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The first effective land transport was steam trains. Suddenly, people and freight could move where they wanted, when they wanted, faster than the wind or waves would carry them. The Iron Horse gave the world freedom from geography. It was a bright line divider - before was a static population, effectively bound to the land; after was the lure of the Open Spaces. Go west, young man.
This runs deep in the Western spirit, and so music has picked this up and lovingly preserved it long past the days when passenger rail is all but dead. The songs have an excitement to them, one that lets us imagine life on a Kansas farm. Holding up the plow team to watch the train go past. The Rock Island Line is one of the storied railroads of this land, old enough that Abraham Lincoln acted as legal counsel to them in a lawsuit.
And storied enough to have one of the great old songs written for it. Pretty much everyone has covered this one. Here's Little Richard, who pours on extra coal and opens all the valves.
Rock Island Line (Songwriter: Kelly Pace)
The Rock Island Line it's a mighty good road
The Rock Island Line it’s a road to ride
The Rock island Line it’s a mighty good road
If you want to ride it got to ride it like you find it
Get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island Line.
Oh cloudy in the west and it looked like rain.
Around the curve come a passenger train,
North bound train on the south bound track.
He did alright leaving but he won’t be back.
Whe Rock Island Line it's a mighty good roadThe railroad has been passed by, at least for passenger traffic. Short trips are handled more conveniently and less expensively by automobiles. Longer trips are handled faster and less expensively by plane. The railroads are doing a booming business, on freight - but on freight alone.
The Rock Island Line it’s a road to ride
The Rock island Line it’s a mighty good road
If you want to ride it got to ride it like you find it
Get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island Line.
Oh I may be right and I may be wrong
But you gonna miss me when I’m gone.
The engineer said before he died
Tthere where 2 more drinks that he’d like to try
Conductor said "what could they be"
A hot cup of coffee and a cold glass of tea.
he Rock Island Line it's a mighty good road
The Rock Island Line it’s a road to ride
The Rock island Line it’s a mighty good road
If you want to ride it got to ride it like you find it
Get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island Line.
But the distant whistle still stirs the wanderlust, and not just in the souls of Progressives. I don't want to have to pay for the boondoggle that is high speed rail or mass transit light rail, but the romance is still there. Just look at the songs. You don't get songs like this for airplanes.
7 comments:
Oh, Borepatch, I totally disagree. It's not the Left who romanticizes travel and wanderlust, it's the Right. The Left wants you to stay on the farm and toil for your betters far away where you can't be heard. Or live in an inner-city hovel and labor in large factories where you are easy to organize into labor unions.
The Left long ago left behind the serious economic critique of capitalism because no one believes it anymore, not even them. When poor people have TVs and cars, the economic argument against capitalism falls a little flat.
For a long time now the Left has been using a cultural critique that basically comes down to "You rubes are too stupid to rule yourselves." The car frees us up to live where we want and work where we want. This allows us to live in places where the Left doesn't want to see us, and quit crappy jobs and work somewhere else rather than have no other option than labor disputes. The same car that frees us from the chains of geography frees us from the conditions they need to keep us in so that they can rule over us. By permitting us to make our own decisions, the car makes them irrelevant.
By making it hard to drive, with high taxes, high tolls, roads that are too small and congested, they are trying to put us back in our “place.” That’s why they love trains so much. We can be forced to live where they put the rails. We can be forced to work where those rails lead. They have power over us.
They can unionize the train workers and bring the entire country down with one strike. Watch what happens in France or Italy when their transport workers unions go on strike. And the people who control those unions, professional leftists, not conductors and engineers, have power.
It’s not the romance that they are after, it’s the power.
The high speed rail commission in California is recommending that the project essentially be scrapped. After announcing a 3-fold increase in projected costs a few months ago, the mandated group basically said it was crap. The LA Times is still fighting for it, despite common sense to the contrary.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/01/03/BAKF1MKFOG.DTL&tsp=1
Sean, I grew up in a strongly progressive (liberal, actually) house. I don't think that's what my family wanted to do. I do think that they wanted to help poor people (although their policy prescriptions were wrong in my opinion).
But I do think that the was a nostalgia for old trains, even back then in the 1970s. Maybe it's different with Progressives today.
Midwest Chick, I saw that. Even California knows that it's running out of other people's money.
@Borepatch: I wasn't talking about those who believed the lies they were told, just those who made up the lies in the first place. The liars are the ones who will benefit the most from being put in charge.
Sean, I think you're falling victim to ... oh, whose rule is that .. right, Heinlein's Razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice." Old Bonaparte put it slightly differently: "Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
Borepatch: "The instinct isn't rational, carefully thought out, weighing the costs and benefits."
Actually, I think it is. The big problem with the progressives' analysis is that there's one factor they leave out: distance.
Where do the classic examples of high-speed passenger trains come from? Japan and Europe. Neither Japanese nor European trains have to deal with the vast distances that are typical in the United States. Japanese cities have some of the highest population densities in the world, and some European cities aren't much bigger. The vast majority of commuters live within thirty miles or so of where they work, and residences and workplaces are highly concentrated. Progressives look at these places, where high-speed rail is economically viable (sort of), and think "gee, we can certainly do what they do here!" They don't understand that a huge sprawling megalopolis like Greater Los Angeles is simply too spread out to make high-speed rail work. You would need hundreds of separate lines, hundreds of trains. The money isn't there, and neither is the land.
Well, I agree with Sean on what "most" progressives think. I don't think that they're malicious people (most of my family swing this way, and they're fine people).
I do think that they're wrong.
Wolfwalker, you may be right about a core group. I expect that at the heart of that you'll find a very Clintonian world view - never let a crisis go to waste and all that.
However, high speed rail doesn't pay even in Europe where the population densities are much higher and the distances are much lower. Ryanair and the other low cost air carriers are eating the train's lunch even there. The SNCF only survives on massive subsidies, because the French government can't stand to see a massively expensive prestige project fail.
But even there the economics run 2:1 towards air.
Not for daily commuting, Borepatch. Airlines are highly efficient over long ranges, less so over short ranges - by which I mean sixty miles or less.
On the other hand, over-all, I do agree that passenger rail is generally not profitable. It never has been. The railroad barons of the 1800s made their fortunes for three basic reasons:
1) they got the land they needed ultra-cheap
2) they ran freight trains over the same rails, often as part of the same trains. Freight was MUCH more profitable than passengers.
3) they had a captive market - if you wanted to travel a long distance in a short time, or (more important for farmers) get your goods to market before they spoiled, rail was pretty much your only option. You paid what the railroad demanded, or you watched your crops (and your year's income) rot in your fields or your barn.
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