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Trains have a nostalgic connotation for most Americans, but John Stilgoe argues that we should be looking to rail lines as the path to our future, not just our past. Train Time picks up where his acclaimed work Metropolitan Corridor left off, carrying Stilgoe's ideas about the spatial consequences of railways up to the present moment. With containers bringing the production of a global economy to our ports, the price of oil skyrocketing, and congestion and sprawl forcing many Americans to live far from work, trains offer an obvious alternative to a culture dependent on cars and long-haul trucking. Arguing that the train is returning, "an economic and cultural tsunami about to transform the United States," Stilgoe posits a future for railways as powerful shapers of American life. For anyone looking for prescient analysis and compelling history of the American landscape and economy in general and railroad and transit history in particular, Train Time is an engaging look at the future of our railroads and of transportation and land development. For those familiar with John Stilgoe's talent for seeing things that elude the rest of us, and delivering those observations in pithy asides about real estate, corporate culture, and other aspects of American life, this book will not disappoint.
During the tumultuous year of 2008--when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California--journalist James McCommons spent a year on America's trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism. Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible? Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads. While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America--and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.