Choo Choo

Where’s it going? There was a bit on the news about a miraculous high speed rail project in California that is going from nowhere to nowhere else. The project is several billion bucks in the hole and the state keeps on digging. While it sounds good, completion is nowhere near a reality. There is no time line.

There is perennial interest in running passenger rail service from Atlanta to Savannah with a few stops between. Most of the tracks are owned by freight lines who are resistant to sharing.

Rail service shares one issue with air service, which is that once you arrive at your destination, you still are not at your destination.

Airports are rarely where anyone wants them.

Peachtree-Dekalb (PDK) airport began as Camp Gordon.

In 1941 a Naval Air Station was built on the same spot. The airport was in plain sight when the neighbors moved in, but now they don’t like it being there.

There is only one passenger train serving Atlanta. Amtrak’s “Crescent” stops in Atlanta on its way from New Orleans to Washington, DC, and back.

The trip leaves Atlanta just before midnight going north and takes fourteen hours.

The Crescent leaves Washington at 6:30 PM and arrives in New Orleans just after 9:00 PM the next day, nearly twentyeight hours later. From Atlanta, the train leaves southbound about 9:00 AM and arrives about twelve hours later, but the fare is only about fifty bucks, about a third the price of the ten hour bus ride.

Fares are competitive with airline fares. There are discounts and levels of service, from coach to having your own private room in a rail car. The difference is time en route.

Transportation built Atlanta which was a rail hub. The two huge rain stations are long gone, replaced by the busiest airport in the world.

Peachtree Station, the only passenger station, is small, but freight trains are still very active.

Flying across the country, the old rail beds are easily seen. Most towns had some level of rail service, and you could connect from your home town to any other town in America.

The first gold record was a song about a train ride from NYC to Chattanooga by the Glenn Miller Orchestra. The irony is that there is no longer a “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”

The grand old Southern Railway Terminal Station functions as a hotel and entertainment center. The station once saw about fifty passenger trains a day, but there is no passenger service to Chattanooga except for seasonal excursion trains.

The “Rail Passenger Association” advocates for passenger service and is a good source for information, such as “there is no middle seat on the train.”

That’s enough.

joenphillips@yahoo.com