"All Aboard, (Northeastern United States of) America, All Aboard Amtrak..."

It makes me smile when I read about how Amtrak is carrying more passengers and making better financial decisions.

Although, I won't really be happy until I'm traveling inter-city on high-speed rail is connecting every major city so you don't have to worry about snow or bad weather cancelling your flight or making roads unsafe to drive. Kind of like how the Acela proves here:

Boston to Southern Virginia in three hours? Well, not in the US anyway.

An article in yesterday's New York Times about China's high-speed rail construction also gave some background information on why China is so insistent on building it:

"China’s lavish new rail system is a response to a failure of central planning six years ago.

After China joined the World Trade Organization in November 2001, exports and manufacturing soared. Electricity generation failed to keep up because the railway ministry had not built enough rail lines or purchased enough locomotives to haul the coal needed to run new power plants.

By 2004, the government was turning off the power to some factories up to three days a week to prevent blackouts in residential areas.

Officials drafted a plan to move much of the nation’s passenger traffic onto high-speed routes by 2020, freeing existing tracks for more freight. Then the global financial crisis hit in late 2008. Faced with mass layoffs at export factories, China ordered that the new rail system be completed by 2012 instead of 2020, throwing more than $100 billion in stimulus at the projects."

One other passage that stood out:

"In a little more than three hours, [the Guangzhou-to-Wuhan line] travels 664 miles, comparable to the distance from Boston to southern Virginia. That is less time than Amtrak’s fastest train, the Acela, takes to go from Boston just to New York."

One can only hope...

Plains, Trains & Automobiles? Ditch the cars and planes for the TRAINS!!

People that know me well have known that I am very much a railfan. As a kid growing up in Queens, I memorized the entire New York City Subway Map when I was only five years old. I would make each stop on a subway line with my toy train without ever looking at the subway map. In fact, my parents would often just send my sister and me to take out-of-town guests sightseeing, often to the astonishment of our guests that two schoolchildren would be showing them around New York City.

On one occasion when I was six years old, I even navigated five of us that went sightseeing back home when our usual train line was suspended due to a derailment. This interest even continued in high school, when some of my friends would make me sit on the train with my back to the map and quiz me on stops, transfer points, and the service hours of specific subway lines, betting that I would get one wrong (I never did; a friend once tried making up station stops with fake street names just to stump me.)

That's why trains mean a lot to me and I am happy to see rail service in this country get the political recognition that it deserves. In January, Vice President Joe Biden penned a nice column in Huffington Post about why America Needs Trains. As a daily train commuter, he spelled out quite nicely how trains are not only greener but can be more reliable and secure than airline travel.

Today's New York Times has another opinion piece about a strategy that the writer believes should have been implemented when high speed rail funding was included in the stimulus. I don't entirely agree with his disapproval of the two projects that were part of the stimulus. After all, very few people outside of the northeastern United States have commuter rail service in their locality or have even ridden on a train for that matter and the exposure of new rail construction and the initial fanfare would be a good introduction for them. However, the writer does make some good points about why the Acela service in Amtrak's Northeast Corridor would be a logical choice for an upgrade to true high speed service.

Read it and feel free to tell me what you think. ENJOY!!!