Trains were quickly losing passenger and freight revenue to automobiles between 1920 and 1929. In this 1931 article from the Post, Edward Hungerford, who was considered an authority on railroad history, is nostalgic for the once-popular railroad. In this abridged version, Hungerford suggests railroaders must unite to combat the competition.

[See also: "The Looming Crisis in Mass Transit" from our Jul/Aug 2012 issue.]

CAUTION! DANGER AHEAD!

January 31, 1931—A young man entered St. Lawrence University at Canton, New York, last autumn and confessed that he had never ridden upon a railroad train. One of the officers of the university, an ardent railroad fan, was most interested in this young man and took him, not long ago, for a ride on the local train to Ogdensburg. The boy said that he enjoyed the experience.

There are many boys and girls like this in American colleges today. In my day almost every boy knew the railroad and loved it. But the younger generation today begins to know the railroad as a tradition rather than as a practical or a really close-at-hand necessity.

Not long ago a railroad president went out into the Middle West to the dedication of a railroad station. When it was nearly over, a local banker approached the railroad president and congratulated him upon the elegance of the new building.

“Quite a monument to the railroad passenger business,” said he, in his impressive, bankerish way.

“Mausoleum would be a better word for it today,” replied the railroader.

He was thinking, rather sadly, of that former great factor in American railroading that of late has been slipping pretty rapidly. From a high peak of $1,305,000,000 in passenger-traffic revenues in 1920—the high record of all time—it descended, in an all too brief decade, to $780,000,000 in 1929. Slowly at first; just lately with alarming rapidity—toboggan-slide fashion.

Opened in 1926 the Delaware River Bridge (now called the Benjamin Franklin Bridge) allowed railroad and automobiles to cross the river.

Unfortunately there were, in 1920, problems not only of labor and of labor’s wages, not only of a morale seriously impaired by the long period of government control, but far more portentous, those of that swift-oncoming competitor, the automotive vehicle. The development of the motor car and the motorbus, the perfection of the national highway system, the cheapening of motor fuel all seemed to spell trouble for the important passenger end of the railroad business; while it was felt even then that the motortruck might yet become a serious competitor to the freight end of it.

It has been suggested that the present emergency is large enough to call a railroad convention-presidents, vice presidents and other high executives to continue in session for a week, if necessary, and to thrash out some of the problems that are so vexing to the business as a whole.

At this convention of railroad executives various questions would be pressed:

What shall be the attitude of the railroads toward highways and toward the waterways?

Shall they advocate regulation of the length, weight, and speed of motortrucks and coaches because of their destructive effects upon the highways and the dangers to which they expose private motorists?

What of taxing very heavily such vehicles?

How about meeting the competition of trucks by pick-up and delivery service from the door of the shipper to the consignee?

How about this question of lowered fares?

No battle was ever won by an army not sure of its course and reasonably sure of final victory. Cooperation is vastly more than a word, or a group of words.

It might be possible for the railroads to take a leaf out of the big book in the White House and appoint some sort of capable joint commission to make a careful study of the entire problem in all its many phases. The result of such a study, made by careful and experienced, yet progressive, men should also clear the present atmosphere. It is commended both to the rail carriers and to that far-reaching and powerful organization, the American Railway Association.

The American railroader goes his way slowly—sometimes too slowly. He is facing a real crisis, unquestionably. He has faced other crises—borne of them much more portentous than this one—and has come through them safely and with a smiling face. The present situation is by no means hopeless; the railroads have not ceased to be the very backbone of the nation’s transport system. It is the yellow signal that is displayed, not the red. Caution, not danger.

Caution! Danger Ahead! The Saturday Evening Post

Over time, his interest in the hobby grew—literally. “My eyesight kind of forced me into large-scale,” he jokes. But of course large-scale model trains need large spaces to run in.

So when he retired, Elwood built a 24-by-48-foot train room that “looks pretty big empty, but filled up really, really fast.” His layout is fashioned after a logging and mining railroad, including a 12-stall roundhouse, which real railroads used when backing up a locomotive meant more than shifting to reverse.

Not every railroading collector has the time or space for such layouts, but they all share a similar passion for miniature replicas of the big boys. According to estimates from hobbyist organizations like the National Model Railroad Association, there are as many as 100,000 model train enthusiasts, not including countless others who keep a cherished childhood set in the basement to bring out whenever the grandkids come over.

