On trains

 Just saw this bad (big) boy this past week. A throwback to another time and place, this monster hauled cargo to and fro across the Rockies, climbing the impossible grades of those mountains when brute force was our only answer. Replaced by the stronger and more reliable diesels during the Fifties, these enormous piles of iron and steel were the epitome of steam engineering, the accumulation of ingenuity, imagination, and curiosity. Trains should be the wave of the future in America because building new and more roads is not a sustainable activity now, if it ever was at all. We need high-speed rail between major cities such as Dallas and San Antonio or Austin and Houston, and maybe both. We all love our cars, but, as the Europeans have already shown, there isn't enough room for everyone to drive their own car to work. We need public transportation, and we need it now. We once had passenger trains that crisscrossed the entire United States. Granted, it wasn't the fasted way to get from New York to L.A, but it existed. People sharing a public space in order to travel. Airplanes do a lot of that today, but many shorter trips could be made by train. We can't make interstate I35 any bigger anymore. Some of the cars must go. While in Europe, I ride trains on a daily basis because they are just more viable than taking a car everywhere. We did it once, we can do it again: high-speed rail from Minneapolis to Chicago, L.A. to San Francisco, St. Louis to Kansas City, Miami to Orlando. Sometimes, the only thing I want to do at the end of a tough day is get on the train and let someone else drive me home.