Reporter Liveblogs a Pere Marquette Trip

On Monday, Grand Rapids Press (MI) reporter Ken Kolker liveblogged a round-trip to Chicago on the Amtrak Pere Marquette, three days after the train was involved in a serious read-end collision with a Norfolk Southern freight train outside of Chicago that caused 60 injuries.  Kolker shows his lay credentials, referring to a couple boarding the train as, “climbing aboard the locomotive.”  More notably, he also collected anecdotes from two passengers who were on the ill-fated train the previous Friday.  78 year-old Louisa Vargo, who still had a black eye to show for her troubles, nonetheless returned home by Amtrak as a vote of confidence in the safety of rail travel:

Despite the crash, she did not hesitate to ride Amtrak home. She takes this trip several times a month.

“I don’t even think about it,” she says. “It’s just another trip, I’m not apprehensive at all.”

Members of the traditional news media are beginning to embrace technology as a means to expose the public to the rail travel experience.  At the vanguard of this phenomenon is Rafi Guroian, Director of Technology & Online Content Manager for Cox Newspapers Washington Bureau, whose Rafi on the Rails feature includes regular insights from his experiences on Amtrak.  Guroian even went so far as to have a live webcam and GPS tracking during a recent two-week cross-country trip!

Hopefully, this is a trend that will expand.  Not only do these “new media” ventures by traditional outlets provide greater exposure for the rail travel alternative, they can lead to greater accountability for the bad apples at Amtrak who the correspondents encounter, as Guroian did on a recent trip.

—Matthew Melzer