Lean Left posts an interesting contribution from Dennis Miller of all people, who thinks we ought to take NASA's budget and dedicate it to rebuilding our nation's rail system.
I've been thinking about rail travel quite a bit lately, from a visit to the
Museum of Transportation here in St. Louis to trips to Chicago that I wish I could take reliably on a train to an
syndicated article I read last weekend by Arthur Frommer, the travel guru.
Having driven across this great continent in 39 hours during college, I have an idea of how wide it is and how far apart things are, but this graf took me by surprise and shock.
Would you believe that across the entire northern swath of the United States â" from Seattle to Fargo to Minneapolis to Chicago â" there is only one train? One daily train (the Empire Builder) in each direction? One slow choo-choo that laboriously departs the Pacific Northwest to cross the prairie states and arrive in Fargo at 2 a.m., before proceeding for another 14 hours to Minneapolis and then to Chicago? No, actually, I had no idea. That's horrifying. I wondered why our rails were in such shoddy shape, especially, as one Lean Left commenter responded, 9/11 should have given us a huge incentive to reinvest in train travel.
Then I realized that if the
Europeans do it, fat chance we'll jump on board.
On Sept. 28 a Eurostar train made it from Waterloo Station, in London, to the Gare du Nord, in Paris, in two hours, 18 minutes. An earlier train had traveled from London to Brussels in one hour, 58 minutes. The English Channel is being eliminated as an impediment to a united Europe of high-speed trains.If only we could say the same about Connecticut.