Two days after my arrival in Pittsburgh, there is another dawn without rosy fingers, more morning murk and nightly showers. It is cool, very cool at night even when hot by day. The grass is oh so green at the organic dairy where we get Rick’s milk. The trip, aspects of it, like the swaying, rattling, wreckage of the cars, the rain pouring through the coupling between cars, the wisps of mist clinging to the country side around the Appalachian divide, all yet haunt. Even the dream I had yesterday, in which I was murdered in those hills, was deep green and pretty with vapor.
Full construction at Lancaster, PA and expansion of service with New York is taking the form of a structural overhaul. Lancaster, PA has been slated as an eastern mass transit hub to exceed Baltimore and anything in the Midwest but Chicago. 30 years ago Baltimore fled there. Over the past 7 years something like 700,000 New Yorkers have fled to the green hills of Lancaster. Farms are being paved for distribution centers. Some Amish are selling. There are more freight trains running in PA than in any state I have visited.
Elam and his baby were “overbooked.” The kind Amish fellow with his more cute than cute son sat with me, the little fellow on his lap, wondering at the weird one next to him. Elam is a mechanic for a saw mill, keeps forklifts, loaders and grinders going, likes it, and can number each category: 8 lifts and 3 grinders, among them. The grinders break the most. Elam speaks Dutch at home. Many of his people have church basements now. He confided that there are some “six” variations from more to less conservative, among them. He keeps a phone for business, one that takes only calls. We discuss the hypnotic effect of palm phone texting and reading, which we have observed. His first child, toddler son, Elmer Lee, is a delight, and befriends me.
Altoona up to Johnstown, on the Horseshoe Curve was a sobering ride. I was in the cafe car, which had a line as long as the car. So many people are being booked on trains that the cafe has become the 7-11 from hell. It is a half hour wait for coffee, at least. No one has seen this previously. As I sit in the car drinking my caffeine and trying to count the freshly painted black NorfolkSouthern locomotives there, a man who works online using his phone hotspot, has a nice conversation with the assistant conductor, a large, pleasant woman of Viking aspect. They both discuss their new aversion to flight. Both have been involved in near misses at New York airports. These were not news worthy, even though hundreds of people on those planes will never fly again. In addition, the airports are further out of town in all cities, than the railroad station. With families scattered across the nation, and access to these habitations being mostly by sedan and local transit, train travel is becoming more attractive. The crew claims that 25% of the traffic gotten over the past year are fliers coming down from expensive and more harrowing air travel. Another 25% comes from the former Greyhound riders who pipe up and say, “Never again—the busses are torture, loaded with junkies.” I can tell from my experience that the other roughly half of the additional passengers are also new. For almost no person who took trains before 2020 does so now. This half of the rail herd are people who have experienced hard times, replacing the former vacationers that dominated.
Norfolk Southern had over 60 new black engines at the Altoona yard, and about a dozen old orange locomotives, freight traffic was almost constant.
The assistant conductor gave a nice monologue from which I gleaned some information. The rail services across the state are about to increase from 1 to 2, with more increases between PA and NYC. In 1954 48 daily trips traversed Pennsylvania from New York to Pittsburgh and beyond. Amtrak used to have the Broadway line, from Broadway to Chicago, daily.
28 cents an hour was the wage of the 450 men who built this line in the 1840s and 50s, via manual labor and black powder. Horseshoe Curve was one of the wonders of the industrial world and was one of the top 10 strategic targets for the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
The conductor fielded some questions as to why the freight trains only give right of way east of Harrisburg.
“Amtrak only owns the tracks between Washington and Boston and Harrisburg and Philadelphia. Everywhere else the railroads own the tracks, with Amtrak subject to their dispatch. We have to use freight dispatch—if they have a money train coming through, forget it, we sit on the side.”
When I came back from the cafe car a cute little thing with attitude, a blond woman of about 95 pounds was in my seat. I stood and looked at her until she moved her things from my seat. The conductor came by for her ticket. She had none, said she boarded at Altoona, gave name, and was not on the manifest. The man, a likable nerd of a Murkhan Land Whale, looked at me with questioning eyes and I gave him the look that all men understand, “Bro, she’s an 8. We only kick women off the train that are a 6 or less!”
The stowaway hottie got a patriarchal pass. All she had was an overnight bag.
The conductor then announced that The National Weather Service came through with a flood warning from Johnston thru Latrobe down into Pittsburgh. The speed governor would be set at 40mph, by law, and we would be 20 minutes late.
Kind, elderly boomers and Amish families offered to let me out of the seat as they passed me. But I prefer to be the last passenger off a car that has come to the end of the line.
I sense that something in the updated design of the Mid-Atlantic American Zone is heralding a time, not far off, within the next five years, when auto and aircraft traffic will be reduced by some measure, with rail and bus increasing. Ticket prices are falling, as every station I have been to is being remodeled and updated. Amtrak subsidizes the rail freight barons, not the other way around. It is monopolistic capitalism functioning at a high level. I suggest that this is related to a drive to bring manufacturing back into the home territory of USG.
