Here’s one of the more depressing news items I’ve come across in a while. I am fortunate enough to be able to spend a good deal of my time in the hills of southern Vermont and, as someone who uses inter-city train transportation a great deal (I also spend a lot of time commuting between DC and Philadelphia on Amtrak), I’m more than a little interested in the appalling state of the passenger train network north of New York City. It’s no great shakes south of New York, to be sure, but in New England it really gets grotesque. North of New Haven, the Amtrak trains average 40 mph — the trip from, say, New York to Hartford, which should be under an hour if the system were up to the standards of 1980 (as opposed to 1880), takes a good 2 1/2-to-three hours (if it’s on time, which it hardly ever is).
But wait – help is on the way! I was glad to hear that major improvements were in the works; at a recent meeting in Hartford, Transportation Dep’t officials unveiled a 20-year plan, to cost almost $500 million dollars, which will result in an increase in the average train speed . . . to 60 miles an hour! That’s right, sixty miles an hour — in a world in which you can get on a train in Japan, or China, or Singapore, or France, that can whisk you along at 200 mph or more, our big dreams amount to an upgrade from laughable to pathetic.
I know, I know – it’s so expensive to get right of ways, and to put in infrastructure, etc. etc. etc. But we have really dumbed down our expectations and our sights for what we can accomplish in this country when we’re satisfied with this as the best we can achieve. I can (dimly) recall a time when someone would have said: we’re the richest and most advanced country in the world; rip the sucker up and build the best damn thing you can build.