Dear EarthTalk: If train travel is so much less polluting than driving or flying, why are passenger rail options in the U.S. so limited compared to Europe? And is anything being done to shift more travelers over to American rail lines from cars and planes?

I take Amtrak cross-country as it’s my favorite way to travel. If you are interested in reading about it, here is my article about my first trip aboard.

It’s true that train travel is one of the lowest impact ways to get from point to point short of walking, jogging or bicycling. In the early part of the 20th century, with car and air travel both in their infancies, taking the train was really the only practical way for Americans to get from city to city. And take the train they did: By 1929 the U.S. boasted one of the largest and most used rail networks in the world, with some 65,000 railroad passenger cars in operation across some 265,000 miles of track.

But a concerted campaign by U.S. carmakers to acquire rail lines and close them, along with a major push in Congress to build the world’s most extensive interstate highway system, combined to shift Americans’ tastes away from rail travel and toward cars. As a result, while Europe focused on building its own rail networks, the U.S. became the ultimate auto nation, with more cars per capita than anywhere else in the world. By 1965 only 10,000 rail passenger cars were in operation across just 75,000 miles of track.

In response to the declining use of America’s rail network, the U.S. government created Amtrak in 1971 to provide intercity passenger train service across the country, running mostly on pre-existing track already in use for freight transport. Today Amtrak runs some 1,500 rail passenger cars on 21,000 miles of track connecting 500 destinations in 46 states. In 2008, upwards of 28 million passengers rode Amtrak trains, representing the sixth straight year of record ridership for the publicly-owned rail line. Despite this growth, the U.S. still has one of the lowest inter-city rail usage rates in the developed world.

But that may all change soon. In the spring of 2009, President Obama allocated $8 billion of his stimulus package toward development of more high-speed rail lines across the country, citing the need to reduce both greenhouse gas emissions and reliance on foreign oil. Currently only one high-speed rail line exists in the U.S., Amtrak’s Acela Express, which can reach speeds of 150 mile per hour on its Washington, D.C. to Boston route. The success of high-speed, high-efficiency “bullet” trains in Asia and Europe—where train rides can be as fast as flying but without the long waits and security hassles—has helped convince American transportation analysts that the U.S. should also take the high speed rail plunge.

The first round of federal funding will go toward upgrading and increasing speeds on existing lines, but the majority of it will be used to jump-start construction of new high speed lines in 10 corridors across the country, including in northern New England, across New York State, across Pennsylvania, in and around Chicago, throughout the Southeast, and up and down the length of the west coast.

A 2006 study by the Center for Clean Air Policy and the Center for Neighborhood Technology concluded that building a high speed rail system across the U.S. (similar in scope to that proposed by Obama) would likely result in 29 million fewer car trips and 500,000 fewer plane flights each year, saving six billion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions—the equivalent of removing a million cars from the road annually.

CONTACTS: Amtrak, www.amtrak.com; Center for Clean Air Policy, www.ccap.org; Center for Neighborhood Technology, www.cnt.org.

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As many of you know, my wife and I traveled by Amtrak again this year across the country for the holidays. Last year we took it from Los Angeles to Chicago, and this year we went from Albuquerque all the way to Boston.

We had a good time, even though we were delayed a day due to the weather, and I do hope we can do it again. Amtrak even put us up for a night in a hotel in Chicago and gave us per diem money until the next day’s train – something that rarely if ever happens with the airlines anymore. But as much as I enjoy train travel, both for the adventure aspect and the knowing I am contributing less to climate change than I would be if I were flying, there is something I need to get off my chest – and this is directed at Amtrak. I hate to do it, but it has to be said…

For all your environmental talk, Amtrak, you sure don’t do a good job of doing any on-board greening of the trains.

There, I said it. On their website, Amtrak prides itself on how “green” they are – which they are kind of by nature just in being a train. Trains are more 17% more efficient than airline travel and 21% more efficient than auto travel on a per-passenger-mile basis; you get much more bang for your buck, so to say. Amtrak also is a member of the Chicago Climate Exchange, the world’s first legally-binding integrated greenhouse gas reduction and trading system. They are reducing their diesel emissions, working on making their trains more fuel-efficient, reducing the time locomotives idle in place, and are substituting electric trains for diesel ones along certain corridors – all of which are great things to be doing. But where they are failing is inside the train, where the passengers are.

