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Stop This Train!Are trains slower now than they were in the 1920s?

By Tom VanderbiltPosted Friday, May 15, 2009, at 12:22 PM ET

Quick: Can you think of a technology that has regressed since the early 20^th century?

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Technological progress is usually considered a given. Think of the titters when you see Michael Douglas in Wall Street walking on the beach with a bricklike mobile phone. Then, it was thrilling, almost illicit—Gekko can call Bud Fox from the beach. Now, the average 12-year-old has a far superior phone: smaller, camera-equipped, location-aware, filled with games and a library of music, and so on. We've seen vast improvements in just a few decades, which means the gulf between now and, say, the 1920s seems almost unimaginable.

There is at least one technology in America, however, that is worse now than it was in the early 20^th century: the train.

I have recently been poring over a number of prewar train timetables—not surprisingly, available on eBay. They are fascinating, filled with evocations of that fabled "golden era" of train travel. "You travel with friends on The Milwaukee Road," reads an ad in one, showing an avuncular conductor genially conversing with a jaunty, smartly dressed couple, the man on the verge of lighting a pipe. The brochure for the Montreal Limited, from an era when "de luxe" was still two words, assures travelers that "modern air-conditioning scientifically controls temperature, humidity and purity of air at all seasons."

But the most striking aspect of these antiquated documents is found in the tiny agate columns of arrivals and destinations. It is here that one sees the wheels of progress actually running backward. The aforementioned Montreal Limited, for example, circa 1942, would pull out of New York's Grand Central Station at 11:15 p.m., arriving at Montreal's (now defunct) Windsor Station at 8:25 a.m., a little more than nine hours later. To make that journey today, from New York's Penn Station on the Adirondack, requires a nearly 12-hour ride. The trip from Chicago to Minneapolis via the Olympian Hiawatha in the 1950s took about four and a half hours; today, via Amtrak's Empire Builder, the journey is more than eight hours. Going from Brattleboro, Vt., to New York City on the Boston and Maine Railroad's Washingtonian took less than five hours in 1938; today, Amtrak's Vermonter (the only option) takes six hours—if it's on time, which it isn't, nearly 75 percent of the time.

"I don't want to see the fastest train in the world built halfway around the world in Shanghai," President Obama said recently, announcing an $8 billion program for high-speed rail. "I want to see it built right here in the United States of America." There is something undeniably invigorating about envisioning an American version of Spain's AVE, which whisks passengers from Madrid to Barcelona (roughly the distance from Boston to Washington) in two and a half hours at 220 mph and has been thieving market share from the country's airlines.

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Tom Vanderbilt is author of Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do, now available in paperback. He is contributing editor to Artforum, Print, and I.D.; contributing writer to Design Observer; and has written for many publications, including Wired, the Wilson Quarterly, the New York Times Magazine, and the London Review of Books. He blogs at howwedrive.com and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Illustration by Rob Donnelly.

COMMENTS

In the US, I can get my family from Boston to DC and back on the high speed train for the cost of... a used car. A decent used car at that, which is why we drive instead of take the train.

In China, by contrast, trains are getting faster and faster-- What used to take nearly 40 hours (the Shanghai to Beijing run in the early 1960s) is now down to about eight hours for the fast nonstop, and train tickets, especially on the slightly slower trains, are very reasonably priced. Chinese trains move, literally, hundreds of millions of people on a routine basis. And fast. If you wanted to go to Tianjin, which I don't, the trip takes about half an hour to go 120km, with trains departing every ten to fifteen minutes. Tickets are about $8 and about $9 for first class.

Trains in this country need to speed up and get a lot cheaper before people will consider them a viable alternative to flying or driving. It's a matter of public policy: if there is a greater social benefit to people using trains, then the government should support and subsidize train usage. If there is not such a benefit, then left to market forces, passenger train service will remain a minor piece of the transportation pie.

-- DuckworkerMike
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The real reason rail faltered in this country is a combination of a wide population distribution and long distances. Rail has a much higher per-mile cost than other forms of transportation (due to all that rail you need to lay), so it isn't very good if you're talking long distances or very diffuse networks.

The reason rail works in places like Europe and Japan is due to a very different model of urbanization. In most of the rest of the world, the 'inner city' is where the well-to-do live, not the poor. The concept of 'exurbs' in America (far-flung suburban areas) is non-existent. So public transportation in the U.S. is almost exclusively the province of the poor, not the middle class. Pretty much the only exception to this is New York City - and it's a result of water presenting a major barrier to commuting.

It would be nice if we had a 'bullet train' running from Boston down to Miami. But the reason we don't has little to do with intransigent unions, mismanaged companies or regulation-happy government. It has to do with it being an inefficient solution to the problem.

-- Xando
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