More rail

Rail Transportation America’s Most Desperate Need?
By Daneil G. Jennings
Events in the last couple of weeks have exposed one of America’s most desperate shortcomings it’s lack of modern rail transportation.
First we have the hurricane in New Orleans, hundreds of thousands of poor people, elderly people, tourists, travelers and others without access to cars were trapped in the city with no way out. An efficient passenger rail system could have evacuated those people easily and effectively. Trains could have moved all those people from New Orleans to neighboring cities in a few hours. Even a good commuter or light rail system could have moved all those people out of the city to points where buses could pick them up. Yet there wasn’t such a system in place only a couple of antiquated trolley lines maintained for the tourists.
Lack of an effective modern passenger rail system caused a great deal of suffering and many unnecessary deaths in New Orleans. Yet the disaster in the Big Easy is only the tip of the iceberg, the gasoline price increases expose another part of the story that is almost as frightening.
Here in Colorado tourist business in mountain towns that rely on tourists has fallen off considerably since gas prices went up. The number of cars going into the mountains is going down and with it the money that flows into the bank accounts and pocketbooks of the people of those areas. Merchants are doing less business because people aren’t driving because of high gas prices, waiters and waitresses are getting less tips for the same reason, hotels are renting less rooms, stores selling less products. More than a few of those businesses will have to let employees go because of this lost business. Many of those people are barely eking out a living right now.
To make matters worse, investors will put less money into mountain towns. Intrawest has already delayed a major redevelopment project at the Snowmass Ski Area near Aspen. Fewer construction jobs will be a result as will fewer jobs at cement plants, lumber mills and other businesses that supply contractors will be a result.
Now just imagine if the tourists who wanted to visit Colorado’s mountains the golfers, the fishermen, the daytrippers etc., had an alternative to the car. Many of them would have come anyway but there is no alternative. There is some airline service but its so expensive only rich people can afford it and the planes only serve a couple of towns. Amtrak runs a passenger train that attracts few riders and a local company runs a ski train that isn’t running right now. That’s about it, for people who want to reach Colorado’s mountains but can’t afford to drive there is no alternative.
The economic impact of these high gas prices and the higher airfares we’ll soon see will be a disaster in many American tourist destinations. All the people who rely on marginal tourist industry jobs many of America’s most desperate will be in trouble, many of them will out of work.
Yet it’s not just the tourist industry, take farmers, many of them won’t be able to get their crops to market this year because ports on the Gulf are closed. If we had increased railroad capacity we could get their crops to other ports and export them. Many farmers will suffer from this.
As will us all, we all rely on products hauled by trucks and trains that run on diesel fuel. Oil prices go up transportation costs go up. So do the prices at our local Wal-Mart and the neighborhood supermarket. We all pay more and it doesn’t have to be this way.
If America had a modern electrified railroad system we could move a lot perhaps most of that freight around the country using electric trains not reliant on diesel fuel. These trains would be faster, more efficient and haul more. If we had such a rail network, we would probably still be paying more at the pump but not at the grocery store.
And the frightening thing is other nations are investing untold billions on such rail networks while America sleeps. China is building a network of electrified rails that reaches to Tibet, Europe is unifying and modernizing its rail system, Russia has electrified the Trans Siberian Railroad from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok. In other words these nations will be able to compete and survive because they have transportation alternatives that we don’t.
Hopefully the catastrophic hurricane and the oil crisis will wake us up and show us what why we need rail. If they don’t we’re going to face a far worse crisis in the near future.