For Relaxation and Reverie, Sometimes a Train Trip Is the Only Way to Fly

Like many travelers, I have been following the debate about the future of our national passenger railway system. I listened to pundits say that the rail system, which loses millions every year, should die off, like the dinosaurs, and to others with expensive plans to get it back on its wheels.

Mostly, though, I thought of train trips I have taken here and abroad, all experiences I feel lucky to have had.

I once ditched a dreary, poorly run camping tour in Alaska and caught the railway from Denali to Anchorage. I drank white wine and ate a salmon steak in the dining car as the train passed a moose.

I have ridden from Auckland to Wellington on the cozy railways of New Zealand, privately owned at the time but federalized last year, and I have taken an overnight train from Beijing to Xian, bunking above a Chinese policeman. Just last month I sampled Switzerland’s efficient railroad system, which is part private, part federal.

Most memorable was a three-day train trip I took in 1996 on Amtrak’s Pioneer from Denver to Portland, Ore. I boarded in Denver’s handsome Union Station, went coach to save money, sleeping in my seat amid fretful babies and rambunctious Boy Scouts, ate microwave meals and had to catch trains in the wee hours of the morning.

The train roughly followed the Oregon Trail, across southern Idaho and eastern Oregon, before joining the Columbia River in its wild rush to the sea. An appreciation for the beauty of the country, especially its tiny whistle-stops, and the extraordinary accomplishments of the pioneers welled up in me whenever I looked out the window. But the train was hours, not minutes, late at most stops and slowed to a crawl outside Portland. On the last leg of the trip, I read in a newspaper that Amtrak had discontinued the Pioneer because of low ridership and passenger revenue.

This train experience compels me most when I think about Amtrak and the highly politicized debate that surrounds its fate. Since the system’s inception in 1971, the only parts of it that have shown growth are the coast corridors in the Northeast and West. (Ridership on the Surfliner between San Luis Obispo and San Diego increased 9% last year.)

Amtrak’s long-haul intercity lines--with names that send tingles down a traveler’s spine, like the Silver Meteor (from Boston to Jacksonville, Fla.), the California Zephyr (from Chicago to San Francisco) and the Sunset Limited (from Orlando, Fla., to L.A.)--lost $304 million last year, according to an inspector general’s report. When Amtrak made a bold leap--adding high-speed Acela trains to the Northeast corridor--their debut was delayed and their speeds proved rarely as fast as those of their European counterparts.

France presented the model for high-speed, long-distance railways with the 1981 institution of the Train a Grand Vitesse. High-speed trains run regularly in France, from Paris to Brittany, Tours, Marseille and the Channel Tunnel. The efficient, environmentally sound, scenic rail system cost the French state about $15 billion compared with the $1.2 billion requested by Amtrak to run American passenger railroads in 2003, with money-saving improvements but no fundamental changes.

Switzerland excels in the integration of its railway lines with buses, ferry boats and even ski lifts. There are train stations at airports to make transfers easy. As a result, I was able to fly overnight to Zurich from Washington, D.C., and catch a train at the airport to my ultimate destination, the Alpine village of Zermatt, a six-hour ride.

As it stands now, you can’t take a train directly from LAX to downtown Los Angeles or from JFK in New York directly to Manhattan. Having traveled much in Europe, I am convinced that Europe has a better public transportation system than the U.S.

My hope that American passenger rail service--especially the long-haul segments like the erstwhile Pioneer--won’t go the way of the dinosaurs isn’t really about keeping up with Europe. It comes from my love of travel and my sense that trains provide a way to see the landscape unlike any other, partly because the tracks were laid in particularly scenic corridors. In “Trains of Discovery,” author and railway historian Alfred Runte says that trains were instrumental in the formation and promotion of our national parks. There’s a deeply therapeutic train state of mind, I think, that sets in after you have stared out the window for a time, drinking in the scenery.

Max Biegert, who owns the tourist railway that runs from Williams, Ariz., to the Grand Canyon, says that passenger railroads are always losing propositions that must be state subsidized. They can’t compete with the airlines, which turn a plane seat half a dozen times in the 24 hours it takes a train to go the same distance.

He’s no train buff. In fact, he ended up with the Grand Canyon Railway by accident, when a loan went bad. He was ready to pull up the tracks and sell off the ties, but the people of Williams begged him to save the historic line. Almost 15 years later, the Grand Canyon Railway, which receives no federal or state funding, still doesn’t run in the black but is considered profitable because it brings business to the Fray Marcos Hotel in Williams, also owned by Biegert’s company.

Still, Biegert and others would mourn the loss of long-distance passenger trains. But is this enough reason to spend the billions of taxpayer dollars required to maintain long-haul passenger railways? I don’t know. All I can say is that when it comes right down to it, I’ve never had a bad train ride.