For model train hobbyists, there are two broad categories: collecting and building. Model railroaders are collectors, of course, often seeking a favorite childhood toy, a scale engine and cars that evoke other interests, or parts of a matched set that they’re on a hunt to complete. While a few collectors may only display their trains, most model railroaders operate their own miniature railroad empires, some letting their imaginations run wild with fantasy layouts; others recreating railroads they’ve read about or knew from childhood. These set-ups often run like the real thing, moving on meticulous timetables with scale goods being delivered logically to scale markets.

Model trains come in several sizes or scales, and many collectors start small and work their way up. Keith Lewis, for example, started with a train set his parents gave him one Christmas. He worked with HO scale (real size ratio, 1:87) for a while, but then saw a large G-scale set (real size ratio, 1:22) that made him sell all his other trains and start again. Keith also collects sets of Christmas-issue trains, and cars that are lettered for his home state of Delaware or that have his daughter Tiffany’s name on them. Like most hobbyists, Keith won’t buy an engine or car if he can’t display it as well as run it. But he keeps the original boxes, knowing that collectors value the packaging almost as much as the model itself.

If you set your mind to collecting or expanding on that old set in the basement, start by checking out local clubs and train shops or shows—you’ll find listings in your telephone directory, through ads in your local paper, or online at Web sites such as traincollectors.org or the National Model Railroad Association site, nmra.org.

But once you start down this track, it can become a lifelong pursuit, notes Elwood. “You never want to finish,” he says. “There’s always something you want to do next.”

A Love of Rails The Saturday Evening Post

Whistle Stops The Saturday Evening Post

The evening sun tinged the smoke a reddish-gray as it curled up from Gary’s steel mills. Indiana corn fields, ragged with last year’s stubble and damp with winter runoff, awaited spring planting. In eastern Ohio, night came on and the land went black. Blinking red crossing gates, the sodium lamps of main streets, and the window glow of farmhouses streamed past the window. 
Intermodal freight trains—double stacked with scores of shipping 
containers—rushed by the opposite way. After Toledo, I went back to my coach seat, wrapped myself in a sports coat, and slept to Pittsburgh, the bump and sway of the rails a familiar balm.

In the previous year, I’d ridden 26,000 miles on Amtrak trains, 
researching a book on the future of passenger rail. This coach seat to 
New York was a freebie earned from 
all the miles racked up on my Amtrak 
Rewards card. I could have flown, 
as most Americans do on business trips, but I wanted “train time”: the 
opportunity to unwind, read news
papers, write on my laptop, and zone out on the landscape.

Only 2 percent of Americans have ridden an intercity passenger train, 
not a surprising statistic considering the median age of the population is 
37 and American railroads gave up 
passenger trains in 1971, when Amtrak was created by Congress. Since that time, Amtrak has provided only a 
bare-bones national network, so for most Americans, a train isn’t a travel option. Finally, that may be changing.

Railroads and passenger trains are poised to expand in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. The $4-per-gallon gas crisis in 2008; the meltdown of the domestic auto industry; jammed and crumbling highways; stressed airports; a renewed focus on infrastructure 
improvements; the drive for a greener, more efficient economy; and the awarding of billions in federal stimulus dollars for high-speed trains all bode well for rail transportation. Even the big freight railroads, who own nearly all the nation’s rail infrastructure, have signaled a new cooperative attitude 
regarding passenger trains. They know that when the Great Recession is over, business will bloom again, and they’ll need government help to expand the infrastructure—not just for passenger trains, but for the intermodal trains that are surely taking market share from the trucking industry.

Warren Buffett, perhaps the country’s most respected investor and one with an expansive time horizon, sees American railroads as an industry 
with a bright future. Last fall, he and his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, plunked down $26.7 billion to acquire Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway (BNSF), the nation’s second biggest railroad. It already owned about one-third of the company’s stock.

Buffet, the so-called Oracle of Omaha who promotes value investing, called the purchase “a huge bet on that company. It’s an all-in 
wager on the economic future of the United States.”

A rail renaissance is underway. “Last century was the 
automotive century. I think 
the 21st is fixing to be the 
railroad century,” says Gil 
Carmichael, a former federal railroad administrator and the founder of the Intermodal Transportation Institute at the University of Denver.

Making it happen will 
require investment. Since the 1960s, the nation has lost nearly half of its rail infrastructure 
as railroads consolidated, 
removed tracks, and abandoned whole routes. Still, 150,000 miles remain, and these tracks run from city center to city center.

