North American train travel is slow, inefficient and outdated, so why do some people love it?
Drawing on the work of travel writers, environmental psychologists, anthropologists and my own experiences, I will attempt to answer that question and explore some of the unexpected benefits of slow train travel.
Train travel conjures romantic notions of luxury railroads from the early 20th Century. We may envision dome observation cars, dining cars with table linens, and private sleepers with porter service.
Today, passenger rail in the United States is a different story. Our long-distance service crosses the country at speeds slower than automobile speed limits, with frequencies no more than once a day. Food is largely microwaved. Sleeper cars are far more expensive than the cost of a hotel room, putting them out of reach for many travelers.
But those who choose to utilize long-distance service despite its many, many inadequacies have an opportunity to connect with the landscape and with fellow travelers in an eco-friendly way that is not possible with other forms of travel.
Ideally, we should have a rail system comparable to those in Europe and East Asia, where people can travel efficiently for hundreds of miles without cars or airplanes. But while we are stuck with inadequate slow-speed rail, let’s look at some of its unexpected benefits.
Domestic train travel is frustratingly inefficient.
Consider this:
The 819-mile trip from Beijing to Shanghai takes 4 hours and 28 minutes by rail, with more than 30 trains making the trip daily in each direction. The 959-mile trip from Chicago to New York City takes a minimum of 20 hours and 10 minutes — depending on the route taken — and is serviced by 17 trains per week in each direction.
Phoenix is America’s fifth-largest city, and yet Amtrak trains stop in the suburb of Maricopa, 35 miles away, at 9:02 pm if you’re going westbound to Los Angeles, or 5:40 am if you’re traveling eastbound to New Orleans — and only three days a week.
Salt Lake City is served at 11:30 pm westbound and 3:30 am eastbound.
Cincinnati is served at 1:41 am westbound and 3:27 am eastbound — only three days a week.
Las Vegas, Nashville and Boise have no passenger rail service.
High-speed rail exists only between Washington, D.C. and Boston – and even then, reaching 150 mph for tiny stretches of its 457-mile span, while averaging about 68 mph for the entire route. In October 2021, The Points Guy website sent four travelers from Lower Manhattan to Boston in a race: Two flew commercially, one flew a seaplane and one took Amtrak’s higher-speed Acela. The Acela traveler came in dead last.
Outside the Northeast Corridor, Amtrak does not own its tracks, and trains are frequently forced to wait for freight traffic to pass. Fewer than half of Amtrak trains arrive on time. A 2019 study found the average delay to be 49 minutes, with some trains arriving hours late.
Meanwhile, China, Spain, Germany, Saudi Arabia, France, Italy, South Korea, and Japan all have trains that exceed 200 mph.
Amtrak’s inefficiency brings together a disparate cross-section of Americans, many with a story to tell.
So who rides America’s slow trains?
I have found that Amtrak travelers fall into roughly four categories:
people who do not like to fly — including those afraid to fly, and people whose culture or religion prohibit flying, and those whose health makes flying difficult
people who love train travel—you’ll see throughout this piece the many reasons to do so—or people eager to experience it as a one-time vacation
people with a lot of time to spare, especially retirees
people traveling to or from a remote towns served by train but not by air
This is, of course, a simplification of what is really a more complex set of travelers. Some travelers fit multiple categories, while others fit none. I posed the question on an Amtrak forum, and it generated a lively discussion worth reading for anyone more interested in why people choose to travel by Amtrak.
A slow train fosters interaction — in ways no other form of travel can — among these travelers.
Most Amtrak passengers have an interesting story to tell — where they boarded and at what insane hour, why they chose the train, how the inevitable delay will affect their travel plans — and everyone seems interested to hear similar stories from their fellow passengers.
As Monisha Rajesh wrote in her 2020 book, Around the World in 80 Trains (a follow-up to her 2010 Around India in 80 Trains):
“According to economists and pessimists, the romance of the railways is dying a swift death, but I refused to believe it was true. Nowhere in the world could rival India’s railways, but I knew that every country’s network would possess a spirit of its own, it just needed a prod and a poke to unearth. Trains are rolling libraries of information, and all it takes is to reach out to passengers to bind together their tales.”
