Too much chugga, not enough choo-choo
Indignity Vol. 5, No. 35
ANDY ROONEY 2.0
The Trains Are Too Slow
I'M SUPPOSED TO go to Montreal. Flying costs too much and wastes too much time at the airports, and they just tried to fly that one American plane into Canadian winter and it ended up upside down. That leaves two ways to get there: rent a car, or take a train.
I made the drive to Montreal this past summer. It was kind of a haul. It was supposed to be six hours from Manhattan but stretched out to seven or more with bad weather, not counting the hour or so we spent stuck in traffic trying to swing by the airport to pick up someone else. Airports! Airports can ruin your trip when you're not even flying. The food and gas options were harrowingly sparse on the northern half of the drive, and the restroom option that went with the gas option was terrible. It was sort of impressive to end up in a whole foreign country by driving the equivalent of a really bad trip to the Delaware beaches; still, it was a chore.
What about the train? Amtrak runs one daily train from Penn Station to Montreal's Gare Centrale. Gare Centrale is a short walk from the hotel where I'm staying. The train tickets are startlingly cheap, definitely cheaper than a three-day car rental out of New York.
The train takes 11 hours and 41 minutes.
Eleven hours! And 41 minutes! New York and Montreal are about 330 miles apart as the crow flies. When a crow sets its mind to flying, it can travel 180 miles in a day. A bird, that is, would get to Montreal in less than two days, which means it would be journeying at more than one-quarter the speed of an Amtrak international passenger train. And the crow flies only by daylight, and it has to stop and eat a lot to keep its energy up.
In Europe, a train could take you between Berlin and Amsterdam, a distance of 359 miles, in 6 hours and 20 minutes. The 267 miles between Amsterdam and Paris would zoom by in 3 hours and 20 minutes. From Paris to Barcelona, 516 miles, would be 6 hours and 15 minutes. Or you could go all the way from Paris to Rome, 687 miles, in 11 hours and 15 minutes—still less time than it takes Amtrak to go from New York to Montreal.
In the United States, the Trump administration set out last week to kill funding for high-speed rail in California—while the proponents of the California project countered that they are "focused on getting the Merced to Bakersfield system operational between 2030 and 2033 and connecting the state's major population centers via Gilroy in the north and Palmdale in the south within the next 20 years as funding becomes available." It's not clear which position is more inimical to the goal of establishing high-speed rail travel in the United States: the active denial, or the passive non-accomplishment. As the KABC coverage noted:
Voters first approved $10 billion in bond money in 2008 for a project designed to shuttle riders between San Francisco and Los Angeles in less than three hours. It was slated to cost $33 billion and be finished by 2020.
The term "high-speed rail" is, by now, a fakeout. It makes it sound as if the technology is some over-the-horizon miracle, when high-speed rail is simply what other continents use for rail. The problem of how to get a train from New York to Montreal in four hours or so was solved, as a matter of engineering, in the 20th century. Yet you'd have better luck trying to get to a Mars base. Mars may be an idiotic boondoggle, but at least people with power and influence are interested in getting there.
More that 20 years ago, the New York State Department of Transportation published a study about how to speed up travel in the rail corridor from New York City to Montreal. Full high-speed rail, the report said, would have required new routes and would have cost more than $4 billion. But a package of incremental improvements to the existing rail and customs systems, according to the study, could have pared three hours off the trip for a mere $40 million.
In the end, the choice was evidently neither. Or less than neither. The baseline Amtrak trip to Montreal described in the study took 10 hours and 15 minutes. Between then and now, it got an hour and 26 minutes longer.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, February 23, 2025
★★★ Birds made a racket out back. The morning had been cloudless, but the afternoon sun was filtered and bleary. Salt muck still covered the stoop and the foot of the steps, and a grimy heap of snow, melted into roughness, lingered in a tree box. It took a block of walking before the chill accumulated enough to require zipping up the parka over a t-shirt. By the time a drugstore had been found that had most of the shopping list in stock and not locked away, the hint of warmth had gone.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
Click on this box to find the Indignity Morning Podcast archive.
TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
GOT SOMETHING YOU need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from A Thousand Ways to Please a Husband: with Bettina’s Best Recipes, by Louise Bennett Weaver and Helen Cowles LeCron, published in 1917, available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
Invalid Sandwiches
Take a quarter of a pound of raw fillet of beef, scrape it into fine threads, and place it on small delicately cut sandwiches.
Pepper and salt to taste. These are most nourishing and strengthening, but it is well not to let the patient know the contents, as many would refuse to eat them if they knew they were raw.
[Ed. note: Please do not feed people raw meat without their informed consent.]
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
