The Tribune 01.06.05

For four years in the 1960’s, I rode with my Sears steamer trunk on the train twice a year between home and college - a Spartan way to travel by today’s student standards, but one made necessary by the strain my choice of an out-of-state university placed on my family’s finances. At Christmas, while most of my college friends were already at home decorating the tree with their families, I was on the train to Houston, eating sandwiches and hard boiled eggs I had packed for the 30-hour trip home.

To pass the time, I would imagine I was riding a train from a bygone era, when trains were the staple of travel, plush parlor cars pampered the upper class, and every modern city had its own version of Grand Central Station. The romance of trains hit me hard then, and I’ve loved them ever since.

But today’s trains are at a crossroads: they play a vital role in Virginia’s growing economy, but we fund them as if they were a vestige of the distant past.

Trains continue to be transportation workhorses, even though far more road miles than rail miles now crisscross the continent. Trains today carry triple the tons of freight per mile of track they carried 30 years ago, even though the number of miles of rail is less than half what it was then. On the passenger side, demand explodes whenever fast, efficient new rail service is provided. Examples are Virginia Railway Express in Northern Virginia, which has doubled ridership since 1993 and now carries over 3 million passengers per year; the Cascades line in Washington state, which met its 12-year ridership projections in its first three years; and California’s Capital Corridor line, which increased ridership 35% in five years.

A conservative estimate is that trains carried the freight equivalent of over 42,000 trucks per day in Virginia in 2001. Add together the number of passengers who rode trains in that year (3.6 million) and the number of tons of rail freight hauled (189 million) and you have the equivalent of 16 million car and truck trips taken off Virginia highways in a single year!

Yet our public investment in rail is miniscule compared to our investment in roads. Over the past 25 years, the federal government has spent 48% of its transportation dollars on highways and only 4% on rails. Virginia spends 78.7% of our state transportation dollars on highways and 0% - yes, that’s zero percent - on rails.

In a characteristically visionary move, Governor Mark Warner recently appointed a commission to recommend ways to enhance rail as part of Virginia’s 21^st century transportation system. I was privileged to serve on the commission. I’m encouraged that a Virginia Governor understands rail’s critical role in the future of the Commonwealth - encouraged enough to keep the dear old Sears steamer trunk stored in my basement ready for one more cross-country trip on the train.