Giving thanks for passenger trains, and the communities they bring together

As I write this, I am in a Business Class seat aboard Amtrak train 79, the southbound Carolinian. I am headed back to North Carolina from Washington, DC, to visit family and friends for Thanksgiving. It’s the day before the holiday, and we are heading southward over the former RF&P on-time as a winter storm hovers over the Northeast. The rain had begun to change to snow as I was leaving DC, but it became rain again as I approached Fredericksburg, VA, and mostly tapered off by the time I reached the North Carolina state line. This departure, on one of the year’s busiest travel days, has been sold out for at least two months, and the conductor announced that seats were oversold, so passengers were being accommodated in the cafe car.

As I roll along in a warm Amfleet coach, being served beverages by the Business Class attendant, looking out the window at drivers slowly slogging through slushy and dreary conditions on parallel Interstate 95, the occasion has me thinking of the many ways I am thankful for passenger trains. I am thankful that trains provide comfortable, relaxing travel in weather conditions that slow down or halt cars, buses and airplanes. I am thankful that a single energy- and space-efficient vehicle can serve over 300 individuals, most of whom just happened to converge at this time and place, between multiple origins and destinations. Even when every seat is occupied, the train still offers each rider more personal space than an airplane or bus, and the freedom to get up, walk around, use the restroom, get food and even have a glass of wine or a bottle of beer while still moving, none of which one can do driving unless one pulls off the highway and gets out.

I am thankful for trains as a uniquely relaxed and social space. In our fast-paced, information-overloaded society, trains offer a chance to take a breather, catch up on reading, get lost in the ever-changing view, or strike up a conversation with a stranger who you probably otherwise wouldn’t talk to, even if you found yourselves together randomly in a different place. I like to think of intercity passenger trains as America’s mobile coffee shops, providing a similar social environment while stitching together multiple communities. Commuter trains also play this role in the regions they serve, but to a lesser extent. Railroads are what first gave the United States the sense of being a single continental nation, and passenger trains still serve as a form of social glue, where the possibility of serendipitous random encounters separates trains from the type of interconnectedness the Internet provides.

I am thankful for the men and women who put their sweat and energy into building and maintaining the tracks, signals, stations, locomotives and railcars, and into operating hundreds of trains safely every day and serving their customers. I am thankful that enough elected and appointed federal leaders, from the late 1960s to today, saw the wisdom in preserving and maintaining at least a skeletal national passenger train network. I am thankful for the state leaders who had the foresight to invest in new short-distance routes, such as the Carolinian I am riding, for which North Carolina pays the entire difference between revenues and operating costs south of Washington. And I am thankful for the rail passenger advocates who tirelessly pressed the case for the economic, social and environmental advantages of passenger trains with decisionmakers, and continue to do so. Although our train and transit networks today are a far cry from where they should be, and where they are in most of the developed world, without advocates’ efforts, Americans today would largely have no choice but to drive or fly. 

Finally, I am thankful to be part of a community of people who appreciate, enjoy, care about, and work to save and improve passenger trains — preserving and interpreting their history and envisioning their bright future. For the staff and volunteers of the numerous excursion railroads who provide millions of people every year with fun outings and unmatched experiences of landscapes from the stunning to the pastoral. And for all who share their enjoyment of train travel and train watching in a variety of ways.  Our community encompasses a breadth of geography, backgrounds, and viewpoints, though it would benefit from embracing greater diversity in terms of age and other demographic factors. Sometimes our love of passenger trains is a tough love, as Amtrak and other systems are far from perfect (due in part to decades of underinvestment), but it is a testament to the many aforementioned endearing qualities of trains that they have such a loyal following.

So on this Thanksgiving, I say thank you to all who continue to make trains, as one fellow passenger put it earlier this month, “the most privileged way” to traverse the tapestry of America.