| The Net View |
| Riding the Rails |
| By Brian Brenner, Boston Central Artery/Tunnel, Massachusetts
1-617-951-6276, brbrenne@bigdig.com
|
| PB prepared a guidebook
that provides state departments of transportation and metropolitan
planning organizations with practical suggestions about how to carry
out land use analyses in conjunction with transportation planning.
A summary of the guidebook's contents is presented in this article. |
|
Now that the AMTRAK Northeast Corridor electrification project
is complete, it is possible to ride on the train from Boston to New
York in less than four hours. Previously, all trains needed to stop
in New Haven to switch from diesel to electric locomotives and the
trip could take more than five hours. Now there are two all-electric
trains per day that don't require this delay, with more to be added
to the schedule. The early train from Boston arrives at New York's
Penn Station at 10:10 a.m. Since I had a 10:30 a.m. meeting in New
York recently, I took the train instead of the shuttle plane. It was
a great ride, and it got me thinking about travel in general and about
riding the rails.
My train, named the "Acela" regional, pulled into the Route
128 station on schedule. Boarding the train took about 2 minutes,
not the 15 minutes it takes to pack a sardine-can jetliner. I arrived
at my seat in the coach section and was able to stretch my legs. When
you ride on this train, you get a lot more leg room. You can cross
your legs. This was a revelation. If you try to do this on a plane
while flying "coach" class, all blood circulation in your
body stops unless you have training in yoga. The train pulled out
of the station, and soon the scenery was zooming by the windows, a
parade of trees and yellow sunlight. I decided to do some work, but
that impulse lasted for only a few minutes. It was time for a snack.
I walked to the snack car. The food was pretty good. I had a nice
fresh fruit cup. No little bags of peanuts were anywhere in sight.
The view from the tracks is much different than what you see traveling
by car or plane. Automobile travel in the U.S. today is mostly a blur
of traffic, billboards and interstate sprawl where the fast food restaurants
and service station sign towers are higher than the trees. If you
have a window seat on the plane, what you see is not really a landscape,
but more an overview of one with adjacent puffy white clouds. When
you take a train, the landscape is at eye view and seems more natural,
immediate and in proportion. At least along the New York run, the
tracks in most areas fit in right along with the houses, stores and
woods. The right-of-way seems to be a part of the landscape and not
separate from it. There is not a sense of the gash in the terrain
formed by a busy highway. There are no fast food restaurants or strip
malls next to the tracks, except near the highways.
The Boston-to-New York rail route has some exceptional stretches of
scenery. Not far south of Providence, you get to ride next to the
harbor. The first sight of this is a cove on Narragansett Bay with
bobbing sailboats and sunlight glistening on the water. Further along,
there are a few miles of rocky Long Island Sound coast and sandy beaches,
with outcrops of gray-shingled beach houses and small villages. The
train coasts through this unperturbed scenery.
People seem to talk a lot more on the train than they do on a plane
or in a car or bus. Maybe it's because of the more comfortable riding
conditions, the ability to move around more freely, and the thrill
of the ride. On this train, there was an established social scene.
The conductor was insulting some of the regulars, and they were lobbing
it back at him. The passengers included a mix of families with young
kids, college-age students and retirees. On the air shuttle, you see
a lot more suits than on the train, and they don't talk much, wedged
into the tiny seats with their peanut bags and laptops.
For some people, taking the train is not so much a real travel experience
as it is a nostalgia trip. Although this is not the case for the younger
generation, older riders still remember the times of their youth when
they rode trains everywhere. I'm still probably a bit too young for
nostalgia, but the train ride conjured up some memories of my own.
Many years ago, it was time for me to leave the nest to go to college
in Boston. I was loaded up with a big
suitcase and deposited at the train station. It was early fall. I
can still see myself boarding and sitting on the train. Out the window
was my family waiting on the platform. It was an electric-powered
train, but I remember the steam engine starting to churn, a loud whistle
and the conductor crying out, "All aboard." Slowly, the
train chugged out of the station, picking up speed. I saw my mother
running down the platform, tears in her eyes, crying out something.
(It was either, "Don't go!" or "You forgot your toothbrush!")
At this point, the scene fades and pulls back. We're in downtown Atlanta,
during the Civil War. There are approximately two million wounded,
bleeding Confederate soldiers lying on the ground. The theme from
"Gone With the Wind" is playing. Maybe this isn't exactly
how it happened, but that's how I remember it.
There is still a sense that rail travel in the U.S. is an anachronism.
To go on a real trip, you either take a car or an airplane. Cars are
for all short trips. Planes are for all long trips. There is some
dividing line in between, with overlap, where you either take a car
or a plane. The idea behind the Amtrak Northeast Corridor project
was to make the train competitive at this border line. If the trip
from Boston to New York could be cut down to around three hours, then
the train would take about as long as the air shuttle and would be
faster than driving. I found this to be about right. I took an air
shuttle flight home, because Amtrak was running only one fast electric
train back that day, and the others take five hours. The plane had
about 35 minutes air time, and an hour and a half for boarding, sitting
on the runway, and other delays. Including connections, it was about
the same amount of time by plane as by rail on the fast electric train.
It helps that our New York office is above Penn Station in downtown
Manhattan, while the airport is an hour or more away in heavy traffic.
Even when the train is as fast or faster than the other modes of travel,
I wonder if a cultural adjustment is necessary for Americans to appreciate
that this is so. Unlike travelers in other parts of the world, especially
in Europe, Americans expect to drive short and fly far. This is what
we have done for decades but for this trip to New York, I was able
to buck the trend and take the train.
I rode past the serene New England landscape, munching on Amtrak's
fresh fruit. Soon we passed the New York border. In a lilting, sing-song
train voice, the conductor announced that we would arrive at Penn
Station in a few minutes. The train rode atop the Randalls Island
trestle, with a panoramic spectacle of the Manhattan skyline in view.
We were over the Hell Gate on the grand old arch bridge, with the
suspended spans of the Whitestone and Throggs Neck bridges floating
in the distance. The train dove into its tunnel below the East River,
pulled into Penn Station and eased to a stop. We had arrived. |
|
| Brian Brenner is a Senior Professional Associate
and Structural Engineer working on the Central Artery/Tunnel project
in Boston, Massachusetts. |
|
