All Along the Water Tank.... | Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service--A Year...

a wonderful book for armchair travelers & lovers of train travel | Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service--A Year Spent Riding across America | James McCommons

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	• Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service--A Year Spent Riding across America James McCommons Chelsea Green Publishing, 2009 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 39 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Before Proposing Ideas, Read this Book

I agree with some of the detrimental comments other reviewers posted. The author could have gone deeper in some cases and present a little more comprehensive and detailed proposal without getting too technical and boring; main reason why I give the book four stars not five. But it gets four because it is an excellent read and every one who wants to, or is already involved, with an interest in passenger railroading has to read this book as a primer. If you have no idea how a freight railroad runs, what are the main blockades other than money that face passenger rail expansion, or in general, how a railroad can contribute to American transportation infrastructure now and in the future, this book is is a great introduction. The author keeps it simple, to expand on his work, volumes have to be written but would be laden with technical and economic details that would put off a common reader who wants to get the "gist" of the current and future American passenger railroad operations.

Rail fans need to read this book to help quell the outrages propositions (Like coast to coast bullet trains) commonly found on forums, news groups, magazines, conventions, and even passenger rail advocacy groups. I see some of these proposals as detrimental to the cause because the grand and sometimes outrages scope they posses have the propensity to be instantly ignored by those who make the decisions. In result, ignoring the more sensible proposed solutions that need to be implemented.

Sometimes it is the transit companies themselves whose grandiose plans get shot down because they cannot see the big picture. As an example of this, research SEPTA's Schuylkill Valley Metro (SVM) project in Philadelphia Pennsylvania. They wanted a to build a system that connected two main cities; Reading and Philadelphia with a huge and overbuilt rail system that was a clear overshot of what is needed with price tag of over $2 billion. I should mention that there was an existing service between these cities as recent as 1983. Instead of working with what they had and negotiating with the host railroad (Norfolk Southern), SEPTA wanted a unique, separate system designed to support frequent head-ways that most likely will not be needed and never reach capacity goals. Because of this grandiose plan, the project was nixed by the feds as too expensive for what is needed. I honestly believe that if the planners of the SVM knew and UNDERSTOOD what was in this book, trains would be running between Philadelphia and Reading today. Now, it may be at least 10 more years.

In conclusion, if you want to know what is wrong with this country in regards to the problems plaguing American transportation and how the railroads can help, read this book immediately. It will get your foot in the door so you can understand not only what it takes to get a passenger rail project moving, but what obstacles it will face. You will have a better understanding in reading rail proposals and the political underlinings involved. Again, a great foundation for more advanced research if so inclined, but enough for a casual reader to get what is going on and what is needed.

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All Along the Water Tank....

"Waiting on a Train" gets off to a great start: You have to love that cover shot from an open vestibule door. Try finding one on Amtrak these days! And that title must be borrowed from the classic tune by Jimmy Rodgers, the original "Singing Brakeman" from Meridian, Mississippi.

Author McCommons spent 2008 traveling about the country via by train, interviewing railroad executives, passengers, crew members, politicians plus state and local officials. He does a fine job of combining these talks into a cohesive and smooth flowing narrative. Chapters are short and focused. Nice descriptions of the passing scenery are provided. Author McCommons has done his homework and expended some shoe leather. A good reviewer should keep politics out of his/her comments but such is not possible when the subject is Amtrak or public transportation. This reviewer enjoyed the solid skewering given the Bush brothers, W and Jeb, who were rabidly against any government involvement in rail public transportation. Did that attitude derive from their old man, who arrantly proposed $0 budgets for Amtrak?

The only caveat to WT is the author's attitude. His tone is slightly superior and a tad wonky. This reviewer has taken several long distance Amtrak trips and the passenger's advance frame of mind toward the journey is critical. And most emphatically, folks who like riding and reading about trains are railfans (!), not "buffs" and assuredly not "foamers"! This posture warrants the subtraction of a star from the rating above.

Yet overall, "Waiting On a Train" is a solid piece of reporting which gives an accurate picture of the current state of passenger railroading in the United States. On an optimistic note, we RAILFANS can take heart that there are a lot of smart, dedicated folks out there right now trying to provide this country with the cohesive, connected rail service it so urgently needs.

