The happy way to travel
Travel comparisons should not only quantitative, but qualitative
The Berkshire Eagle once ran an article about the Train Campaign that began "If you ask Karen Christensen, it’s never a bad time to talk about trains.”
When my daughter read that, she shook her head, “They don’t know the half of it.”
Like my colleague Matt Silber, whom you often hear on our podcast, I am what he calls “train-pilled and metro-maxed.” But it’s not a bitter pill, as so many people seem to think. I have lost count of the times I’ve heard, “You took the bus?” and “You took the train?”
I’ve had a chance to compare modes of transport recently because I’ve been spending time at Harvard, as a research associate at the Fairbank Center. This means traveling from the Berkshires in western Massachusetts to Boston, our capitol city in the eastern part of the state.
Many people who live here and in Albany have no idea that there is any passenger train service to Boston. In fact, I’ve had arguments with people who insisted such a service doesn’t exist.
It’s called the Lake Shore Limited. While it is not running at the moment—something we’ve mentioned in previous posts1—I can assure you that it does exist. The Lake Shore Limited has a normal schedule of one train a day in each direction, at inconvenient hours. To have a full day of meetings in Boston, one would have to stay there for 2 nights. Check the hotel prices in Boston and you’ll see that that is utterly impractical.
But there is good news, if you’re staying longer and are flexible. Because there is also once a day bus service at different hours, I can walk out of my house in central Great Barrington, catch a regional bus to Pittsfield, take a Greyhound bus into Boston, then the T to Cambridge. And for the return, I take an Amtrak train from Boston to Pittsfield. The little regional bus that I take to Pittsfield doesn’t run often, but it’s clean and I can use a Boston-based Charlie card to pay. (It’s also almost empty: there’s a serious systems probelm when people aren’t using the public transit that exists.)
Door to door it’s over 6 hours, while the drive would be about 3, and making this trip every couple months has reminded me just how much pleasanter it is to travel by train than by car or bus or airplane.
A while back, I responded to an article in the Financial Times about European trains versus air travel:
Letter: Time and motion is wrong metric for why rail prevails From Karen Christensen, Chief Executive, Berkshire Publishing Group and Founder of the Train Campaign, Great Barrington, MA, US
Peggy Hollinger (“Railways have potential to put legacy airlines on the right track”, Inside Business, January 3) makes a good point about the need to integrate rail-air travel. I founded the Train Campaign in 2011 to restore frequent daily passenger services between New York, Pittsfield, Boston and Albany after flying from Beijing to Shanghai, and walking next door to the rail station for a high-speed train to Hangzhou. Today, of course, I’d take trains the whole way. But her time comparison is off track. Time and motion isn’t the right measure. A one-hour flight really takes three to five hours. A trip by rail takes little more than the actual time in motion. When you take the train, you keep even large bags with you, and you can arrive minutes before departure. You never have to take off your shoes. Of course here in the US we long for anything close to what you have in Europe. But we’re held back by the lack of interstate co-operation, lack of federal leadership, and rail advocacy that focuses not on sensible short regional routes but on the long-distance cross-country trains that will never compete with airlines.
Travel comparisons should not only quantitative, but qualitative. What kind of hours are they? An hour or two on a well-designed, well-run train is positive life time: time to nap or daydream or read, or even work. It can be a restorative period, a pleasure. It’s the closest thing I know to air travel in business or first class - without the champagne, of course, but better because you’re on the ground, with things to see. There’s a delightful sense of solitude: liminality in motion.
Of course, that’s only when the system really works. That’s all too rare, especially in the US. But even on what the train guys refer to as the Late Shore Limited, I stare dreamily at the woodland and long stretches of marsh along the route west and I find myself at peace. Many of the railroad lines in the US, today used only for freight, go through beautiful countryside, with no billboards, no neon stalks, no glaring exits.
My favorite story about that train line comes from Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, an encounter that took place in the middle of the 19th century:
Riding from Boston to Albany, a few years ago, I found myself in a large car, well filled with passengers. The seat next to me was about the only vacant one. At every stopping place we took in new passengers, all of whom, on reaching the seat next to me, cast a disdainful glance upon it, and passed to another car, leaving me in the full enjoyment of a whole form. For a time, I did not know but that my riding there was prejudicial to the interest of the railroad company. A circumstance occurred, however, which gave me an elevated position at once. Among the passengers on this train was [Massachusetts] Gov. George N. Briggs. I was not acquainted with him, and had no idea that I was known to him. Known to him, however, I was, for upon observing me, the governor left his place, and making his way toward me, respectfully asked the privilege of a seat by my side; and upon introducing himself, we entered into a conversation very pleasant and instructive to me. The despised seat now became honored. His excellency had removed all the prejudice against sitting by the side of a negro; and upon his leaving it, as he did, on reaching Pittsfield, there were at least one dozen applicants for the place. The governor had, without changing my skin a single shade, made the place respectable which before was despicable.
When someone expresses surprise that I would take bus or train to Boston instead of driving, my answer isn’t defensive about the length of time but a call to improve a service that offers a quality that I could never find behind a steering wheel.
If you haven’t taken a train recently, please give it a try. Matt Silber’s account of his summer travel offers plenty of inspiration.
The Train Campaign, which hosts the Train Time media project, was inspired by people who longed to see passenger rail service in the US to rival the services they had enjoyed elsewhere in the world. That vision remains strong today!
When I started the Train Campaign, I’d just come back from China and high-speed trains were on my mind. It was a shock to find out that our trains, where they exist, go no faster than trains a hundred years ago. Nevertheless, I believe we should take every opportunity to use public transportation - first, of course, because of climate change (trains and buses are vastly less energy intensive than cars), but also as a way to change your perspective on travel. Do you have a story about a favorite train trip? We’d love to read it.
Stay tuned for a survey that will help us gauge where the most important improvements would be, and don’t hesitate to send your comments. There is lots of background information at the Train Campaign website, too: www.traincampaign.org.
All content in Train Time is shared under a Creative Commons License (CC BY-NC-ND):
Attribution (BY) – Always credit the author and Train Time as the original creator with a tag or link to https://traintime.substack.com.
Non-Commercial (NC) – Content cannot be used for commercial purposes.
No Derivatives (ND) – Content may not be modified, adapted, or repurposed.
Thank you for this article. I enjoy train (and subway, streetcar) travel so much more than being in a jostling bus or car. In a bus I can read or work a bit, but as a car passenger not at all. Unless travelling with someone in a car, it's mostly dead time. Although audio books make the best of driving alone. The current obsession with travel speed is misplaced, as you write here, it's total travel quality, and time, that are important. People flying largely omit altogether the dead time of getting to the airport, filing through Security & numerous other lines, waiting at crowded gates, waiting inside the aircraft to taxi, no electronic devices allowed for the most part. Whereas the train is simple, far fewer restrictions, lines, and far more legroom.