Three years ago I was in Paris and having something to eat in one of the several street corner cafés within a two-minute walk from my hotel. It was a weekday evening, but every table was taken, both inside the restaurants and spilling out onto the sidewalk. It was the same every night I was…
I know it doesn’t seem like it, but little by little, we are making progress. One of these fine mornings, we could all wake up and find that several Amtrak routes have been expanded, that the Sunset Limited and the Cardinal are running every day, that service between New Orleans and Orlando has been restored,…
We’re constantly subjected to news stories, opinion columns and letters-to-editors from people who believe that passenger trains should either operate at a profit or cease to exist. “Subsidy” is anathema to those folks. Setting aside the inconsistency of that position given that all other forms of public transportation are subsidized, operating rail passenger service without…
Years ago, before I moved to Hawaii, I was working in Hartford, Connecticut. One of my co-workers was a woman I remember quite clearly because she had no interest whatsoever in travel. And I mean any travel. She had never been as far south as New York City or as far north as Boston. I…