{"id":402,"date":"2009-04-26T23:55:00","date_gmt":"2009-04-26T23:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/04\/26\/oncoming-trains\/"},"modified":"2009-04-26T23:55:00","modified_gmt":"2009-04-26T23:55:00","slug":"oncoming-trains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/2009\/04\/26\/oncoming-trains\/","title":{"rendered":"Oncoming trains"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was excited this week to read an article on the BBC website<\/a> about a possible renaissance of the US rail system, including talk of a high-speed link from Vancouver down to Seattle, Portland and Eugene.<\/p>\n

Yup, I’m a train spotter<\/s> lover. Love, love, love, travelling by train. Not quite as much as by boat, but close. It’s just such a civilised, human <\/span>way to travel. You can leave your seat, stretch your legs, wander through to the catering car for a cuppa tea or a beer, even jump out at stations for some fresh air. Compared to trains, planes are just awful – full of that nasty recycled air and the risk of DVT<\/span> due to hours of inactivity. And cars… I do not like travelling by car at all<\/span>. Strapped into your seat, stuck in traffic, and all that carbon guilt. The scenery also tends to be better from a train. I like the aerial views from the plane, but you don’t get the detail. Obviously some roads have good sight lines to take advantage of nice views, but more often than not you just see a bunch of other cars, and maybe some stunted trees if you’re lucky.<\/p>\n

I took the train all the time in the UK: to get from my parents’ to University and back, to go to weddings, football and rugby games, concerts, you name it. I’ve also been lucky enough to do some fabulous overnight and multi-day train trips, the stand out being Toronto – Vancouver through the Rockies. Toronto-Montreal was nice too, as were Paris-Marseilles, Paris-Madrid and Madrid-Lisbon. The latter journey was on our honeymoon and also Mr E Man’s birthday, so we treated ourselves to a first class sleeping cabin, featuring fold-down bunks, our own bathroom and shower, and a delicious three course dinner with a more or less open bar (we did not test the limits of the openness<\/span>, but the guys at the next table were getting close). I’ve also done shorter hops around France, Italy, Portugal, Switzerland, and Belgium. Man, I miss Europe sometimes.<\/p>\n

So… regular high speed rail down to Seattle and Portland? Sign me up!* I’ve got friends there I’d like to see, and I’ll be more likely to go if I can take the train (and once I get the coveted Canadian passport and no longer have to be fingerprinted, photographed and generally interrogated at the border). The US is going to lag behind Europe for a good long while in this regard, but if some of the stimulus money can be used to stimulate the railways, I’ll be one happy traveller.<\/p>\n

———————<\/p>\n

*Barriers to going right now: there are like 4 trains a week, and they’re sloooooow<\/span>. And expensive, because the only people who use them are wealthy European tourists. When I did the Vancouver-Seattle-San Francisco-LA section of my North America trip when I was 20, I had to take the Greyhound the whole way, because the trains were laughably far beyond my budget.
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I was excited this week to read an article on the BBC website about a possible renaissance of the US rail system, including talk of a high-speed link from Vancouver down to Seattle, Portland and Eugene. Yup, I’m a train … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/vwxynot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}