In my own two decades of train travel, these are a few of my more interesting encounters:
On my first long-distance train trip, the Southwest Chief from Chicago to Los Angeles in August 2000, the first person I met was a man who had once served time at San Quentin State Prison. He said he had fled a life of drugs in California by driving until he ran out of gas in Oklahoma, where he had lived ever since. On that same trip, I met a woman who was completing a month-long journey on a North American Rail Pass, and her trip across the Canadian Rockies and prairies inspired me to make the same trip four months later.
In June 2001, on my second weeks-long train journey around the United States and Canada, I lent my telephone calling card — before mobile phones were ubiquitous — to a man traveling with his wife and children on Amtrak’s Empire Builder. We ended up talking for much of the evening. At 3 am, he woke me up and took me to the lower level of the train to show me that it was possible to open the train window and take in the fresh air. We were near Sandpoint, Idaho, along the Pend Oreille River, and dawn was starting to break. We took turns — one enjoying the view through the open window and one keeping watch for Amtrak employees — for more than an hour as twilight turned to daylight over rural Idaho.
Aboard the Lake Shore Limited en route to Chicago in November 2017, I lingered in the cafe car long after last call and played Cards Against Humanity with fellow passengers much younger than I was — some were serving in the Armed Forces and did not want to talk about their work, while others were traveling to Chicago to celebrate a 21st birthday.
While traveling north along the Eastern Seaboard in November 2019, I was annoyed to find that alcohol sales ceased once we crossed into the Carolinas, as many counties there prohibited alcohol sales on Sundays. My seatmate in the coach invited me, in limited English, to return to the cafe car, where he proceeded to share with me a small feast he had brought aboard: cooked lamb cubes, beef sausage, Uzbek bread and more. He also shared videos of bakeries in Uzbekistan and urged me to visit someday.
None of these experiences would be possible on an airplane, where the possibilities to socialize are limited. Further, I would argue that experiences like these would be rare on a bullet train speeding across the landscape toward a destination.
But a slow train, meandering across the American landscape at an average speed of 45 miles per hour, fosters these conversations and interactions.
In the preface to Zephyr, Tracking a Dream Across America, longtime Chicago Sun-Times book editor Henry Kisor writes about his own challenges communicating with others as a deaf person whose impairment can sometimes bring on a crippling shyness: “When both sides have all the time in the world to listen to each other, such a meeting can be a marvel instead of an embarrassment.”
He adds that the slowness of the train gives him time to get to know the stories of fellow travelers:
“At any time of the year one is unlikely to run into the wealthy and well-connected on a long-distance train, unless they’re afraid of flying. But the frequent rail traveler—especially one who rides in the off season—will meet professors and novelists as well as vacationing Europeans, South Americans and Australians, and, thanks to the luxury of time, come to know them.”
The slowness of the train shows you the American landscape in a way no other mode of travel can.
When the California Zephyr debuted in 1949 connecting Chicago and Oakland, it captured the nation’s imagination, according to Kisor’s Zephyr, even though it was 10 hours slower than the Overland Limited’s connection between the same two cities.
Why did Americans prefer the Zephyr? While slower than the Overland, the Zephyr offered the spectacular scenery of the Colorado Rockies, and that scenery could be viewed through the Zephyr’s dome cars.
“No other American train traverses such a variety of terrain: the industrial backside of Chicago, the Midwestern breadbasket of Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska over the Mississippi and Missouri rivers to the high plains and towering Rockies of Colorado, the intermountain desert of the Great Basin of Utah and Nevada, the high Sierra of California, the shore of San Francisco Bay,” Kisor writes.
More than 70 years later, this route is still considered Amtrak’s most scenic. I made the 2,438-mile trip in September of 2020 and offer this brief account:
After a 2 pm departure from Chicago, city turns to suburbs, followed by small towns and rolling cornfields. The farmland is interrupted only by a crossing of the half-mile-long Mississippi River. Dusk falls over western Iowa, and by morning, the train arrives in Denver for an hourlong stop.
After Denver, the Zephyr climbs into the Rockies, entering 29 tunnels, including the 6.2-mile-long Moffat Tunnel. Before the tunnel was completed in 1928, this stretch took hours to traverse, rising to an elevation of 11,000 feet. Today, it takes about 10 minutes to go through the tunnel, at 9,239 feet above sea level. Before entering the tunnel, the Zephyr runs alongside the South Boulder Creek, which eventually empties to the Atlantic, and afterward, the Zephyr runs parallel to the Fraser River, which eventually empties into the Pacific — marking the crossing of the Continental Divide.