Carmichael and others are promoting Interstate II, or the Steel Interstate, a plan to double and triple track 20,000 to 30,000 miles of existing freight right of way. The tracks would be grade 
separated—meaning intersecting roads would run under or over rather than across the tracks. Intermodal freights could run 90 mph, passenger trains up to 125 mph, and heavy coal and grain trains could go their own slow speed. Initially, power would come from 
diesel locomotives, but eventually the corridors could be electrified, getting juice from greener sources, such as wind, solar, and biomass plants. 
Nuclear power is back in the mix, too.

“No leap in technology is needed to electrify trains. We know how to do that. The right of ways are already in place—we just need to expand them,” Carmichael tells me. “Putting billions into a rail corridor program would 
create jobs and build for the future.”

Some states are already ahead of the curve in this regard. In 2006, Amtrak and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation spent $145 million to lay welded rail, put in concrete ties, straighten curves, erect an electrical 
infrastructure, and create a high-speed service on what’s known as the 
Keystone Corridor.

But nationwide, improving transportation infrastructure—whether it’s a 
rail line, a canal, an airport, or a highway—seldom comes quickly, cheaply, or without controversy. Congress created the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission to recommend where the country should concentrate its resources in 
the coming decades. At first, the 
commission wasn’t going to consider rail, reasoning there wasn’t enough data to compare it to highways.

Then, Frank Busalacchi, a commission member and head of Wisconsin’s Department of Transportation, formed a separate “passenger rail working group.” He gathered experts, held 
public hearings, and even got some commissioners to board a train. In its final report issued in early 2008, the commission called for spending $225 billion annually on infrastructure, 
including $8 billion to $9 billion each year on intercity rail.

“Those commissioners who thought trains were old fashioned got their eyes opened. When you look out 50 years with perhaps 100 million more 
citizens, it’s clear you cannot meet the transportation requirements of this country with just air travel and highways,” says Busalacchi. There has to be investment and a shift to more mass transportation by rail.

Without rail, the study estimated, the country will need nine new airports the size of Denver’s and a doubling of the current 49,000-mile interstate highway system.

At 5 a.m., the Capitol Limited dropped me and a handful of passengers in downtown Pittsburgh, where we had a two-and-half-hour wait 
before boarding the Pennsylvanian to New York. The station was chilly; food came from vending machines, and 
outside, the city was still asleep. I walked a few blocks but failed to find a restaurant for coffee and breakfast.

If I’d been in Germany or a dozen other First-World countries running 
national rail systems, my connecting train would have waited across the platform or arrived within minutes. The station would be busy with people, restaurants, and newsstands.

It used to be that way in America. We had grand terminals and the best rail system in the world, built in the 
19th and early 20th centuries by privately owned railroads that were subsidized by government through land grants, easements, legislation, and generous loans. Railroads made modern life 
possible and knitted together a disparate people and sprawling geography, said John Hankey, a historian and 
former curator of the Baltimore and Ohio (B&O) Railroad Museum.

“Good transportation is that important. By nature, we ought to be five 
different countries. The reason we aren’t is the railroad,” he says.

But railroads also were monopolies, big corporations wielded by tycoons and Wall Streeters. Their errant ways and fearsome reputation lead to heavy government regulation. When automobiles and cheap oil came along, federal and state governments saw no need to help the private railroads. Instead, they poured billions into subsidizing roads.

The decline in train ridership was well underway by World War II, 
when military research and development in aviation—again funded by government—led to the emergence of commercial aviation. But the stake 
in the heart of the privately run 
passenger train was the interstate highway system. Those wide, concrete swaths with nary an intersection or stoplight beckoned us to hit the roads in tens of millions of gas guzzlers churned out by Detroit.

For the average American, cars 
versus trains became a simple process of substitution, even an expression of freedom. No longer captive to a big 
organization like the railroad, we could go where we wanted, when we wanted.

“We’re Americans. We don’t like to be restricted. We embraced the automobile. It would have been denying our nature not to,” Hankey says.

At the time, trains seemed passé, 
a relic of another age. Abandoned 
by passengers, their freight business 
decimated by trucking, railroads 
were in terrible shape. In 1970, the 
nation’s largest railroad company, 
the Penn Central, went bankrupt and shook the country’s financial system. Other railroads would follow unless government acted.

