All aboard!

I've always loved train travel.

When I was a kid, every other summer or so, we went to Chicago (where my mother hails from) to visit family. Some years we drove, other years we took the train. 

I remember snippets from all of those trips. 

Taking a taxi cab - a nearly unheard of luxury, one that I only knew about through The Taxi that Hurried, one of my favorite Little Golden Books - to Worcester's Union Station.

Pushing up the curtain - shared between two seats - just a tiny bit so I could watch what was going by, only to have the soldier in the seat in front of me slam it down. ( I was 4 years old, and I was only looking for a half inch of daylight.Thanks for your service - not!)

The ice old water in those conical cups.

Dressing up for the trip - Sunday dress, patent leather Mary Janes, little white gloves - because that's how you traveled back in the day. At least that's how Catholics traveled. I remember my sister Kath and I being shocked by a couple of girls our age wearing green slacks and pastel shirts (one pink, one pale yellow), while Kath and I were in our matching polished cotton dresses - hers pink, mine turquoise - with their nifty little bolero jackets. We ended up playing Fish with these girls to kill time on what was a long overnight trip and, sure enough, they were Protestants. (We just knew it!)

Breakfast in the dining car.

Upgrading, over time, to roomettes, so that, rather than have to sit up all night in steerage, we could sleep on fold-down beds, and enjoy our own private toilet. I remember my father tipping the Negro porters who helped fold down the beds.

That place outside of Cleveland where wild roses grew all over the banks next to the tracks.

I loved those trips.

In my early twenties, I spent four months hitching around Europe, but my friend Joyce and I did end up taking a couple of trains. The train in Spain was especially memorable. We ended up in a car full of leering men, and we both got chigger bites. 

I've taken plenty of trains in Ireland, the most unforgettable being one from Dublin to Enniscorthy. The train had too many cars to fit in the Enniscorthy station, so you had to know which car to be in so you could disembark. We spent the journey trying to find someone who could tell us. We asked the conductor, who was mostly MIA. We asked the barman in the club car, who was clueless. We asked fellow travelers. At the last minute, we found two women who were getting off in Enniscorthy and passed the secret code onto us. Phew! 

I can't remember the last time I flew to New York City. Mostly, I take the Acela. Much less stressful.

I take commuter rail all the time - to my sister's in Salem, my cousin's outside Worcester.

The longest train trip I ever took was from Orlando to Boston, in the aftermath of 9/11, when the planes weren't flying. What an eerie trip. We left Orlando no knowing whether the train would get any further north than Richmond, and were relieved to learn that it was going all the way through. We made a frantic connection in DC to get on the Boston-bound train. The car went completely silent when we departed Newark and saw the black cloud, much of the length of Manhtattan...

Carol Burnett was sitting near me. There's always something...

Anyway, I really enjoy train travel, and hope that I live to see goodies like high-speed travel in this country. 

All that said, I don't follow train news all that closely. Still, a recent story on Bloomberg caught my eye.

Believe it or not, there's actually a private passenger railroad, Brightline, that's backed by private equity and runs trains between Miami and West Palm Beach.

It’s the first new private company to move paying customers between American cities by rail in almost a century. It's also far from profitable, behind on ridership projections and recovering from a canceled initial public offering. (Source: Bloomberg)

Although they're not quite making a go of it yet, Brightline sounds pretty nice:

The seats are wide and made of leather. Blue-jacketed attendants greet passengers. Drinks are free in first class. The company plans to extend the line to Orlando by 2022 and possibly on to Tampa.

They're also opening up shop on a route between Victorville, California and Las Vegas. Turns out that pretty much any driving route from anywhere in California to Las Vegas goes through Victorville. So the Brightliners are betting that folks would be willing to park in Victorville and chillax for the final 90 miles of their journey. 

The private equity firm is now sniffing about for similar deals that would enable it to stitch together cities that fit a simple criteria: too long to drive, too short to fly. Atlanta to Charlotte, Los Angeles to San Diego, Portland to Vancouver, and Dallas to Houston are among those it’s mentioned.

The timing seems right for all this. Traffic is insane everywhere, and planes are big polluters. And, thanks to awareness building by Greta Thunberg, people are now being shamed into no flying.

What's interesting is that, unlike Amtrak, which is a quasi-public entity, Brightline is a private initiative. So they don't have to live under the constraints that Amtrak does, which has to make sure that the train goes to where powerful senators wants it to go, even if it's a money-losing proposition. (I am fortunate to live on Amtrak's most lucrative route, the Northeast Corridor, where taking the train from Boston to NYC, and from NYC to DC, really makes sense. Brightline, by the way, would love to privatize this piece of Amtrak's business.) 

Fortress (its private equity backer) did get a bit ahead of itself in trying to rush Brightline's IPO.  It was way off in its passenger and fare revenue estimates. Plus it was dogged by:

....safety concerns raised by Brightline’s opponents in areas north of West Palm Beach, through which its trains will eventually pass. An analysis of Federal Railroad Administration data published by the Associated Press found Brightline had more deaths per mile than any other U.S. railroad. Most of the 41 fatalities were suicides, according to the report, and the railroad itself wasn’t at fault. That hasn’t stopped critics from calling Brightline “the death train.”

Forty-one people struck and killed by a train that doesn't go that far and that often? In just over a two-year period? Yikes!

The majority have been suicides, while most others involved impatient motorists, pedestrians or bicyclists who misjudged the trains’ speed and ignored bells, gates or other warnings. Drugs, alcohol or both have been found in many victims’ systems.  (Source: AP)

Florida man...

Meanwhile, Brightline is trying to make its trains run more safely. Plus it's making its train stations smell citrusy and it's coming up with a way to close that treacherous gap between the train and the platform that happens in so many stations. I am always worried about breaking an ankle, so props for making it so we don't need to 'mind the gap.'

Me? I'd like to take a good long train trip somewhere. Maybe someday...