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a wonderful book for armchair travelers & lovers of train travel

WAITING ON A TRAIN: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service - A Year Spent Riding Across America, by James McCommons, with foreword by James Howard Kunstler (304 pgs., 2009). This book has not been written by a foamer. Foamer is the name used to describe ultra fans of railroads. McCommons is a journalist. He has always been interested in travel, transportation & the environment. He has concluded that the best way to help the environment & get people out of their cars & freight out of their trucks is to upgrade rail service throughout the U.S.A.
Much of the freight traffic in this country already travels in containers on long freight trains. They can carry more freight for longer distances while consuming less energy & power than those huge long-distance trucks pulling one to three trailers. With better improved passenger service, the same can be said for moving people in comparison with cars & planes. Nevertheless, better passenger rail service requires more track, more track dedicated to passenger traffic, higher speed trains, more interconnectedness between various passenger train routes & bus stations & airports, better cooperation from freight lines, better service on passenger trains, newer equipment & rail cars, better depots, & more passenger train routes. All of that will require a huge investment by both Federal & State governments.
McCommons is calling for a system in North America which would be more akin to the system of train travel in Western Europe & Japan. Even China is pulling ahead of the U.S. in high speed train travel.
The author spent one year traveling across this country on as many train lines as he could manage. He connected them with cabs & buses when necessary; but never once rented a car to make connections. This book opens in January in snowy Baltimore. It ends in December in Washington D.C.
During this trip, McCommons met with many railroad executives, State & Federal bureaucrats in various Depts. of Transportation or Depts. devoted to train travel, & advocates of passenger train travel. He presents various points of view. His book is very balanced, even though his bias towards increased passenger rail is quite obvious. He points out the need for this increase in various balanced & sober ways, using statistics & history to back up his conclusions.
This is a wonderful all-in-one book to learn how good passenger rail in this country once was, why it was left to wither on the vine, how to revive it, & why there is a pressing need to revive it.

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Entertaining and enlightening

I have read many books about Amtrak. Most of them at some point will digress into trip-from-hell, can you top this stories or just sink into a boring depression about the current state of Amtrak. This book does not fall into those traps. The book is just as enjoyable to read when the author is having a superb trip or a less than stellar trip. Chapters are short and fast paced.
It is also accurate, informative and very up to date. I couldn't find any factual errors.
For anyone who enjoyed Stilgoe's Train Time, this book will be an ideal complement.
High marks all around. I hope that his suggestions are implemented and America regains its vision for rail transportation. We are going to need it.

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The future of American intercity travel

James McCommons has written a very unique perspective on the transportation debate in America after treking over the country in 2008 while usually originating in Milwaukee from bus from the Upper Pennisula. A unique history of the railroads in America, and how the unwinding of the industry and near death of trains in the late-1960's led to the creation of AMTRAK, which was "set up to fail". Living in an area of the country, Wisconsin, that has been a relative interurban success story with the Chicago to Milwaukee Hiawatha line, along with having several major AMTRAK proponents in government such as Governor Tommy Thompson and DOT secretary Frank Bussalacchi, Wisconsin, along with California, North Carolina, Washington, and more recently Illinois are states that are migrating toward intercity trains making 500 mile connections or less as the future of regional transportation. Other states such as Texas and Florida are caught in the political turmoil of high speed rail, tax payers and political mitigation of proposing and killing major bullet train initiatives. Wisconsin currently finds itself in this same conundrum as it is an election year and a high speed rail line linking Chicago Madison, through Milwaukee, with eventual completion to Minneapolis-St. Paul is currently an approved rail project that has been swayed into a political football. As high gas prices, and interconnectivity between regions become major issues, this book offers a perspective of what a future with connected regional cities may look like compared to what we currently have. Train transportation has a home in the US, but the DOT only funded or cared about highways and airports until very recently due to the private industry that makes up railroads with passenger and freight trains sharing the same right of ways, as the freight railways own the track. Very good reading, and should be required reading for all the politicians bashing rail as a viable transportation option.

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During the tumultuous year of 2008?when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California?journalist James McCommons spent a year on America?s trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism.

Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible?

Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads.

While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America?and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation?s stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.

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