Quote of the Day (Matthew Engel, on Why ‘A Successful Public Transport System is a National Benefit’)

“A successful public transport system is a national benefit. Japan, China and most of western Europe accept it explicitly. For much of the world, the past 40 years have indeed been the second age of the train. British politicians get the point implicitly but execute policy furtively and cack-handedly; only American Republicans are visceral and obstructive deniers.”— British journalist Matthew Engel, “Slow Train Coming,” The Financial Times, Dec. 5-6, 2015

It escaped my attention a few weeks ago until I noticed Leo Lewis’ excellent recent retrospective in The Financial Times: late last month, Japan celebrated the 60^th anniversary of the first bullet train. Since that event, the nation has steadily improved its high-speed railroad system, the shinkansen, with the fastest train, the Hayabusa, now reaching 320 km/h.

In contrast, the fastest train in the US, Amtrak’s Acela—currently running at 150 miles per hour—will, even with a new model announced for 2024 but still with no set date at this point in the year, only reach 160 mph/h, or 258 km/h.

For several reasons, within the lifetimes of older baby boomers, the U.S. railroad system has declined in importance even as the automobile and the airplane become more entrenched. has declined. For the sake of a diversified transportation system and healthy economy, more needs to be done to revive the industry. It should be beyond partisan politics.

Continued decline or even stagnation of the industry is not inevitable. A high-functioning rail system can be not just a signal of industrial innovation but even a point of national pride, as Lewis points out in noticing that the Tokyo-to-Osaka line opened just ahead of the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, making the two events “symbols of Japan’s great postwar resurrection.”

But upgrading a rail system will not only require a can-do spirit but eternal vigilance. As Lewis observes:

“Despite the appearance of effortless service, punctuality and performance, Japan knows full well that everything is, in fact, attributable to unstinting effort. It is no coincidence that, in the same year it opened the shinkansen, Japan Railways invented an alarm clock which could not, under any circumstances, be slept through (thanks to an inflatable balloon under the mattress).”

(The image accompanying this post, the Shinkansen N700A Series Set G13 high speed train travelling at approximately 300 km/h through Himeji Station—an image captured with a line-scan camera using strip photography—was taken Aug. 19, 2017, by Dllu.)

Photo of the Day: Old Station Museum and Caboose, Mahwah NJ

I took this photo a month ago while passing through Mahwah, at the northern edge of Bergen County, NJ. Because it was a Sunday, these structures were closed. But, because I have been interested in the significance of railroads in developing America, I paid attention to the sign on the property and read about how the site has been maintained for posterity.

Constructed in 1871, this building served as the original station on the Erie Railroad in Mahwah until the early 1900s, when the Erie expanded to four tracks and raised the roadbed from the ground level.. After being used for different purposes, it was saved from the wrecking ball by the Winters family of Mahwah and later by the Mahwah Historical Society.

Railroad memorabilia collectors have contributed numerous artifacts to this museum, including a 1929 Erie cupola caboose (which features displays about the men who worked the line, and their role in the railroad, and their living conditions), a scale model of the Erie system, and photos of the origins of railroading in Mahwah.

Quote of the Day (F. Scott Fitzgerald, on a Train Ride Home From School at Christmastime)

“One of my most vivid memories is of coming back West from prep school and later from college at Christmas time….

“When we pulled out into the winter night and the real snow, our snow, began to stretch out beside us and twinkle against the windows, and the dim lights of small Wisconsin stations moved by, a sharp wild brace came suddenly into the air. We drew in deep breaths of it as we walked back from dinner through the cold vestibules, unutterably aware of our identity with this country for one strange hour, before we melted indistinguishably into it again.

“That’s my Middle West—not the wheat or the prairies or the lost Swede towns, but the thrilling returning trains of my youth, and the street lamps and sleigh bells in the frosty dark and the shadows of holly wreaths thrown by lighted windows on the snow.”—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)

Since my twenties, every year around this time, my mind drifts to and fastens on this passage near the conclusion of The Great Gatsby, just before the rhapsodic, better-known last few paragraphs on the Dutch ships discovering the “fresh green breast of the New World” for the first time. 

In the postwar period, and particularly since the deregulation of the airlines that made plane travel more affordable starting in the late 1970s, countless college kids have taken to the air to make their way home. It’s certainly convenient, but high above the earth, they miss so much that Fitzgerald would have seen right outside his window on the train.

In the 1910s, F. Scott Fitzgerald would have taken this holiday trip probably about a half-dozen times—first, while at Newman Prep in Hackensack, NJ, a suburb of New York City, and then at the conclusion of the semester at Princeton University. He would have had a great deal to do that could have distracted him on those trips—reading, jotting down something in his journal, or, Fitzgerald being Fitzgerald, catching his breath at the sight of a pretty girl walking down the aisle of his train.

But these were long trips, and those activities, no matter how consuming, could only occupy his mind for so long. So inevitably, the landscape made its vivid impression on him, and his imagination would freeze-frame the moments. 

Transportation in the forms already evolving in the 1920s—the automobile and the airplane—meant not only the annihilation of distance but the annihilation of individuals in Fitzgerald’s fiction: Jay Gatsby is in a car involved in a fatal hit-and-run accident, while in Fitzgerald’s uncompleted The Last Tycoon, movie producer Monroe Stahr dies in a plane crash. 

In contrast, railroads were a mature industry by this point, but they remained functional and provided (certainly for Fitzgerald) an element of nostalgia that the two forms that have largely supplanted it have never been able to adequately provide.

In an article for The Atlantic four years ago, author and Midwestern Susan Choi told interviewer Joe Fassler that she regarded this as among the most beautiful and mysterious in the entire novel: “When I'm reading the book, I look forward to the arrival of this passage like one of those trains. I know it's going to give me chills, and it always does.”

