RICHMOND, Va. -- What, lawyer John Krieger asked an audience here the other day, is the only real advance in transportation over the past half century?
Those in attendance at the 2010 Southeast High Speed Rail Conference at the Greater Richmond Convention Center squirmed in their seats as they struggled for an answer. Someone ventured the Interstate highway system? Another suggested, the GPS?
Nope, none of those, said Krieger, staff attorney and congressional lobbyist for the U.S. Public Interest Research Group. It's the development of rolling luggage - those ubiquitous bags with little wheels and pull-out handles. But moving people from place to place isn't among the major innovations since 1960 - "so certainly, we can do better," he said.
Krieger's wry point was that at the start of the second decade of the 21st century, we're still using essentially the transportation modes of the mid-20th: cars, trucks, buses, airplanes and, to a limited degree, passenger trains. But we've spent a lot more building roads and subsidizing car and air travel than modernizing rail travel.
In 1960, passenger rail was being viewed by many railroads as a burden; some had already abandoned once-popular passenger train service in favor of more lucrative freight service; and the bankruptcy of the once powerful and later merged Pennsylvania and New York Central railroads was a decade away. That unhappy event heralded the end of the passenger train era in the United States and led a year later to the creation of Amtrak, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation. It operates many of the remaining passenger trains in this country.
Now, 40 years later, as North Carolina and other parts of the South cope with the effects of dramatic population growth, traffic congestion and the post 9/11 inconveniences of airplane travel, the Obama administration is pushing for a remake of a rail passenger system that once was the predominant way of moving people about the country. The administration is making available more than $10 billion in grants to 31 states to create a system of high-speed trains that could link 80 percent of the nation's population by 2035. It will cost many billions of dollars.
And here's the thing: North Carolina finds itself well-positioned to tap into that funding to rebuild its rail lines and significantly increase its ability to help move people up and down the East Coast.
That will happen if rail planners succeed in linking the Northeast Corridor of existing fast trains between Washington and Boston with the Southeast High Speed Rail Corridor, sending fast trains from Richmond south through Raleigh, Charlotte, and Atlanta with connections to South Florida.
One reason the Tar Heel state is well prepared to take advantage of the high speed program is its commitment over the past two decades, dating to Gov. Jim Martin's administration, to restoring passenger rail service. The rail division at the N.C. Department of Transportation has worked with existing Amtrak service and contracted for operation of state-supported trains restoring daily round-trip service between Raleigh and Charlotte with connections north and south. Those trains, especially the state-sponsored train sets, are clean, comfortable and a bargain for travelers who don't own cars or don't want to fight traffic in the Triangle, through the Triad and into Charlotte.
Since the 1990s the division has made steady progress along the Raleigh-Charlotte line, reducing travel times by nearly an hour and improving the reliability of service. These incremental improvements have not been cheap or fast, but they have come regularly, giving passengers an attractive and increasingly competitive alternative to driving.
But the Southeast High Speed Rail project envisions something new. It aims to resurrect a link between Richmond and Raleigh via Petersburg by rebuilding a now-abandoned rail line south of Petersburg. It once was part of the main line for the storied Orange Blossom Special from New York to Miami.
You may know the Orange Blossom Special as the national anthem of the serious fiddler. You may have heard a recording of Johnny Cash singing the song for inmates at San Quentin in 1965. But few remember when it was a famous fast train, pulled in the South by big locomotives of the Seaboard Air Line railroad company.
Here's a verse: "Hey talk about a-ramblin'/ She's the fastest train on the line/ Talk about a-travellin'/ She's the fastest train on the line/ It's that Orange Blossom Special/ Rollin' down the Seaboard line."
The train operated from 1925 to 1953, and its locomotives are said to have exceeded speeds of 79 miles per hour. The Southeast Corridor, however, aims to do considerably better than that, targeting speeds of about 90-110 miles per hour in the longer stretches.
This is not, sadly, the contemporary definition of high speed rail. John Conlow, a senior planner for Amtrak, says "It's really not much of a vision because 200 miles per hour... is happening all over the world. The U.S. is kind of behind the curve on this."
He's right. I don't know if I'll live to see 110 mph rail travel in my home state, but I'm glad someone is thinking about how to get from here to there that fast. John Krieger is right: We can do better.
