Leaving Portland,we admire their beautiful Amtrak station, restored and preserved. We arrive at the station by bus, and find it more crowded than any other station we've visited on this trip. The train to Seattle leaves several times a day, and is packed.
I was reading an advertisement the other day by a company called CSX. I'd never heard of it before traveling east, but it seems that it owns the track all over the northeastern U.S. Now, I don't know how they count, or if the number is entirely accurate, but their claim in the ad was that they move a ton of freight 432 miles on a gallon of fuel. I was impressed.
So I do a little math. The 432 miles is two and a half times the distance from Portland to Seattle. On average, six adults may weigh a ton. Let's call it five, including luggage. That means that if the train operates at CSX efficiency, then it can deliver twelve of us from Portland to Seattle at a cost of one gallon of fuel.
Could it be? And if it is so, or even if the real figure is half that, isn't it about time we wake up and get a little smarter about where our transportation money goes?
I'm looking around the train, and I'm seeing lots and lots of young people. They have laptops, they have cell phones, they have Blackberries. I am only guessing at what is in their minds, but I'm guessing that this is a new kind of train passenger -- smart, in touch, on the move, and very concerned about their influence on the environment, about how their choices affect the world. I am happy to see it.
But I don't think it's all about mere unpleasant moral duty. They've tasted the great pleasure of sliding down the rails, rocking in a rhythm they may not have felt since being babies in a carriage, admiring the countryside, doing a little work or a little play on the laptops, free of the tensions of navigating traffic.
Travel by train in North America is a model that has faded almost to oblivion. But here and there we find whiffs of resurgence. Very encouraging.
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