10th anniversary post: Yonder comes the train?

 

Amtrak station, Mount Pleasant, Iowa

Since moving to Iowa in 1989, I've made regular trips to Chicago for family, pleasure, and professional reasons. I've made exactly two of those trips by train, which requires a 75 mile drive south to Mount Pleasant. The first was in July 2014, with my then-17-year-old son Eli; that train was 2 .5 hours late getting in; we passed the time agreeably at a coffee shop on Mount Pleasant's town square (See my posts "Yonder Comes the Train?" and "California 2014 (With Postscript, Chicago with Eli)." But we were fully four hours late arriving in Chicago, and had little food and no Wi-Fi en route. The return trip to Iowa also experienced considerable delays. At the time, I noted quite a fair number of passengers were willing to put up with even this level of service, and that with some effort "There could be" a future for interstate train travel in America.

The train arrives, 2014

It took more than ten years, but I tried the train again last month when I went to Chicago for one of the Center for Neighborhood Technology's Visionary Voices panels on housing. The experience was altogether better, and I'm encouraged not to let another ten years go by before I try it. The train from California was an hour or so late, and the return trip was on time. Parking is still free at the Mount Pleasant station, though due to construction in the area, it was difficult to find--impossible, in fact, in the absence of signage, but in time I was able to get directions from the station agent.

Remote parking, two blocks from the Mount Pleasant Amtrak station

The train seemed near capacity in both directions, with a surprising proportion of passengers being Amish. There was plenty of room for my backpack and small suitcase--there was no baggage check in Iowa anyhow--and plenty of legroom, unlike any airplane I've recently experienced. On the train, I cheerfully avoided the constant clot of traffic around Chicago, and spent less on tickets than I would have for two nights of parking at my hotel north of downtown. However, there still is no Wi-Fi on the California Zephyr, and the snack car closed almost as soon as we boarded. 

Some of my improved experience might be random coincidence, but the administration of President Joe Biden did supply some long-overdue upgrades through a $66 million appropriation won from Congress (Hughes 2024; see also Bragg 2024). That is being used to improve tracks, purchase new cars, and add at least one route. The Floridian goes from Chicago to Miami, following a route east through Cleveland and Washington, and then down the East Coast. This neglects the cities of Tennessee, but that state's government is working on service to Chattanooga and Nashville (Gang and Mazza 2024). Meanwhile, the states of New York and Pennsylvania are confident there soon will be service from New York City to Scranton (Ionescu 2024). Those states must be less rail-hostile than Iowa's government. Or Indiana's. 

All this progress is contingent on not being stopped by the incoming Trump administration appointees, many of whom (like efficiency doge Elon Musk) have ties to the auto industry. A lot depends on how much Republicans in Congress and state legislatures value the presence of Amtrak in their states, which is really difficult to predict. More ideological conservatives find trains to be an unwarranted use of government power, though of course they have no objections to the government building and maintaining highways (Russell 2024).

Eric Godwyn of the Transit Costs Project, interviewed last summer on the Strong Towns podcast, recently published, with three co-authors, a set of recommendations on how to improve rail transportation in the U.S. (Godwyn, Levy, Ensari, and Chitty 2024). Godwyn advocates a federal government commitment to intercity high-speed rail, developing minimum technical standards and testing to enable cross-country integration, stronger connections to universities and industry for labor force training, better internal project management and assessment, and better and more expedited planning (pp. 17-39). High-speed rail is defined as at least 155 miles per hour, which would get you from Mount Pleasant to Chicago in an hour and a half.

Whether this is even imaginable depends on broader agreement that the need to "decarbonize intercity travel" (p. 41) is enough of a public good to put public money behind it. If policy makers can agree on that, then they can focus on an efficient and enjoyable experience that will entice passengers. My experience last month suggests there's been some progress in that vein, but more could be done.

The California Zephyr crosses the Mississippi River,
12 November 2024