Two nights a week I work in a newsroom housed inside a former train station. Not just any train station, but one of the showpieces of New England, a majestic red-brick structure designed by McKim, Mead and White and topped by a venerable Seth Thomas clock tower modeled on one in Siena, Italy. For decades, the building was the pride of the valley. People arrived in the heart of the city, one block from government offices and two blocks from the city green. The area was filled with mom-and-pop shops, restaurants, department stores and banks. The city thrived, due in part to rail service.
But then the railroads deteriorated as America's priorities changed. Paths were cleared through the countryside for highways and then those highways were widened to six and eight lanes to accommodate more and bigger cars, more tractor trailers to haul mangos across the country to us from California. Malls were built in outlying areas for drivers (usually solo), which led to subdivisions further from the heart of the city, and such pockets of sprawl popped up all the way to the Massachusetts border.
Rail service in western Massachusetts was better in the early '80s, when passengers could board in Springfield or Northampton and go straight to Montreal, than it was in the '90s, when that service was lost.
During each of my nightly shifts in the newsroom, a train arrives and deposits passengers onto a platform outside. Yes, the train tracks still exist, as does the rail service (barely), but passengers no longer use this majestic building. They exit onto an unprotected platform and walk around the building through litter and weeds to meet whoever is there to pick them up at the end of their day's travels.
As I sit in the former train station, removing misspelled words and run-on sentences from the copy of young reporters, I always look up at the sound of the arriving train. The distant hoot heralding its arrival and the mournful sighing sound as it comes to rest at the platform must prick some deep-seated collective memory because I look up and begin daydreaming about hopping the train. It recalls the opening sentence from Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar: "Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it." A minute or two later, the train revs up and heads into the darkness, north toward Massachusetts or south toward Manhattan.
A great nation deserves a better railroad system than the one we have. We've got railroad museums, railroad societies, model train societies where grown men wear conductor's hats and send miniature replica trains around handmade landscapes. There are virtually no children who do not love trains, and we go to great lengths to preserve short spurs of tracks for restored steam engines to give them joy rides. We expend all this positive energy on trains, yet we relegate the actual experience of modern rail service to dimly lit platforms and weed-choked sidewalks.
Today, ridership is up on all branches of rail service, due in large part to the spike in gasoline prices. If gas prices level off or decline, many people may return to their solo driving, because the experience of rail service is not inviting as it now stands.
Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts wants federal stimulus money to expand commuter rail service between Springfield and Worcester. Gov. Jodi Rell of Connecticut has talked about the need for expanded "and even smarter" rail service, but progress on this front has been paltry at best—a few extra trips on Metro-North branch lines and track upgrades. Patrick has joined Rell to promote high-speed rail service between Springfield and New Haven. But as yet, it's all talk.
Blogger NB Politicus from New Britain notes, "Connecticut is a tale of two places when it comes to use of public transportation. There's the Gold Coast and the Metro North line with hundreds of thousands of riders on trains that need replacement and upgrade. Then there is the rest of us in central and eastern Connecticut with limited bus services and downtowns where the biggest retail businesses may be parking lots."
