Something Lovely This Way Comes

Trains are, to me, a philosophical retreat, a movable feast of sight and silence and time to be with your thoughts. Away from telephones, late at night, how fine to watch the landscapes of small towns, front yards, populated porches, three-o’clock-in-the-morning lit windows and know that you pass through towns where most of the people, think of it, are good and not evil at all. It is a journey of rediscovery, made in the most comfortable way possible. As the villages pass, I salute them with a Coke, a beer or an inexpensive but good-enough champagne. Jets never see this America. And buses see them, sad to say, in an agonized and much too prolonged fashion.

We are faced with an Administration and a wavering Congress that, in spite of the Senate Budget Committee’s vote for funding last week, might well pull the spikes and derail our locomotives. Mobs of votes have been accumulating behind their uncivilized plans to destroy the only humane way of traveling in our society.

So I am master-planning a dreadful event that will undermine nervous systems, destroy thinking capacities--and change the minds of all members of the Administration and Congress.

Now hear this:

I will, at some hour in the near future, pack Reagan’s advisers and all the legislators into transcontinental buses for a four-day, four-night journey from Washington to Los Angeles. There they will be forced to enjoy each others company, hour after hour, night after night, endless noon following endless noon.

I will show no mercy. They must sweat, churn, twist, and ferment through some 100 odd hours of penal travel, to stagger forth and kiss the earth in California, glad the long journey is escaped, and resembling, more or less, a ragtag team of madmen, redolent of fungus.

At which time we will take a vote. And Amtrak, the railroads, will be saved.

We the people know about jet-travel, which is white-knuckled, and bus-travel, which is white-knuckled, and some of us, many of us, hate both. We do not want to be forced to choose between two terrible and soul-annihilating extremes. We do not wish to be freighted across the clouds, or dragged down a 104-miles-per-hour freeway, nailed to the cross of boredom to be delivered like unwashed laundry at some dilapidated terminus God knows where.

There are several million In-Betweens out there. I am one of them. And we want our trains.

And yet, even as I write this, the Administration is cranking up to shove our locomotives off land’s end and bury our Pullmans at sea. Which is what we did with our trolleys some few years back.

I realize, in saying all this, that President Reagan, as always, is faced with a nest of magpies, each of us squawking and wanting our worm. The temptation is to shrug, step back and try to accept the destruction of our railroads with good grace. But as soon as I move aside one inch, I hear the sound of the fast train speeding across Japan and a similar bullet rushing from Paris to Lyons, and I wonder why we, who helped invent the train and brought it to its greatest power, should now, late in the day, watch it founder and sink like a dinosaur into the sump.

Can passenger railroads ever be profitable? This summer, like last, the trains will be full-up. If you want to travel cross-country, you will have to make your reservations many days or weeks ahead of time. As for the rest of the year, lower fares should encourage higher ticket sales. What you lose at the front end, you make up with greater volume. For proof, recall when we cut our Los Angeles bus price to a basic quarter, and picked up several hundred-thousand new daily riders.

But then, remember this: Very few if any passenger train systems in the world survive on pure profit. Most, if not all, are government subsidized.

At this very moment, the airlines are subsidized in favor of one group of Americans. Why not give some of the subsidies back to the middle group who want and need the trains? Some of the mail that was handed over to the airlines can surely be delivered back to the railroads. And surely it is time for the train unions to face up to cutbacks or outright annihilation. Then, too, it is hard for me to believe that a little imagination might not cure some of the ills befalling our continental track system. Wouldn’t the American equivalent of the rejuvenated Orient Express prove a profitable venture? With high fares, with sleepers only, between Los Angeles and Chicago and New York, with the best international cuisines served with fine silver and the best wines, could we not lure back some of the rich folks who now fly over the U.S. and never see it? How about one train a week like this?

Of course, this would only be the cream at the top. One train does not a system or a solution make. Amtrak is already more than halfway to where it needs to go. New cars, built and added to the line in the last few years are beautiful, functional and comfortable. Many rooms have showers. Mightn’t more be added, perhaps one to a chair car, to provide that freshness and cleanliness we all long for while sweating in busloads from Amarillo to Paducah?

We invented the robots that we sold to Japan and now bring back to teach us our own trade. That being true, let us import French and Japanese technicians to teach us how to build and operate faster, more efficient and more profitable trains. With a great swallow of pride and a great burst of will, the job can be done. And for peanuts, compared with the subsidy we toss into the air to fly our jets.

We must be given a choice, not forced into a choice. The jet and the bus do not serve our democratic notions of desire and performance. Only the train delivers us to a full expression of our preferences.

Am I saying that our buses are not neat, clean, efficient and on time? No. They are indeed neat, clean and on time. Riding of them for a few hours, or one day is acceptable. But, two, three, or four days? Which way to Siberia?

This is not nostalgia speaking. When I get on a French train, or dream of the Tokyo-Osaka express, it is not the Past whispering but the Future shouting at me.