Riding the rails

In digging through my files I came across this posting from July. I finished it in mid-July on the couchette car going from Berlin to Malmö. There was no internet access. I saved it to a file meaning to upload later. In this case, much later. A couchette car is a sleeper car with bunk beds, shared often amoung strangers. It was the overnight train to Sweden.


Sleeping became better once I put earplugs in. Couchettes aren't a bad way of traveling, nor are trains. They just take a while. They are extremely convenient because the stations are in the center of town. At least nearly always. Back in Illinois, many years ago, the city of Urbana refused (as I recall) to give certain concessions to the railroad building the line from Chicago south. Or they asked for too much. Instead the railroad created a new town originally named "West Urbana" a mile or two away. That city grew, changed its name to Champaign, became the county seat, has more businesses, and when I was there was twice as big as Urbana. Roughly 70,000 vs. 35,000.

Amtrak still goes through Champaign but that's the only passenger service. The station is two blocks from the center of town but it's not part of the city life. Something like 2/3rds of the school come from Chicagoland, and both C-U and Chicago have decent mass transit. A weekend service back and forth to Chicago should get some takers. It's 3.5 hours by car so perhaps 3 hours (or less?) by train.

Why doesn't that happen? It's several things. One is the chicken-and-egg problem where people don't take the train because there is no train because there are no people. In New Mexico Governor Richardson has been pushing a light rail project .. named the Roadrunner Express? ... between Albuquerue and Santa Fe. I think it's a top-down political decision likely to fail. Even when trains were the way to get around the US there was no good rail connection to Santa Fe because of geography. The train stops at Lamy and people going to Santa Fe finish the trip with a 15 minute car ride.

There are two competitors to trains: planes and automobiles. Planes are fast but the airports are out of town, the airlines and security demand passengers arrive early, luggage is separated from the passengers and cannot contain certain items, security screening can be humiliating, etc. Figure two hours overhead and an hour flight takes a bit over three hours of travel. That's 2.5 hours of rail time, assuming 15 minutes of overhead on each side.

Execepting the northeastern part of the US, neighboring cities are a but further apart than that by car. Urbana was 3 hours to Chicago and St. Louis and 2 hours to Indianapolis. Competitive train service must be high-speed train service. I've heard about two reasons keeping this from happening. High-speed lines must be straight. The existing tracks aren't straight enough, with bends too often and too sharp. Fixing that requires new right-of-ways, which is expensive and time-consuming. It isn't worthwhile if there are no passengers and shaky evidence that things will change. Hence a top-down political decision could overcome the barrier. If it fails (in the US) then it's more proof that the government is incompetant. If it succeeds then nay-sayer will say that it was economically worthwhile and free enterprise would have put one in no matter what the government did. Heads I win, tails you loose.

I've also heard that freight lines in the US have right-of-way over passenger lines. The rails are owned by the freight companies after all. So few people ride that they have no political power to change this. Risk management of uncertain schedules requires either a huge number of trains (just catch the next one, coming in a few minutes) or large buffer times ("good thing I had a 90 minute layover because the train was delayed by an hour"). Both make train travel less viable.

The train to Leipzig on Friday was 20 minutes late. The Germans on the train were quite annoyed. German trains run on time. There were people from Deutsch Bahn giving OJ, bottled water or candy to the passengers as an apology. Some people missed the outbound connections. For example, one of my transfers had about 12 minutes between arrival and departure and the train arrived 3 minutes late, which made me nervous. You can't be this tight with airplanes. It takes about as long to load a plane as the train is at the station.

The other train competitor is the car. When ready, hop into the car and go. No nervousness or worry about missing the train. I saw several suit-clad businessmen miss the train by mere seconds. It was still at the station but the doors were closed. They were not let on.