The Zephyr then cuts through a series of steep canyons — Byers, Gore, Red and Glenwood — alongside the Colorado River. For at least an hour, it runs through a stretch of land that can only be traversed by this train, or by raft. No roads. No WiFi. No phone service. Just soaring red rocks and a winding, rushing Colorado River.
After Glenwood Springs, the Zephyr continues westward along the Colorado River, though the ride is not as majestic as it is to the east of Glenwood. A series of delays meant that on my September 2020 journey, the Zephyr did not cross into Nevada until 6:30 am, cruising along a mesa over a massive, rocky desert plain, with mountains in the distance. The entire landscape took on the pink hues of the almost-rising sun, as the train navigated switchbacks through this high-altitude desert. The view was other-worldly, like the surface of Mars.
As twilight turned to daylight, the landscape shifts, more lunar than martian. For more than 100 miles, the Zephyr parallels the Humboldt River and Interstate 80. Grazing cattle line either side of the river, some eating vegetation, some drinking the water, some wading in the water and others chasing their calves.
After Reno, the Biggest Little City in the World, the Zephyr runs along the Truckee River as it snakes through the Sierra Nevada mountains. For those building the Transcontinental Railroad 150 years ago, this was some of the most difficult track to lay. The train goes through a series of tunnels and switchbacks some 7,000 feet above sea level, at one point high above the 1.3-square-mile Donner Lake, named after the party of pioneers forced to winter there in 1846. The Zephyr crawls through the Sierras at around 30 mph, picking up speed after Sacramento for the final run into Emeryville.
Many of these sites could only have been experienced via slow-speed rail.
Those who have traveled Amtrak’s more spectacular long-distance routes would agree: Neither plane, nor car, nor even high-speed rail can show passengers the majesty of West Virginia’s New River Gorge, Washington Columbia River Gorge, Montana’s Glacier National Park, Oregon’s Pengra Pass or a snow-capped Mount Shasta at daybreak the way Amtrak’s leisurely trains can.
And for many, myself included, it is not just the spectacular scenery that draws our gaze. Even the mundane can be appealing, especially when viewed from a slow train car.
In his 2010 book, In Motion: The Experience of Travel, former New Yorker staff writer Tony Hiss writes about the scenery viewed from American rail cars:
“If you decide to look, the effect is intense because the landscape outside is not just a distant prospect but something you’ve never left, since it seems to come right up to your feet and even to wrap around under the wheels. It’s not a managed landscape—no NatureRail or parkwaying here. It’s not even a landscape that’s paying attention to you, since houses and businesses show their fronts to roads and only their backs to train lines. It’s not always what you want to see, but it’s what’s there to be seen—every scrapyard, every weed, every abandoned tricycle in a backyard, every overgrown stream bank, invisible because there’s a billboard in front of it (although you can’t see what’s being advertised, because the billboard’s facing a highway). Every two seconds you get a new framed picture of what America looks like when no one’s looking.”
And writing in Around the World in 80 Trains, Monica Rajesh contrasts Europe’s slower trains with the continent’s now ubiquitous high-speed system:
“France’s TGVs – Trains à Grande Vitesse – have revolutionised train travel across Europe for commuters, but for idlers like us whose sole intention was to spend the afternoon gazing out of windows, the high-speed trains served little purpose, reducing the views to a blur. There were few passengers on the slow trains from Limoges to Clermont-Ferrand, and Clermont-Ferrand to Béziers, most of whom moaned about the heat, fell asleep in the heat, then jumped off within a couple of hours, leaving us to wind down the country alone.”
The slowness of the train puts you into a different state of mind.
In In Motion: The Experience of Travel, Hiss’ thesis focuses on a state of mind he calls “Deep Travel,” a heightened state of awareness into which people enter when they visit a new place.
Over time, Hiss discovered that Deep Travel is possible even during our daily routines. To sum up the ability to enter into Deep Travel while at home, he asks:
“What would I notice, what would I want to know more about, what would I find compelling and be fascinated by if we were having lunch in Warsaw right now, instead of New York?”
