In the observation car, the Amish wedding-goers sat up together at two tables in the dimmed lighting—lighting perhaps no brighter than the oil lanterns provided when trains first rolled across these plains: the men dressed and bearded like Felty Miller, the women in long black or blue dresses and white bonnets, all of them talking and laughing quietly in their unique German dialect, members of one of the very first religious groups to find refuge in America from persecution. It struck me that Whitman would be right at home on the train, even if Will would not.
What is the appeal of train travel? Ask almost any foamer, and he or she will invariably answer, “The romance of it!” But just what this means, they cannot really say. It’s tempting to think that we are simply equating romance with pleasure, with the superior comfort of a train, especially seated up high in the observation cars. But having seen a rural train emerge silently through a gap in the New England woods, having seen the long slide of a 1 train’s headlights down the rails of a Manhattan subway station, I suspect that the appeal of trains is something more primitive than this. Trains are huge things that come upon us like predators. Almost from the beginning of the machine age, Americans yearned and sought ways for the train to connect their little towns—to connect them—to the greater world.
Romance or not, it is this very practical desire that has probably kept Amtrak alive. The Republican right politicized train travel long before George Will and the Tea Party—almost from the moment it failed to expire on cue, in fact. David Stockman, Ronald Reagan’s budget director, dedicated himself to terminating Amtrak, denouncing trains as “empty rattletraps” and “mobile money-burning machines.”
Over the years, Republicans have pushed the question of Amtrak’s continued existence into that same strange sphere of debate in which they have isolated nearly all public institutions save the military: not whether it serves a valuable social and economic function, but whether it makes a profit.
Highway advocates point to tolls and gas taxes as evidence that pavement is self-sustaining; rail’s supporters object that train riders are forced to pay such subsidies, too. Federal highway subsidies came to some $41.5 billion in 2013; federal aviation subsidies, to $16 billion. Amtrak, by contrast, received only $1.6 billion. All Amtrak’s subsidies for the past 40 years—almost its entire existence—do not equal what the U.S. Treasury transfers from its General Fund to the Highway Trust Fund in a single year. To put it another way, each American citizen pays $4.07 a year to keep Amtrak running.
Whether even this amount will be forthcoming in the future is open to conjecture. Rail service has many friends but a limited constituency. There are just over 20,000 Amtrak workers; by comparison, New York City’s MTA system employs more than 70,000 people. Only 2 percent of Americans say they’ve ever set foot on an Amtrak train, and only 3 percent of American workers commute by local train. A cursory swing through the nation’s capital confirms what an uneven struggle the politics of trains really is. Amtrak’s leading defenders are only the rail service itself, ensconced in Washington’s Union Station, and the National Association of Railroad Passengers, a plucky nonprofit advocacy group with a membership of only 23,000, tucked away in a few rooms of a town house in an old neighborhood not far from the station.
And yet, so far at least, this uneven struggle has not worked out the way anyone expected, thanks not just to the fervor of trains’ defenders but also to the votes of Republican congressmen and senators, often from the region of the country I am passing through now. Amtrak is the only public-transportation link to the outside world for more than 300 of its stops—many of them in small communities scattered over the Empire Builder’s route through North Dakota, Montana, Idaho, and eastern Washington State. For years, Stockman’s desire to defund Amtrak was thwarted by Mark Andrews, an otherwise undistinguished one-term North Dakota senator who came to Washington on the coattails of Reagan’s sweep in 1980 but was determined to keep train service available to his constituents.
In recent years, Republicans have mostly confined themselves to their trivial if mean-spirited proposals for paring down train costs—what is perhaps intended to be a death by a thousand cuts. While Amtrak workers actually make less than private-sector employees in similar positions, the GOP objects to their health-care and benefit plans. Other Republican congressmen have pushed the bold idea of replacing the café cars with vending machines, and there have been the frequent suggestions that our national passenger-rail service should simply be privatized and returned to the states.
How this might in fact work was demonstrated by Amtrak’s recent request that Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico each chip in $40 million annually over the next 20 years—$2 million per state per year—to help keep the Southwest Chief line running along its current route. Even this small request for additional state funding has set off extended bickering and created a deadlock between the states involved—along with outcries from many of the small communities the Southwest Chief now serves.
An object lesson in what the train means to the small towns of the West is Shelby, Montana, hard by the Canadian border. The Empire Builder reaches it around ten-thirty at night, running five hours behind schedule thanks to the freight traffic. Shelby was where the craziest of all western booms took place, back in 1923—boom and bust, all in one day. After an oil strike that drove the town’s population from 500 into the thousands overnight, Shelby’s leading citizens decided they might parlay their good fortune into becoming a permanent resort destination, provided they could host a fight for the heavyweight boxing championship of the world on the Fourth of July.
It was a typical western dream: audacious, patriotic, idiotic, and quickly exploited by a grifter from back east. But Shelby’s town fathers were on to something. Theoretically, at least, it didn’t matter now how small their town was, or how far it was from any other population center. The railroad could magically alter time and space.
