Winging It: Stimulus raises hopes for high-speed trains
(Source: Philadelphia Inquirer)
Occasionally, a wise journalism professor once told me, being a reporter is almost like not working because of the fun you can have. If you’ve covered transportation for decades, the best of those “are they really paying me to do this?” days have come aboard trains going almost 200 miles per hour.
Now, I’ve taken some pretty exhilarating airplane rides as well. Like the one in a 1929 open-cockpit biplane over Chester County. And two in cockpit jump seats, one in a British Airways 747 between the Philadelphia and Newark airports, the other in a 100-seat Midway Airlines jet bouncing down an ice-covered runway as it landed in Philadelphia.
But nothing quite matches the thrill of watching from the engineer’s vantage point on a French TGV train going 180 m.p.h., as another train approaches from the opposite direction at the same speed and then disappears behind you in seconds. It’s even better than floating along at 200 m.p.h. aboard an experimental German magnetic-levitation train.
Those land-based experiences make me believe that Americans would fall in love with high-speed trains if they ever got them, first just for fun and then as a practical replacement for short, fuel-guzzling airline flights.
With a new administration in Washington, at least we’re in another period of rising hope, similar to ones I’ve seen come and go repeatedly over the last 30-plus years, when the nation may be ready to invest in high-speed rail.
