April 3rd, 2016: Santa Fe Trail

[Snakeadelic]

You'd think railroads might make a comeback as a viable passenger transit system in places like where I live...the county I live in is double the square mileage of the state of Rhode Island, and not all of it is enormous mountains. There are unused tracks everywhere, including a set that cross the street next to the county fairgrounds about 5 blocks from my front door. Instead, if I wanted to catch an Amtrak somewhere, my choices would consist of the Empire Builder (Seattle-Chicago) route with the nearest station 2+ hours north. I used to ride Amtrak a LOT during the summers--so often that, by the time of my last trip in that era, the conductors were so used to me curling up in my lower-level seat (I only rode Superliners, the big silver 2-story cars, because the seats on the Talgo bullet trains were horribly uncomfortable) that they had a betting pool about which stops I'd wake up at. Now that I have a decent camera and some practice, I wouldn't mind another go on the Coast Starlight route (Seattle-Los Angeles) along the Puget Sound! A passenger train from the next town south of me, Darby, up to Missoula and then on to Kalispell/Whitefish/Flathead Lake might make it a lot easier for people to live semi-rural and work urban. Amazing how fast trains went from "this is how EVERYTHING goes EVERYWHERE" to "we're hoping to save fuel costs by stacking semi trailers on railroad flatbeds"...