But in his early years, before Hiss knew how to access that state of mind at any time, slow train travel served as an “entry point” to Deep Travel:
“I myself, for instance, grew up loving train rides, because so many of them, even very ordinary ones, seemed to be twofers that lifted me out of myself while also taking me to the destination printed on my ticket. You probably have your own list of favorite entry points. Before finding out how readily accessible and plentiful Deep Travel can be, back in my hunter-gatherer days—that is to say, when I assumed, like many people, that it was a scarce commodity that perhaps came in finite amounts—I used to rely on a bumpy Amtrak branch line north of Albany, New York, as a promising source of supply. Since the track was so deteriorated—this being America—that trains were held to an average speed of 24 miles an hour on one stretch between two stations, this was clearly a travel option most people would avoid, and on some days could almost outrun. …
“Outside it was bitingly cold, with a bright blue sky and sun glinting off snowbanks. My state of mind was every bit as ordinary as the train itself, at one moment closely focused on possible Amflaws, and at the next daydreamy and abstracted. I had some work with me, but I didn’t take it out. …
“There were no conversations in the café car to overhear or ignore. It could have been an almost ideal moment for a short nap. Instead, all at once and quite out of the blue, I felt a surge of buoyancy, as if my whole body were popping up through murky water into sunshine. My thoughts, previously drifting by in ones and twos, were multitudinous and seemed airborne, sometimes racing ahead of the still-lumbering train, sometimes darting off and slicing behind a line of snow-clad hills that had just appeared off to my right as the train crossed a broad, shallow valley. Before even thinking about it, I had pulled a notebook out of my briefcase and was jotting down some notes about … the speed of trains and the speed of thought. I was certainly far more awake than I had been a few minutes before, and was surprised to realize that one of the things I had become aware of, now that I had moved over from one travel world into another, was a strong rise in a sense of uncertainty, a condition, like speed, that we generally manage to ignore.
“It was not unpleasant, and I could see what was happening. My attention had certainly been brought to a higher level of alertness. Looking around more carefully, I noticed that the small “here” within easy reach, the “here” inside the café car, was of course entirely unchanged—the heat and stuffiness continued. …
“In these circumstances, remembering that you don’t know where you are or what will happen next brings with it the reassurance that for the time being you don’t have do anything about this situation. The railroad’s intention is not to move your mind forward, but it is in the process of moving your body forward safely and in relative comfort. It’s no more than a “half a loaf” setting, but it’s one that the mind can nibble on. Energized, untethered, unhurried, and protected, your mind can be free to explore any subject at all, because all possibilities lie open.
The intent of the train is to move the body forward, but the slow train lifts us out of ourselves, and moves the mind forward as well.
Hiss’ comment, “I had some work with me, but I didn’t take it out,” reminds me of my first long-distance train trip, from Chicago to Los Angeles. In the days before tablets and smartphones, I bought myself some magazines at Chicago’s Union Station to read on the train. As the suburbs of Chicago tuned to cornfields, I pulled the magazines out, but could not look at them. My gaze was fixed on the passing cornfields The scenery was not breathtaking by any means, but it held my attention.
To this day, I can only focus on in-depth reading on a train when it is required, that is, when I have had to do work or classwork on the train. Otherwise, I generally have my iPad opened to Google maps, with my attention shifting from the map, to the passing scenery, to the people on board the train, sometimes jotting notes, trying to absorb and remember every bit of the experience.
This is much different from how I act on a plane. Flying, to me, is an opportunity to be productive with reading or writing. But on a train, I clearly enter what Hess has coined Deep Travel.
What is it that puts us into a different state of mind? Perhaps it is not being concerned about time. Many on a train are not there to get from Point A to Point B, but instead to enjoy the experience—and often times that means connecting with fellow passengers and the landscape.
In the first chapter of Zephyr, Kisor writes that what appeals to him most about trains is time:
“Train time means large blocks of leisure to rest, to read a book cover to cover, to write a few thousand words on my laptop computer in the warm privacy of a sleeper compartment, or simply to woolgather, letting my imagination carry me where it will. Just as important, a subtle alteration in the perception of time occurs aboard a long-distance train. Everything seems to run more slowly, including my emotional and intellectual metabolism. Arrival at my destination is many hours, even days away; without the pressure of the clock, I feel more relaxed, patient, confident, ready to open myself to new adventures and connections.”
Traveling by train allows one to enjoy two distinct spaces at once: the space inside the train and the space outside the train.