Read it again. I’m sure you’ll agree.

(The image accompanying this post is of the Minneapolis, St. Paul and Sault Ste. Marie Railroad, a subsidiary of the Canadian Pacific Railway, arriving in Almena, Wisc., sometime in the 1920s.)

New Jersey Transit: The Disaster That Was Waiting to Happen

Twenty-six years ago, when I worked briefly for a company on 12^th Street in Manhattan, I linked up with the PATH train that took me to my office by taking a New Jersey Transit commuter train from Bergen County, NJ, to Hoboken.

In many ways, riding the Pascack Valley line was the most satisfying time of my day; I could eat, talk to other passengers, and most of all, not worry about overcrowding or getting stuck in traffic. “New Jersey Transit has the best on-time performance of any railroad in the tristate area,” a fellow passenger told me once.

New Jersey didn’t have much to crow about then, but that passenger and I--and I would wager nearly every other passenger on that line and that rail system--knew we had a good thing going. A change of jobs in a new location closer to midtown led me to start taking the bus into the Port Authority station in midtown, and though I didn’t regret the job switch, I had often wished in the quarter-century since that I could continue taking the train into work.

That is, until last week, when a train on the very route that I took long ago crashed inside Hoboken Terminal, killing one passenger and injuring hundreds more.

My initial “There but for the grace of God, go I” reaction and sympathy for the victims of the accident soon gave way to horror over the disruption that the massively damaged terminal was causing for area commuters. More recently, I was filled with a sense of angry déjà vu over how institutional rot led to long-term deterioration and this sudden, savage exposure of that system’s ills.

The news of this catastrophe, you see, occurred at the height of a closely watched trial in New Jersey, featuring testimony by Gov. Chris Christie’s former enforcer at the Port Authority, David Wildstein, the mastermind of a September 2013 scheme to retaliate against the Democratic Mayor of Fort Lee by closing two of three of the borough’s lane approaches to the George Washington Bridge during rush hour for a fictitious “traffic study.”

Christie has already seen his hopes for the GOP Presidential nomination evaporate because of Bridgegate. But he had to be seriously sweating that a new, needless disaster could be laid at his door, because—within 32 hours of the train crash—he announced a compromise that ended his two-month stalemate with the state legislature over funding public transit.  (Even then, the 23-cent-per-gallon gas-tax increase was passed so quickly that the public had little time to weigh in.)

Naturally, for the several years he was planning or conducting his Presidential campaign, he refused to approve any legislation that might allow GOP primary opponents to charge him with raising taxes. And, to be fair, Republican and Democratic predecessors also did not adequately maintain the transportation trust fund at acceptable levels.

But allowing NJ Transit steadily dwindling transit-specific funding—from $285 million in 2012 to $33 million this year—was all on Christie’s watch, and utterly unconscionable given higher mass-transit ridership during this time. Increasingly, rather than using funds as intended for capital projects, the agency has had to dip into them more immediately for ongoing operational needs.

During his prolonged standoff with the legislature, Christie would only allow work to proceed on emergencies. This meant that he froze hundreds of ongoing projects, including $2.7 billion worth of New Jersey Transit work. That doesn’t begin to measure the true cost of inaction, either, because, with deferred maintenance, expenses rise as the condition of a site deteriorates.

At the same time it has suffered funding shortfalls, New Jersey Transit has also experienced a vacuum in leadership. Its executive director resigned last November to become head of the New York subway system, and since then the agency has been managed on an interim basis by its former chief of bus operations. Moreover, New Jersey Transit has canceled every public board meeting since June, so it is also operating without oversight.

Although, for a few years, Republicans nationwide couldn’t get enough of Christie’s in-your-face style—and the media, to his handlers’ delight, responded—few noticed what a hash he was making of the fiscal stewardship that the GOP long claimed as one of its hallmarks. In terms of New Jersey transit, that involved funding legerdemain: moving dollars away to the agency from where it had been originally intended (e.g., other state financial pools such as the New Jersey Turnpike Authority and a state clean energy fund), as well as raising New Jersey transit fares twice since Christie took office). And still, the agency experienced massive funding shortfalls.

Now, New Jersey commuters are reaping the whirlwind of this neglect:

*New Jersey Transit now has 12 times more equipment failures than any other commuter railroad in the country, according to a CBS News New York report.

*A leader in the 1990s in developing the automatic braking system known as Positive Train Control (a technology that many believe might have averted this latest crash), New Jersey Transit has now fallen far behind other states in implementing this technology.

* A late-September collision between two NJ Transit buses in the Lincoln Tunnel injured more than two dozen people.

* In August, a high-speed crash between two NJ Transit buses in downtown Newark left two fatalities.

*This past summer, the agency cut service on the Pascack Valley Line by reducing the number of trains and running trains with fewer cars, with a predictable outcome: overcrowding.

*In August, New Jersey Transit regularly canceled its second morning express train.

*Early this summer, sparked by commuter complaints, the Federal Railroad Administration investigated NJ Transit’s safety practices, finding multiple violations.

Perhaps in no other realm has Chris Christie’s Washington ambitions caused more damage, now and in the near future, for so many as transportation. Commuters suffer the consequences on a daily basis. In the end, neglect of infrastructure will only make individuals and businesses reexamine whether they really want to deal with the endless hassles that come with living and working in New Jersey.

Photo of the Day: Waving in a Strong Breeze

Last weekend, I took a detour from walking around Overpeck County Park in Bergen County, NJ, to step to the railroad just outside. There, I found this, overgrown and stirring in the breeze. I had the feeling that any minute it would become an unusual life form, like something out of Little Shop of Horrors or Invasion of the Body Snatchers.