To avoid nationalizing the industry, Congress came up with Amtrak, an 
entity that would relieve the railroads of their passenger trains. In return, the railroads agreed to give Amtrak priority over their routes, but even today 
passenger trains frequently are shunted to sidings to make way for freights. Sometimes, it’s because there’s just one track and not enough room for all the traffic out there. No surprise then that Amtrak has a long history of poor time performance and marginal service on shared right of ways.

The problems really go back to the beginning, when Congress gave Amtrak two mandates—run a nationwide 
system and create efficiencies that would turn a profit. Amtrak has never made a profit, and in its 39-year history has lurched from one financial crisis to another. To stay solvent, it’s needed about a billion dollars a year in subsidy.

In terms of government dollars going into the transportation modes, that’s 
a drop in the bucket. But more importantly, profitability of passenger trains was a ridiculous notion to begin with, says William Withuhn, former curator of Transportation at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

“We’ve been hearing since 1971 that if Amtrak was reformed, got new equipment, or got rid of certain trains and routes, it would make a profit. It’s all a crock,” he says. “Passenger trains do not make a profit. Neither do roads or airports. That’s not the purpose of transportation. It’s national cohesion; it’s about moving people where they need to be. The reason America doesn’t have a world-class passenger rail 
transportation system is because it hasn’t paid for it.”

When the Pennsylvanian left 
Pittsburgh shortly after dawn, it took nearly five hours to reach Harrisburg 
(2 hours longer than driving the Pennsylvania Turnpike), but finally I had breakfast and a couple of newspapers to read. And for the first time, I traveled over the famous Horseshoe curve near Altoona, which was built in the 1850s to climb the Alleghenies. At the state capital, the Pennsylvanian switched out its diesel for an electrical locomotive, shook off the doldrums and cranked up to 100 mph. It wasn’t like the TGV I’d ridden in France, but it was a fast train—a demonstration of what can happen with investment. Trains aren’t just rapid but regular on this corridor—14 times daily each way—and frequency is what builds ridership. It’s the mantra I heard from rail experts everywhere—dependable, frequent, and fast service on corridors 100 to 500 miles long 
(distances too close to fly and too 
inconvenient to drive) are the sweet spots for rail.

Like Pennsylvania, a few state DOTs subsidize Amtrak service between their major cities, even going as far to 
purchase their own trains 
because Amtrak is too cash strapped to provide equipment. Washington has put $100 million into the Amtrak Cascades corridor between Portland and Seattle. Wisconsin subsidizes the Hiawatha service between Milwaukee and Chicago and plans an 
extension to Madison. Illinois will soon have 110-mph-Amtrak service between Springfield and St. Louis.

California’s efforts dwarf all others. In the past 20 years, it has invested $2.2 billion in corridor trains and created a network of feeder buses and light rail that extends Amtrak 
service to 80 percent of its residents. In January 2010, it received $2 billion of stimulus money to begin building a 200-mph-train from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Florida received $1.25 billion for a high-speed train from Tampa to Orlando. Both will run on new right of ways separate from Amtrak and the freight railroads. If these investments between the states and federal government continue, America may see its first true bullet train in 10 years and an Amtrak system that fulfills its promise. There may even be an Interstate II.

In Philadelphia, I switched to the Acela, currently America’s fastest train. Capable of 200 mph, the Acela averages just 80 mph on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington, 
D.C., because of curves, a patchwork electrical system, and tunnels that go back to the Civil War. The corridor 
infrastructure needs billions in rehabilitation to make it truly high-speed.

Still, more than 100 trains move along it each day, and Amtrak captures half of the air/rail market between the big East Coast cities where trains never went entirely out of fashion.

My Acela crossed the Delaware River into New Jersey, ran through the gritty streets of Trenton, and blew by the auto traffic on I-95. In the Meadowlands, the Manhattan skyline and a bright, full moon rose up on the horizon.

It took 22 hours to cover the 900 miles from Chicago. In the 1930s, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broadway Limited did the same run from Chicago to New York in 16 hours. And it didn’t arrive at a charmless, utilitarian Penn Station complex, but at Pennsylvania Station, a gem of Beaux-Arts style 
architecture, and truly one of the great buildings of New York.

They tore it down in 1964 in the name of urban renewal, another 
casualty of a country that allowed its passenger rail system to go to seed.

As the preservationists said then of Pennsylvania Station—never again.

Waiting on a Train The Saturday Evening Post