[PRCo] Re: Sound Transit - SEATAC line etc

Fred Schneider fwschneider at comcast.net
Fri Jun 11 03:17:47 EDT 2010


I liked US travel by rail when the railroads were independent and competitive.   Amtrak?   Well, just does not cut it.   If you have never seen or ridden a real train, then Amtrak might be nice.   But if you've remember when the Erie Lackawanna created their own crispy corn fritters in the diner on the Lake Cities and their crews behaved like you were only passenger they had even if the train was full (and it probably was on a Saturday night from Hoboken to Scranton), then it is hard to like Amtrak.   The Santa Fe people behaved the same way.   The trains were spotless; the crews well mannered.   Someone taught them they they were supposed to like the passengers who paid their wages.  

I can't blame the freight railroads for sandbagging Amtrak ... they get nothing and those passenger trains get in their way.  It was different when they at least got the revenue and they could charge off the losses to advertising  (at least in their minds).   They ran trains on time.   The Southern, for example, had a double track main line from Atlanta to Washington.   It's now a single-track railroad.   They have no economic reason to maintain an extra track for Amtrak.   Neither does CSX.

So the Florida trains arrive at their destinations when they get there.   Sometime today.

But if I ride Swiss Federal Railways, it's still the old spirit.   I can't say I've never ridden a late train in Switzerland.   I have.   But I think I can honestly postulate that 90 percent reached the terminal within 60 seconds of the advertised time and that I never once missed a fifteen minute connection because of a late train.   

I also liked flying when I was the pilot.   It was fun on a crystal clear morning doing turns about a point using a cow for a point.   But before I made that final check flight and got my license the property tax bill came.   I thought about it.   Made more sense to keep my house than keep playing with Cessnas.   I paid the taxes.   But I had about 50 hours in the log book.   It all started taking aerial pictures for an Erie Lackawanna story for Trains magazine in 1970.   Maybe I would still remember enough to land a plane in an emergency.   

But I don't like flying cross country any more because of the nuisance in airports with TSA.   It's more fun finding those great off-the-wall restaurants.   Found a neat little Sushi place in Seattle on this trip (Lybarger will not agree that it could be neat).   It was in the right neighborhood where every customer but me was Japanese.   If it wasn't for feeling overfed last night on Mexican (thanks to Duke), I might have tried out some of the oriental places in San Gabriel tonight ... instead I fasted.  Miles and miles of streets with nothing but Vietnamese and Korean and Chinese restaurants to serve their own people.   That gentlemen is why I drive.   

And I didn't get mugged photographing the Gold Line in the barrios of East L. A.    Even got some nice digital color pictures in Soto Street subway station under East 1st Street.    Pico - East First was LATL and LA Railway's heaviest hauling streetcar line.   Now it's back.   But the other end is on what used to be the Santa Fe passenger mainline through Pasadena to Sierra Madre.    Hard to believe you can ride a streetcar to today on the route of the Super Chief and wind up where PCCs used to run in East Los Angeles.   By the way, construction has begun to extend that line east from Sierra Madre to Azuza.    (Remember the joke in the Jack Benny radio show about the fictional train for Anaheim, Azuza and Cucamonga?   They were not all on the same line.  The last two were on the Santa Fe passenger mainline through Pasadena.)    

On Jun 11, 2010, at 1:33 AM, Derrick Brashear wrote:

>> I never added up the rail miles ...  Santa Fe from Houston to Killeen, Wabash from St. Louis to Chicago, Southern from Atlanta to Washington three times, Pennsy from Chicago to New York including multiple times from Pittsburgh to New York, New Haven from New York to Boston and Hartford to New Haven.   South Shore and North Shore from end to end.  B&O from Parkersburg to Wheeling to Pittsburgh.   Georgia Railroad from Atlanta to Augusta.   Probably not much over 5000 miles?
> 
> Really?? I've got at least 20k rail miles in the US under my belt not
> even counting commuter or Pennsylvanian, probably more. and I've got 3
> more years to hit 40 yet.
> 
> Pittsburgh to the west coast is 5k round trip, 3 of those; 2 more to
> San Antonio; probably 8 to Boston, once to Atlanta, once to New
> Orleans...
> 
> Europe for me is far less; Italian intercity, Munich to Graz and back,
> across southern Sweden once, Edinburgh to London once. Guess I should
> see what the bride-to-be and I are going to do in the Czech Republic
> soon. Or at least think about it.
> 
> 





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