Creative Trains

I agree with everyone who says it's a good time to begin thinking about trains - to bring them back and invent new ways of using them.

Amtrak has an auto-train option on its New York-Florida route, where you drive your car onto the train and then sit back for 900 miles. The motel and car rental industries might lobby against it, but wouldn't it be great if this was expanded? Save wear and tear on highways and on the environment. Save gas.

Trains - even high-speed trains like they have in Europe - will never be able to compete with the speed of air travel. But if trains were fully modernized, if people could use their time on the train as thinking time, writing time, away from interruptions, more people would choose them. Not necessarily just for holidays.

Some notes:

There was limited WI-FI on the Coast Starlight - only available on a limited basis, in the first-class-only Parlour Car. Things like that are simple enough and obvious enough to change. (By the way, my Blackberry worked nearly all the way from LA-Seattle. Except for a stretch through the Cascades. And - unlike being on a plane - I wasn't asked to switch it off).

There were electrical outlets in most of the coach seats, and in every sleeper room, good for keeping your laptop and your camera and your cell phone charged.

I saw some un-tapped opportunities on the train. For instance, I wanted there to be a Coast Starlight interactive radio, where I could plug in my ear phones and get well-produced information on the place we were passing through that very moment.  (The National Parks volunteers in the observation car - along certain stretches - provided an informed commentary beautifully. Thank you, dear Volunteers!  But there are only so many seats in the observation car.  Many people didn't get to hear what they had to say. Audio accessible by ear phone, by lap top, by IPOD, would be terrific).

Culturally, historically, people who ride trains tend to want to get away from computers and gadgetry. They're more interested in meeting people in the community seating that still exists in Amtrak dining rooms. They want to enjoy the scenery. But there's room for everybody on a train. New generations of train riders want to be able to choose how much they tune in or tune out.

And in the winter, when days are shorter, there is a lot less passing scenery.(A good compensation might be a web site for each of the various train routes, with frequently asked questions, relevant links and video/ Too expensive? Get local high school students to help produce the material, drawing on their own community).

I don't want this to sound like a rant, but the more I think about it the more I realize there are so many ways train travel can become less off-beat, more relevant and current. More widely-used, to have a bigger conservation impact.

The Coast Starlight Communities Network has produced a paper looking at ways this particular train can be more, setting an example for other routes. It's called "The Coast Starlight: Improving America's Premier Long Distance Train".  It's available on-line. (http://www.coaststarlight.net/)