With “Wonderfully Affordable” Flights, Who Needs Trains?

“A national rail network in a country this spread out and with wonderfully affordable airline service simply doesn`t make sense.”

This quote, from a Jan. 17 Gannett News Service article, is from Robert Poole of The California-based Reason Foundation. Poole, a long-time Amtrak foe, would have us forget that the days of “affordable” airline service are numbered, because of energy supply issues, as well as global warming concerns.

As a harbinger of the future, the European press already has daily references to pricing strategies against cheap air fares, including by Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman in his Jan. 23 column: “Most of the proposed remedies for global warming involves things the right traditionally abhors…There are restrictions on individual liberty as the clamour grows to tax people out of their cars and off their cheap flights.”

But you don’t have to look to the distant future to question Poole’s statement. Right now, Amtrak serves many locations with no easy access to airports, or airports with “affordable” fares to the desired destination.

Case in point: an elderly friend who lives in Elyria prefers Amtrak for trips to the East Coast—in spite of bad train times in Elyria—because it is 10 minutes from her retirement home. And, even though Cleveland’s Hopkins Airport is a comfortable drive, she also does not like dealing with all the airport hubbub.

Long-timer observers may be interested to know that Mrs. Donald Pease, widow of the former Congressman and Amtrak board member, still uses Amtrak at Elyria.

—Ross Capon