The average coach seat on a domestic flight in the United States gives passengers 17 to 18 inches of width. The distance from the back of one seat to the back of the next is usually 30-33 inches. This is hardly a space one can enjoy. And at a cruising altitude of more than 30,000 feet, even the passengers with window seats do not have an outdoor view to appreciate.
A train is a much different story. Amtrak does not publish seat dimensions, but several online sources say Amtrak seats have a width of 23 inches and legroom pitch of 39 inches between seats.
A post on Amtraktrains.com paints a better picture than any measurements can: “All I know is they are wide enough and far enough apart for a 6'5" 300lb man to ride comfortably, sleep comfortably, and exit from a window seat to the aisle without waking the passenger next to him . Try doing that on a bus or plane.”
Not only are the seats comfortable, but there are other spaces to enjoy. Depending on the train, one also has access to a cafe, an observation car and a dining room.
In short, unlike other forms of travel, trains offer a comfortable space in which you can move around. At the same time, one can look out the window and see the landscape of America pass by.
An entire movement dedicated to slow travel celebrates the value of slow trains.
Inspired by the Italian-born “slow food” movement, a growing number of travelers are making the case for “slow travel.” And slow trains are a part of the movement.
While my work here focuses on the United States — because here we only have slower speed trains—slower trains are not confined to North America. Yes, Europe boasts an extensive network of high-speed trains, but slow-travel advocates point out the value in seeking out the slow train there, too. As Hidden Europe reported,
“Europe is often distilled in the glimpses from the train window. Many are the half understood scenes from other worlds that slide by outside our carriage. All the more so from the slower trains that dawdle along rural branch lines or take the back routes into cities. Not the main line, but the one that ducks and dives through a dozen suburbs. …
“In the pauses that the slow train makes, there is a prism on a wider world. …
“When did you last take the slow train? Had you realised that it really is not compulsory to speed across Europe at three hundred kilometres per hour? The more sedate trains, those lazy slowworms that stop and ponder at country stations, are still there in the timetables.
“Icons of sleek modernity like the TGV and Eurostar have made it possible to cross great chunks of Europe in air-conditioned comfort in a matter of hours. But no-one says we must take the fastest train. For travellers with a day or two to spare and no inclination to rush, it really is still possible to meander across Europe on trains that travel no faster than that described by Lawrence Durrell (above) or stop with unscheduled serendipity at tiny village stations with fabulous names like Whatstandwell, Kissing or Crossmyloof.”
Such recommendations are not confined to niche publications of small but growing movements. Writing for the Washington Post, London-based writer Will Hawkes made the case as well:
“Trundling across Europe at a snail’s pace offers many simple pleasures: the landscape gradually opening up in front of you, a warm summer breeze blowing through an open window, and clocking each sleepy provincial station as they come and go.”
Train travel is more environmentally friendly than car or air travel.
The International Council on Clean Transportation reported that carbon dioxide emissions from commercial flights in 2018 totaled 918 million metric tons, which amounts to 2.4% of global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use. This marks a 32% increase over the past five years.
Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Carbon Brief estimated that even if the aviation industry meets self-imposed targets to curb emissions — and that is a big if, as it includes dramatic improvements in aircraft technology, air traffic management and infrastructure, was well as 100% biofuels — aviation will still have consumed 12% of the global carbon budget for a 1.5-degree Celsius increase in mean temperatures by 2050. If the industry fails to reach its own targets, its share of this carbon budget could rise to as much as 27%.
These negative effects of flying have given birth to a movement known as “flight shaming,” or the idea that one should feel guilty for flying — and therefore not fly — because of the significant effect on one’s carbon footprint.
Swedes coined a word for it, “flygskam,” in 2017, and it has since gained popularity on social media, with accounts that shame frequent fliers or that boast about more-sustainable train travel. The movement received a high-profile boost from climate activist Greta Thunberg, who visited the United States in 2019 by taking a carbon-neutral boat across the Atlantic. Similarly, the British band Coldplay announced weeks before the pandemic that it would not tour for environmental reasons, and the British band Massive Attack announced it would tour Europe by rail rather than by air.
Because the emissions per mile traveled by plane dwarfs that of travel by train (though not necessarily that of travel by bus or one-passenger car), rail travel is most often recommended as an alternative, especially in Europe and Asia, where high-speed rail networks are extensive.
