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More than 20 years ago, I enjoyed the train trip from Guangzhou to Beijing from the tropical south to the arid north to give a paper with a Chinese colleague at an international conference. More recently my Sweetie and I took a train trip from Denver to Halifax via AMTRAK and Canadian railways with several stops en route. Wonderful experience!

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In the land of the Almighty Dollar, for the past several decades U.S. passenger rail has typically been less profitable than freight rail and thus usually requires modest government subsidies to remain financially viable. Almost all economically advanced governments in the world have long understand the multitudinous benefits of passenger rail and have been willing to provide adequate government subsidies. Unfortunately, nearly all right-of-center U.S. politicians, especially Republicans, have long ignored or rejected global norms such as the metric system and reflexively starved U.S. passenger rail subsidies (e.g. Amtrak) in favor of windfall tax breaks and tax loopholes for ultra-millionaires and corporations. About the only silver lining of this irrational and distressing tendency in the federal government is that a relatively young NGO called Rails to Trails has been buying up abandoned rail-line rights-of-way nationwide and converting them to long-distance bicycle trails--the goal is eventually to be able to bicycle coast to coast on such trails. Quite a lot of local city governments--especially in college towns like the one in Montana where I live--have also stepped up and built networks of multi-use bicycle paths that are off limits to noisy, polluting, and often dangerous motor vehicles. Some cities like Portland, OR have maintained their streetcar systems, but the vast majority have been shut down, frequently with active intervention by money-first petroleum and tire corporations (as in downtown Los Angeles). Personally, I first experienced passenger rail as a teenager with a Eurailpass in the early 1970s, and had never felt so mobile. I've also ridden everything from coal-burning steam locomotives (in the early 1980s in China) to high-speed bullet trains throughout East Asia over the past few decades. My overall impression is that except for the northeast corridor of the U.S., passenger rail in the U.S. has remained one of the developed world's most backward and even laughable passenger rail systems--largely due to the U.S.'s campaign finance system of essentially legalized bribery of lawmakers by corporate moneyed interests that simply don't care that the U.S. is a global laughingstock in areas such as passenger rail and failure to join the rest of the globe in adopting the metric system.

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Before spending that huge amount of money to serve a limited number of people, a few scattered cities, and causing huge environmental and visual impacts, the state should up grade and extend the existing rail system. Better service from LA to San Francisco along the coast, for instance, would cause much more impact, decompress Highway 101, and allow commuting between a lot of communities for much less money.

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