Tuesday, 4/9

Is it weird that I've never been on a passenger train? Or is that one of those things that makes me uniquely American?

I can't quite decide.

In two weeks I'll be riding on the first passenger trains of my life, first heading from Berlin to Leipzig and then a few days later from Leipzig to visit Loraine's friends in Weissenfels (and, of course, back both ways). And while passenger train ridership is nothing out of the ordinary for Europeans—in fact, it's part of their everyday life—for Americans train ridership is something very unique, something so extraordinary that people look at you the same way they'd look as if you told them you came from another planet.

You know, the kind of looks I get a lot.

Of course, part of that has to do with the way we live vs. the way Germans (in this case) live. They have a well-funded train system that runs on time, and gets them where they need to go almost as quickly (and in some cases quicker) than an airline would. We have a woefully underfunded train system that only goes certain places at certain times, and even then only has something like a 40% shot of getting there when it's supposed to. Just because of that I can see why Germans ride trains and why Americans avoid them like black flies at a summer beach.

But it wasn't always that way.

Study enough history and you know that for a big chunk of America's lifetime trains were the only way to get from here to there. In fact, up until the 1960s passenger trains even pulled into and out of Marquette several times a day. But with the advent of both the interstate highway system and commonplace air travel train ridership plummeted, and in the case of a place like here, totally disappeared. Traveling by train is now about as common as sending a telegram to someone...assuming, of course, you can still send telegrams.

That might be a blog for another day.

Germans, of course, embrace mass transit as a way to cut down on air pollution, while Americans don't seem to give a rip about that. But cities in Germany are a lot closer together than they are in the US (the distance between Berlin & Leipzig, for example, is about the same as the distance between Marquette & Houghton), and unless you have the high speed trains available in the rest of the world train travel between any major US cities just takes too long. I can see why flying or driving makes more sense.

It's just too bad we've given up on it.

Anyway, it should be a fun time, and a very unique experience. So unique, in fact, that I doubt that more than a handful of people (if even that many) reading this can welcome us to the club.

(jim@wmqt.com)