OK so at this point you might be wondering what exactly I am talking about here, so lets take a look at the “non-green” experiences we had on the train:

• When we take Amtrak we always pay for our own room, as then you get an actual bed and you get all your meals included for the entire trip. In these rooms, you get little tiny plastic bottles of water every day. There are places to get drinking water on board, so I am not sure why they need to provide bottled water for every sleeping car passenger. And these bottles don’t even seem to be recycled as they go in the trash along with all the other garbage. I seriously doubt someone sorts all those bags of garbage when they unload it at the different stations along the route.
• In addition to the bottled water issue, the toilet paper, coffee cups, and paper towels in the bathrooms are not made from recycled paper – at least they don’t say that they are on the label. That stuff is available everywhere for both individual and corporate use, so there is no reason that Amtrak should not be using recycled-content paper products.
• And in the dining car, everything is plastic – from the utensils to the cups to the plates. Some of this, I hope, gets washed – but I seem to remember that there used to be actual silverware and glasses in the dining car. Is this a new cost-cutting move, Amtrak? Because if so, you are cutting small costs at the expense of the tossing of a very large amount of plastic. And if you are in-fact washing some of the dishes downstairs, why not wash all of it?

So while your trains are more efficient than traveling by air or car, and you are certainly doing your part to increase your efficiencies, I am afraid you are neglecting a big part of your environmental footprint – the inside of your trains. And as much as I wanted to, I could not have lugged all that plastic off the train myself, so it went right in the trash, where it was probably headed straight for a landfill in whatever city we stopped in. I will be copying this post into a letter to be sent to all of the Big Wigs at Amtrak, but if you happen to read it here first – can you please do something to clean up what goes on inside as well as outside of your trains? You know where to find me if you want to talk…and until then, I hope our next trip is even “greener” than this one was!

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I thought you guys would be interested in seeing some pictures from a short trip we took this week down to Bandelier National Monument here in New Mexico. This park was established in 1916, covers over 33,000 acres of land, and has 70 miles of hiking trails. There are numerous areas (over 3,000) of Ancestral Pueblo (formerly called the Anasazi) dwellings throughout the 33,000 acres, some of which have been excavated and made easily accessible and many that exist untouched after 800 years. We went hiking through a lot of the park, went up and down ladders into the multi-storied cliff dwellings, and enjoyed over 6 hours of silent reflection learning about these people and how they lived. It is amazing when you start thinking about how people lived before and how different our culture today is. These people were so preoccupied with surviving that they did not have many of the petty concerns we have today. Life is so easy today compared to 800 years ago! Hope you enjoy the pictures…

If you are ever out in central/northern New Mexico, I would highly recommend you visit Bandalier!

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So, we just finalized our plans for holiday travel this year and once again we are hitting the rails with Amtrak! With the price of flying heading ever skyward and passengers being nickel and dimed to bring even a single bag, combined with the fact that my wife is a teacher and has a few weeks off, we have decided to once again take advantage our situation and take the slow ride back east. We took the train last year from Los Angeles to Chicago and had a wonderful experience, so hopefully this year will be just as fun. However, this year we are going even further – from Albuquerque, New Mexico to Boston, Massachusetts to visit my family!

In reality, there are several reasons we are taking the train again – it’s not all because it was fun last time. For starters, flying when you don’t have to is incredibly wasteful – why not take the time to travel in a less polluting and more efficient manner? We don’t need to fly back east, we have plenty of time to make the trip in both directions and spend time with the family, so we are going to take advantage of it. Secondly, I hate to fly – let’s be honest. I will do it if I need to, but I hate it. And lastly, it becomes part of the journey, unlike getting the airport hours early, getting delayed, multiple stopovers, and not seeing much of anything on the way. When we took the train last year, the scenery was amazing and we saw parts of the country that we otherwise would never have seen. And this year we will see even more, as we are going a lot further than Chicago. Plus, you get 3 meals a day, a comfortable bunk bed to sleep in, and the camaraderie of meeting other “train” people throughout the trip. Here is what the route looks like:

The route from here to Chicago is called the Southwest Chief, and the car is the Superliner where we will have our own bedroom but have showers and the bathroom down the hall:

The route from Chicago to Albany, NY is called the Lake Shore Limited, and we will have our own sink and toilet but showers are down the hall:

The last leg of the trip is from Albany, NY to Boston, MA, and we will have business class seats as it is only about half a day’s ride:

We are pretty excited about riding the rails again. I know some people think we are nuts for taking the time to travel by Amtrak instead of flying, but we truly enjoy it. Amtrak ridership has been steadily going up for quite some time now, and I think it is only a matter of time before we start investing in high-speed rail in this country. With fuel prices going up and environmental concerns, train travel is making a comeback and we are glad we might be doing our part to help it out!

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