“There was good railroad service into Shelby along the tracks of [the] Great Northern [Railway],” Roger Kahn wrote in his 1999 biography of boxing legend Jack Dempsey, A Flame of Pure Fire. “Fight fans could come in on coaches and Pullman cars from Spokane and Seattle and San Francisco, or from Grand Forks and Minneapolis and St. Paul, even Chicago and New York.”
The trouble was that the railroads, never quite believing the town could pull off the big fight, declined to run any special trains. Just under 8,000 paying customers showed up, in an age when heavyweight-title bouts routinely attracted 100,000 spectators. By the time it was all over, every bank in the area had gone bust, and Dempsey’s nefarious manager, Doc Kearns, was stuffing the last of the town’s money into a suitcase and running for his train while the locals discussed whether to string him up from some nearby cottonwoods. “Lonely-looking trees they were, at that,” Kearns would remember.
Seen from the train, Shelby today is little more than a gas-station sign looming out of the darkness. But it’s a working town of more than 3,000 citizens, out here in the illimitable western prairie, still served twice a day by the Empire Builder.
The next morning breaks bright but turns appropriately overcast as we snake our way down along the bank of the Columbia River and into the rain shadow of the Rockies. This is ominous-looking, barren country, studded with desolate gray and brown hills. It is another industrial landscape, with enormous machinery scattered here and there, but the only sign of human activity to be seen is another train, making its way along the south bank of the wide, slow river. The clouds hang lower, but the hills grow steadily more steep and wooded, each passing scene more dramatic as we approach the Pacific.
I catch the Coast Starlight out of Portland’s pretty red-brick-and-stucco Union Station, with its high clock tower and its mural of Lewis and Clark inside. The Coast Starlight is the closest thing Amtrak has to a 20th Century Limited—to an elite carrier—even if the differences from its other long-distance lines are trivial. A voice purrs quietly over the public-address system, urging us not to bother our fellow
passengers too much by using cell phones. A complimentary split of champagne and a wine-and-cheese tasting are on offer in the “parlor car.”
There are “wine tastings” on many long-distance Amtrak trains, but this usually means a few plastic cups of table red. On the Starlight, local vintages and artisanal cheeses are served in actual glasses and on real plates, and they are presented with copious guides to what we are about to devour and which bottles will be available for purchase. It’s all wittily moderated by a train steward with a steady comic patter, much to the delight of a small English tour group and an Australian family of three, who are reduced to almost nonstop laughing and snorting by the wine and japes.
The parlor car was built for the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway in 1955, during the last gasp of opulent train design. It has cut-glass booth dividers with the name and logo of the legendary, long-vanished railroad it was intended for, and well-crafted corner cabinet bookcases that hold a few musty books, magazines, and board games. Downstairs is a tiny movie theater that shows a children’s film during our imbibing and, later on, the most recent Great Gatsby for the adults.
The Coast Starlight does not really travel along the coast until San Francisco, but we do pass through lush river valleys and alongside well-heeled small towns, suburbs, and country homes.
California was supposed to be where President Obama’s vision for the future of rail was to become reality. In theory, his plan was a good one. It called for immediate upgrades on “existing infrastructure to increase speeds on some [Amtrak] routes from seventy . . . to over a hundred miles per hour.” This would be followed by longer projects to create true high-speed-rail systems on 13 major corridors throughout the United States, each of them 100 to 600 miles in length and running between multiple urban centers. It was, in short, a plan to replicate what already works—Amtrak’s northeast corridor—all over the country and make it better, maybe building a permanent ridership for trains in the bargain.
The trouble came, as it so often does with Mr. Obama, on the follow-through. The $9.3 billion he requested for railroads in the first stimulus proposal was a ridiculously small amount for the project at hand—one that signaled through its size alone what a low priority rails really are for this administration. Of that $9.3 billion, a mere $1.3 billion went to upgrading existing Amtrak operations, partially through the purchase of 70 new, badly needed electric locomotives. The remaining $8 billion was allocated to the planned high-speed-rail corridors. This was barely enough to build a hundred miles of track. The original 13 proposed corridors were narrowed down to 4, in California, Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin. But none of these plans was put into place before the 2010 elections swept Democratic governors and legislatures out of power in Florida, Ohio, and Wisconsin. Their Tea Party replacements gleefully renounced federal money for the train corridors as “high-speed boondoggles.”
The one exception was California, where Jerry Brown was back as governor and where voters had already approved a referendum authorizing the state to spend $9.95 billion to build new trains that could travel from Los Angeles to both San Francisco and Sacramento, and do it in no more than two hours and forty minutes. The federal government has now pledged some $6.4 billion of the original $8 billion designated for fast trains to the California project, with the hope that it will be completed sometime in or around . . . 2033.
