Back in the 1930s and early 1940s, Frank Kelley, who went on to serve as Michigan’s attorney general for a record 37 years, used to spend every summer with his family up north.
During the summer season back then, he told me, there were six passenger trains between Detroit and Petoskey every day. When I heard that, I was transfixed.
Six trains every day! I’d settle for one. Like many of us, I go up north every chance I get, and where I end up staying is usually more than a five-hour drive. I don’t recommend you try it in January. Imagine being able to walk onto a train without having to endure traffic jams, bad drivers, or security screenings, and as far as I am concerned, you are imagining paradise.
When I think of train travel, I first think of a kind of a late 1940s scene, Bogart with a splash of film noir on trains both here and in Europe; then of sleek passenger trains hurtling across a continent, like the bullet trains I’ve seen in Japan.
“Everybody loves the sound of a train in the distance,” Paul Simon wrote and sang. “Everybody thinks it’s true.” Folk singers aren’t the only ones who love trains. Richard Nixon, perhaps the least romantic of politicians, once told a Republican convention that he had been a boy who “hears the train go by at night and dreams of faraway places he’d like to go.”
But when World War II ended, those boys who grew up listening to trains wanted their own private cars instead, so they weren’t dependent on anyone’s timetable. When they traveled long distance, they wanted to fly and get there as fast as possible.
We poured billions into building roads and tarmac, and neglected track. We took much of the freight that once arrived on railroad cars and stuffed it into the back of trucks.
Then we wondered why train travel slowly withered and died.
Well, now it seems to be slowly dawning on us that we may have lost something, that rail offers certain advantages other forms of transportation doesn’t have. Next time you want to spend a weekend in Chicago, drive to Dearborn and get on the train.
You won’t have to take your shoes off or have your luggage searched. You can read, eat, nap, surf the ‘net, whatever, for a few hours. They’ve done a lot to improve the track, though they aren’t where they’d like to be yet. I don’t know, frankly, how much train travel can possibly be revived. I don’t know if anyone does. But trains are somehow in our national DNA.
A few years ago I saw the film version of Ayn Rand’s famous novel Atlas Shrugged, a book one critic called a “mesmerizing nutwork.” It was a terrible movie, worth seeing only for the trains. It was set in a not-too-distant future where the price of gas had made car travel nearly impossible, and America had returned to train travel as the main way of getting around.
Somehow, I found that curiously appealing. If we ever get back into train travel in a major way it will take billions, and public-private partnerships that will want a lot of data before one shovel goes into the ground. They won’t care about my theory that if we build it, they will come.
But they would, you know.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
