Sunday, August 24, 2008

Trains

I went with the family, including my parents, to the California State Railroad Museum yesterday in Sacramento. This is a place I take my son several times a year and a place my parents took us once when I was a kid. There's something magical about trains. I'm a car guy, but cars are accessible, possessable, and are about the now. Trains are gigantic relics of the past, a technical marvel that's tied to history and community. Cars are about individuality and personal empowerment, but trains are something you can be proud of as a people. The museum was full of Californians but also tourists from around the US and other countries. One group listened in rapt attention, through their Russian translator, as a volunteer explained how mail was delivered by train.

I talk about trains as if they no longer exist nowadays, which is true in the US except for commuter varients. Amtrak is as much a relic as the old steam locomotives in the museum. It's a slow, ponderous, expensive mode of travel, with poor service and many delays. I would suggest that it's for the elderly with lots of time on their hands, but the trains aren't kind to the disabled or lesser abled. The last long trip I took on Amtrak was from the East Bay to Orange County, a 10 hour trip that cost twice as much as a plane ticket and with many delays. Rather than being scenic, the trip mostly went through the graffiti covered junk yards of California. Most of the delays came from making way for freight trains. Freight rules the rails, while passenger service is an amusing sideline (literally). Rail travel is alive and well in many countries, and I've experienced excellent rail service throughout Europe and India. I would much rather take a train in these places than a plane.

Game stores could probably take a lesson from train stores. There were several in old town Sacramento, and like train stores everywhere, they had a "live" display of moving trains, complete with beautiful terrain. That's something I would like to do at our store, create a large display of say, a 40K battle in progress. This would go either in the window or better yet, in the miniatures section separating the minis from the toys. The toy department would be shrunk to make space. We have miniatures on display now, mostly painted models in display cases and our Warmachine demo table, but it hardly does justice to the huge amount of wall space covered in lead. A fully painted, full size miniature game with terrain is really a site to behold. I'm not looking for a demo table, but a static display with plexiglass preventing theft and damage, a regular problem with our Warmachine table. If anyone wants to build such a thing, let me know and we can come to an arrangement.

16 comments:

  1. Freight rail = investor dollars at work

    Amtrack = tax dollars at play

    The main reason that there is not an efficient passenger rail service in America is that there is not only an inefficient government passenger rail service, but HEAVY taxpayer subsidies of roads and airports.

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  2. It's kind of interesting that all the NASA like talk about transportation technology change has to do with improving the efficiency of the automobile, rather than investing heavily into public transportation, like state of the art train systems.

    Was there a focus group report I missed, or did we just allow the politicians to frame the debate without public input?

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  3. The US absolutely sucks ass at mass transportation.

    The rail problem goes back to the first half of the twentieth century and lobbying by the automotive and oil industry to kill light rail systems in favor of buses. It continued with the same industries lobbying for heavy road subsidies.

    Our oil crisis would be much less severe if we were transporting the amount of cargo by train that we should be transporting, but the road subsidies mean we do far more by inefficient trucks than we should.

    As for air transport, we're rapidly destroying it in the name of "security".

    Between gas prices, security theater, and the fact that we destroyed passenger rail long ago, soon there will be no convenient way of traveling long distances within the US. Leisure travel will once again be the prerogative of the rich rather than an option for the masses.

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  4. In case you didn't notice, the lack of decent passenger rail in the US, both light rail and long distance, is a bit of a pet peeve of mine :-)

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  5. As a teen, I used to travel by rail to Santa Barbara/Ventura in the summer to visit my aunt. I loved taking the train - got on in the evening, got off at 6am.

    When stationed at Ft Irwin, I once took the train from the Bay Area to Barstow (closest civilian community to the fort). Barstow is one of the major railheads in the United States.
    They had me get off the train in Bakersfield, and ride on a bus to Barstow.

    So, in addition to paying more than Greyhound, I spent half of my trip on a damnn bus!

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  6. btw - I loved taking the train in Europe. It was convenient, scenic, and cost effective.

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  8. And don't get me started on comparing BART (a money wasting commuter centric transportation supplement) to the London Underground, Franfurt U-Bahn, or New York City subway (full featured public transportation systems).

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  9. Bring back the trains! Use them for transporting cargo first! Remove the trucks from the freeways - make it manditory to all businesses and allow them a tax break if they use the train to transport their cargo. This may increase their revenue and eventually utilize those funds to upgrade and hopefull make it also for public transportation!

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  10. Bring back the trains! Use them for transporting cargo first! Remove the trucks from the freeways - make it manditory to all businesses and allow them a tax break if they use the train to transport their cargo. This may increase their revenue and eventually utilize those funds to upgrade and hopefull make it also for public transportation!

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  11. Interesting how people from here have a hate-on for BART and a love for the London Underground.

    I'm imported from close to London. BART, to me, is FAR better than the Tube. For a start, you can actually rely on BART, and if things do go wrong, they keep you informed.

    Light rail would be nice, but the County Connection buses actually do a good job. They're a LOT better than buses are back in England.

    For all the jibes in the UK about how "everybody drives in America", I've found mass transit in general to be significantly *better* over here.

    But there's still more to do. Getting freight off asphalt and onto steel would be a big step forward, as would making passenger rail travel easier, faster and more scenic. Sadly, none of these sell like "support our troops!" or "for the children!".

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  12. Hmmmm, kids love trains... maybe we can use "think of the children" for good instead of evil for a change :-P

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  13. I liked BART. The only problem is that if your destination isn't within walking distance of a BART station, then it rarely does you any good, and the nature of the BART system means that well over 90% of the bay area is further from a BART station than you can reasonably walk.

    It just doesn't make sense to spend over two hours riding around on buses and BART when you can drive to where you need to go in about an hour.

    Mind you, I've known people who have done those commutes, going so far as to use a combination of commuting, BART, amtrak and buses to get to work. Of course, they also talked their employer into paying them for their commute time since they could use their laptop to get work done on the trip.

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  14. Hell, it takes ten minutes just to walk through the parking lot at most BART stations.

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  15. You can't get the freight off the roads. At this point, our rail lines are just about maxed out with freight as it is. Unless we are willing to build more rail lines, there isn't much more we can do to shift more freight off the roads. Hopefully, CA will get moving on the high speed rail.

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  16. You can't get the freight off the roads. At this point, our rail lines are just about maxed out with freight as it is. Unless we are willing to build more rail lines, there isn't much more we can do to shift more freight off the roads. Hopefully, CA will get moving on the high speed rail.

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