms allowed the people to move away, buy cars, and let the weeds grow. The little platform just a tiny cell that always dies, sooner or later.

This is changing, of course. The green movement rightfully jizzes rainbows over rail. Ridership’s going up as the recession and gas price gyration causes people to sell their cars. California voters approved a multi-billion dollar initiative to install high-speed rail through their state. And there’s the stimulus money. Yes.

The cells of platforms might get to start up again. (The rockin’ thing about machines, it turns out, is that they don’t have to die.) The weeds will probably be mowed again soon. I wonder if they’ll spring up again around the highways? It’s doubtful yeah, but I can only imagine how doubtful the obsoletion of the railroad was in 1909, how unforeseen that the strength of the pumping arteries of track and rail would, in decades, be more visible from museums than from open sky.