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“Couldn’t you find something more interesting to write about?”
It’s a question that arises when people find out that I write about railroads. For me, railroads and all things that run on railroad tracks have been a lifelong passion. For most other people, liking railroads is much like enjoying the occasional old, silent movie. Like the silent movies, there are quaint things that bring on the “I didn’t know people ever did that” reactions. In the same way, railroads have occasional visual appeal, sometimes enough to rise to the level of entertainment. On the other hand, in the same way you can only watch so many old cars silently smash into trees, or old cowhands silently fire their weapons at Hollywood’s early 20th century version of Native Americans, without needing a sudden fix of a fast and furious computer game; so too can most people only stomach watching so may identical (to the layman) locomotives pull so many identical cars across a grade crossing—the only place where most of us can or are legally permitted to get up close to a train—before deciding that a railroad is just about the most boring enterprise since dial-up networking.
So to the captioned question: Are railroads relevant? So as to keep this as interesting as possible to the uninitiated, I will ask, in return, “In what context?” There is social relevance. There is economic relevance. There are environmental relevance, historic relevance, and commercial relevance. Touching on each will require more space than allotted for a single post, but let’s get started with the most important one: Historic relevance.
History is something the average student doesn’t really have to or like to study any more. We are what and where we are due to history, but the past cannot be changed. We live in a forward looking (I eschew the word progressive) century. For those of us not interested in looking backwards, fine, there’s the door. Go out and make all the mistakes made by everyone who ever lived before you and watch what happens. Maybe you’ll learn from them. If I’ve got your attention, what I wanted to say was that railroads historically made North America what it is today. (No judgment as to whether that’s good or bad.) The transcontinental railroads in United States and Canada literally bound these nations together. Without the transcons, there may now be five or six political entities where there are now two. Eastern Canada may have become more closely bound to England while Western Canada may have become either bound to the Western U.S., or a country independent of the British Commonwealth. God only knows how the U.S. would have wound up during and after the American Civil War if Lincoln hadn’t had to foresight to boost a transcontinental railroad.
But that’s not everything from the historical perspective. For the first half of the 20th century, railroads provided the only overland form of bulk transportation of both personnel and supplies. Without the railroads, North America would not have been able to convert already rail-dependent industries into the wartime powerhouses of production and logistics of the early 1940s. In short, historic relevance speaks of everything today’s railroads can and should be.
I still want to take these one at a time. I want to talk about economic and commercial relevance, but to argue successfully, I have to touch on environmental relevance first. I have written elsewhere in this blog and its predecessor, Passenger Rail, about the environmental friendliness of railroads. There is no more fuel efficient way to move people and freight over land. It doesn’t matter how you measure it against use of energy, and it doesn’t matter whether that is fuel energy or electrical energy, or how that electricity is generated. You will move more per unit of energy on the rails. The only more fuel efficient way to move cargo is by river or ocean marine, and that only works for coastal or navigable river adjacent cities and towns. Not only is rail energy efficient, but it is the only form of mass transport currently successfully adapted and adaptable to green forms of energy. Solar and wind can generate current for electrified operations, and where there are no overhead wires or third rails, diesels (and even old steam locomotives) can burn bio-diesel or used vegetable oil. There’s no way to get more environmentally relevant than that!
Next week: More relevance.
© 2016 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com
(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is an independent conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for public infrastructure in the name of defense and private enterprise.)