To illustrate comparisons, Eco Passenger is a user-friendly internet tool that compares the energy consumption, CO2 and exhaust atmospheric emissions for planes, cars and trains for passenger transport. Below is a screenshot of emissions comparisons for a Friday afternoon trip from Paris to Frankfurt:
As a result, flygskam has a companion: tagskryt, or train boasting. According to Business Insider:
Serving as a testament to the rising popularity of train-bragging, a Swedish Facebook group dedicated to traveling sustainably by train has seen its membership soar to 107,000 members this year. That's a 39% increase since April and a significant jump from January 2018, when it had a mere 4,000 members.
Susanna Elfors founded the group in 2014 to make traveling by train to other countries less of a headache. …
Some of the most frequently asked questions in the group are related to travel from Sweden to Greece, how to travel as a tall person, how to travel with a dog, and what the food is like, Elfors told Global Citizen's Helen Lock in July.
In 2018, train travel throughout Sweden increased by 2 million trips compared to 2017, according to the World Economic Forum (WEF). This year, the Swedish government has also pledged to invest $5 million in overnight sleeper trains, the WEF reported.
The train-bragging sentiment has outpaced flight shame, Elfors told Lock. "Before it was all about posting pics on Facebook from Thailand, but now that could bring 'flight shame' and it's more about train-bragging now," she said. "That's what I like about what we're doing. It's not about shame, it's about encouraging people. We're hoping to inspire people."
Of course, most people travel to get from Point A to Point B quickly and efficiently. In Europe and East Asia, that is possible by rail. In the United States, because our rail system is so inefficient, airplanes and cars are the preferred modeof transport between most cities.
For this reason, the original Green New Deal framework calls for “investing in ... clean, affordable, and accessible transportation; and high-speed rail.” (The Congressional resolution does not call for the phasing out of air travel, as some have alleged.)
To begin modernizing our system, the bipartisan infrastructure bill signed into law in November 2021 includes $66 billion for passenger rail, the largest expansion in the 50-year history of Amtrak.
Even as most environmental advocates acknowledge that the United States needs high-speed rail to transport people in a way that does not excessively contribute to our ongoing climate emergency, true high-speed rail is still decades away in this country.
And even if we were to build high-speed rail to connect major urban corridors such as Boston-New York-Washington D.C., or Los Angeles-San Francisco, the vastness of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains will likely not see high-speed rail in our — or our children’s — lifetimes (even though comparable distances and landscapes are served by high-speed rail in China).
The slow train across Colorado, Nevada, Montana and other more rural states is not going anywhere — unless of course Congress chips away at it as it has tried to do in the past.
The history of rail travel is riddled with injustices, but the present and future can be more just.
The building of transcontinental railroads in this country relied on mistreated immigrant labor, severed Native Americans from their land and brought colonialism across the plains to the West Coast.
Today, however, train travel in the United States is, as I have outlined above, an eco-friendly way to uniquely connect with the landscape, oneself and fellow travelers. It knits together communities that do not otherwise have access to mass travel.
From an environmental justice perspective, train travel began as an environmental injustice, centuries before the term was coined, but today we might consider it a possible path to environmental justice.
This history calls us to be mindful of the people, communities, cultures and natural landscapes through which we travel.
In a world that needs to slow down, train travel should be part of our future.
With the rise of flyskam and slow-travel as counter-cultural movements, slow-speed rail is both past and future.
To quote Rajesh again, at length:
“When I left London, I set out to discover what train travel meant to people around the world, and to determine once and for all if the naysayers were right to sound the death knell for long-distance train travel. The romance, they said, was dead – shot down by bullet trains and high-speed rail. But it wasn’t dead, just reincarnated, living on in the passengers who would always tell their story to strangers, offer advice, share their food, and give up their seats. It could never die, any more than our interest in people could die. After my journey around India, I came away in thrall to Indian Railways, convinced that no other country could emulate its spirit and vigour, and that I would be disappointed as I travelled this time, searching for something that didn’t exist. Instead, I’d unearthed something greater: to some, trains would never be more than a convenience, but for others, trains were symbols of strength, weapons of war, and political tools. Trains provided salvation for the poor, and a lifeline for commuters. They offered the chance to escape, and homes for the lonely. Trains were a link to the past, and a portal to the future. And to me? Trains would always be an open window into the soul of a country and its people.”
High-speed rail may be the future. But in a world whose future may depend on us all slowing down, slow-speed rail can be our future, too, connecting us with each other and with the land in a way no other mode of travel can do.