It has been determined that at least 40 percent of the new rail will be elevated, with an estimated 22,000 enormous concrete pillars carrying the train through earthquake-prone California and replicating the very sort of hated elevated urban highway that so many cities have just spent decades tearing down at enormous cost and trouble. Even in the depressed farming communities of California’s Central Valley, where the first leg of this monstrosity is supposed to take shape, opposition has been intense. Governor Brown, however, has remained committed, ridiculing the plan’s opponents as “fraidy cats” and “fearful men—declinists who want to put their head in a hole and hope reality changes.” But the changing reality proved to be the system’s projected costs, which started at an estimated $42 billion, then rose to $68 billion—or $190 million a mile, enough to run two public high schools for a year. By the end of 2013, Brown was in China, still seeking additional funding for this El to nowhere—now estimated to cost more than $91 billion.
If, as Zoellner writes, the American rail system today is an example of “technological regress,” the Obama fast-train project is political regress. A large and immediate commitment of money to upgrade successful existing Amtrak trains—increasing their speeds and frequency, making their service and safety better, reducing their price—might have bolstered a growing constituency for mass transit while providing jobs, improving the environment, and supporting smarter growth. Instead, the Obama administration’s failure to move with alacrity, clarity of purpose, or even basic competence has probably doomed not only its own efforts but a critical national project.
Whether or not California’s fast rail will ever reach San Francisco, no Amtrak train goes there today. Now a trip back across the continent starts with a predawn bus pickup along Fisherman’s Wharf, for delivery to another Amshack, in Emeryville, a generic northern California suburb where there is not a hint of, say, a hotel. An electronic board lists all of two local trains; a sign next to it announces that the two long-distance lines here, the Coast Starlight and the California Zephyr, will not be listed on the board.
The Zephyr runs across both the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies, back through the heart of empire. By the afternoon, we are climbing steadily through the foothills of the Sierra, passing just north of where gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, setting off the daddy of all western booms. Soon we are between 1,500 and 1,800 feet above the American River, then the Bear River, revealed to us in one stunning vista after another through the mountain woods, territory so absolutely beautiful that all we can do in the observation car is snap away with our cameras or phones, or sit helplessly mumbling superlatives.
At 7,000 feet, we reach the pass where the Donner party came to grief, resorting to murder and cannibalism when their wagon train was caught by the first mountain snows, though their fate was exceptional. Planning their trips with incredible care, almost every other wagon train made it through. Even so, only about 200,000 pioneers had followed the Overland Trail to California by the time the Civil War began. The journey took five to six months, and the only alternatives—traveling around Cape Horn or across the fever-ridden Isthmus of Panama—were full of worse perils.
A young railroad man from Connecticut had another idea. Theodore Judah talked so obsessively about the idea of building a railroad across the continent that people began to call him Crazy Judah. By 1860, after four years of searching, he was sure he had found his route—the one we are taking now through the Donner Pass.
The transcontinental railroad proved a remarkably easy sell, even with the country about to lurch into civil war. In part, the Union wanted it as a way of keeping California and Oregon attached to the country. Yet well before the war, America was sold on the idea of a continental road—its leaders and opinion makers remarkably prescient about the prospects of global trade. For John C. Frémont, the transcontinental meant that “America will be between Asia and Europe—the golden vein which runs through the history of the world will follow the track to San Francisco, and the Asiatic trade will finally fall into its last and permanent road.” Asa Whitney, a New York dry-goods merchant, wrote in 1845:
You will see that it will change the whole world . . . It will bring the world together as one nation, allow us to traverse the globe in thirty days, civilize and Christianize mankind, and place us in the center of the world, compelling Europe on one side and Asia and Africa on the other to pass through us.
In reality, the transcontinental railroad was not merely ill conceived but actively destructive, according to historian Richard White, who makes the case in his 2011 book, Railroaded, that all the rail lines eventually built through
North America were run by “inefficient, costly, dysfunctional corporations” and should not have even been attempted. In their immaturity, White maintains, they were “failures as businesses” that started repeated financial panics; “helped both to corrupt and to transform the political system by creating the modern corporate lobby”; “flooded markets with wheat, silver, cattle, and coal for which there was little or no need”; wrecked communities, including many Native American nations, as well as individuals; crushed their own workers; and “yielded great environmental and social harm.”
White’s criticisms are inescapable, but they seem more an indictment of the nation and the age than of the railroad itself. Certainly the Native American peoples east of the Mississippi fared no better than those to the west, even if it took white settlers—without trains—centuries longer to overrun them. Booms and busts had roiled America from the time of the Jamestown Colony, as had financial chicanery since at least the moment the first government bonds set Wall Street in motion. The railroad was not so much a cause as a symptom or a tool.
What remained, though, was that prophetic nineteenth-century vision of America at the center of the world, strategically situated between the economic powerhouses of Europe and a resurgent Asia. And, of course, the physical reality of the railroad itself.
Abraham Lincoln enthusiastically signed the Pacific Railway Act of 1862 into law with almost no opposition from Congress. His government chartered both a Union Pacific Railroad company, to build west from the Missouri River, and the Central Pacific Railroad, to build east from Sacramento. Both companies would be granted 10 square miles of land for every mile of track laid—an enormous government giveaway. Government bonds would raise $16,000 a mile for construction over flat land, $32,000 a mile in the high plains, $48,000 a mile for the passage through the Sierra and the Rockies.
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