 | NARP blogTRAINS: A travel choice Americans want |
» Visit the Official NARP Website
DC to Chicago by Night: Or, How I Learned to Stop Flying and Love the Rails
Friday, October 31, 2008
In the wake of my first truly long distance train ride, I’ve been thinking about the sense I have of my own mobility.
Now, as someone who is paid to think about the state of America’s transportation infrastructure in general, and trains and transit in particular, it’s probably a bad sign that I had taken this summer’s passing of cheap air fares to be synonymous with the death of cheap-AND-easy long-distance travel. But there you go. Whatever forces shaped my conceptions about travel included cars and planes and Amtrak on the Northeast Corridor, and that’s about it.
That being said, I was not prepared for how painless boarding a train in downtown Washington, DC on a Sunday afternoon and waking up in downtown Chicago on Monday morning turned out to be. All for around $150, roundtrip. Which was about $100 cheaper than any comparable airfare I could find (and I’m talking about red-eye, bottom of the barrel airfares here).
Doing a quick breakdown of the distances, I figured that the roughly 700 miles I covered between DC and Chicago would take me to any city in the northeastern United States, as far south as Jacksonville, Florida, and–of course–anywhere kind of between the District and Illinois. All of this assuming that Amtrak was actually able to run regular service between any two cities in my 700 mile radius.
The point is that I have a lot of friends in these theoretically train-accessible cities. Friends I’ve been putting off seeing because I thought I couldn’t afford to. Friends who are now going to need to get their couches ready.
You are now free to move about the country.
--Sean Jeans-Gail
NARP Assistant Director, Legislative Relations
Posted by NARP
Tags: air travel, amtrak, capitol limited, northeast corridor,©2006 National Association of Railroad Passengers | » NARP website
» Recent Entries
» Blogroll
» Terms of Service for Comments
You may register to post comments in response to NARP-generated postings on the Blog. By registering you agree 1) that all comments will be relevant to the respective posting and 2) not to post any messages that are obscene, vulgar, slanderous, hateful, threatening, or that violate any laws. We reserve the right to permanently block postings from any user who does not abide by the above terms. NARP reserves the right to remove, edit, or move any messages for any reason.
» Monthly Archives
