~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I traveled the Midwest this past summer by “Planes, Trains and Automobiles.”* I also took a bus called Jefferson Lines, although with the once well-known Greyhound emblazoned on its flanks.
They all got me where I needed to go, only one of them 12 hours later for an hour and a half trip (airline), and only one of them charging for my luggage (same culprit), which did not travel with me but came to my house the next day.
During the early days of rail travel, starting in the 1850s and through the 1950s, nearly every burgh in the country had a train passing through. Small town Jefferson had two lines – one East-West, the other North-South. Even our tiny Rippey, IA, 17 minutes southeast of Jefferson, chose not to be left behind by modern transportation and shifted three and a half miles north of its original settlement to the new rail line in 1870. This was 15 years after the town’s original founding, and a good idea. Rippey soon had four trains, freight and passenger, a day through town, with a special fare to Des Moines during the State Fair.
The automobile industry, as well as the rubber tire industry, and of course the oil monopolies managed to rid most of the country of all those steel miles of convenient travel by rail. The public advertised to brainwashed lemming status: we were enticed beyond our much-vaunted independence to fall in love with cars and trucks and eventually air travel, and so here we are, slaves, to autos and aeroplanes with their endless need for rubber and cement that foster fuel-guzzling and major pollution.
President Eisenhower, in the 1950s, built an interstate paved highway system 41,000 mile long in order to be able to move tanks across the country in case of war. Many mile-long straightaways were incorporated for use as emergency runways for military aircraft. The now endless ribbons of concrete wending and winding and squaring our cities and towns, plains and mountains now carry millions of us 24 hours a day up and down and across our continent.
It’s often a slow mess because of heavy traffic on the freeways and in the skies – accidents, weather, repairs, Union slowdowns Congressional shutdowns. Of the four modes of human transport I took advantage of this summer, I want trains. Clean, roomy (the surprising luxury of plenty of leg space), fast, on time, cheap snacks and drinks, friendly personnel who will tell me what I’m looking at outside my window, inexpensive fare and no charge for baggage. I didn’t have to drive a car, which forces paying constant attention or paying for my own gas along the way. I didn’t have to squeeze into a bus seat; although the bus seat was very comfortable, the bus itself did not have shock absorbers. I didn’t have to arrive two hours prior to take-off, wait in any lines, have to take off my shoes to prove I was not secreting a weapon, nor give up my brand new to-go water cup simply because I forgot and put water in it.
Wouldn’t some of you love to take a regularly scheduled train from Jefferson to Chicago, or to Minneapolis/St Paul, Omaha, Kansas City, Denver? Wouldn’t you just like to not pay for luggage, not lose luggage, not lug luggage for miles, then squeeze down a narrow aisle with it and try to get it into a small bin above your reach before you make others get up from their tiny seats to let you into your window seat? Wouldn’t you love to feel cared for and protected by the gentle pulling away from the station, so subtle you’re not even sure you’re moving…rather than the bump, jerk, giant burst of power that throws you to the back of your seat as you pray the plane actually can fly?
Unless we manage to tax the uber wealthy commensurate with their income, we will never be able to afford trains again. Almost all the old tracks are now bicycle trails – a nice draw for the aesthetics of cities and towns but impractical for mass transit. Like much of history – nickel Cokes, 10c bread, friendly policemen, hello-good-by-thank-you-may-I – trains are few and far between, in the large view, a relic of the past.
Have we gone backward? Yes, of course, in many ways. Ideal travel, AKA trains, is merely one of the ways we have been denied leisure, ease, calmness in getting from here to there. Not the worst of things happening in this weird era, but definitely one of the most nostalgic, even the saddest.
*1987 movie
