Craig Burroughs is a railroad man I met at a Sierra Club meeting. He touts trains as the solution to a lot of our global warming problem, and he knows what he’s talking about. Starting with the Rock Island Line after college, he spent most of his career developing short-line railroads. Now that he’s “retired,” he’s working with a nonprofit on what has been his dream since he was 9: a trans-world high-speed railroad. Much of the year he can be found in Anchorage planning a railroad from China to Canada, with a tunnel under the Bering Strait. In the fall he covers college football games for his online column, Red Zone. Last year he went to 79 games and a short time ago passed a career 1,000-mark. He’s put 800,000 miles on his Oldsmobile station wagon, but says he’d much rather take the train.
Q: You say trains should be electrified. How is that better than diesel?
A: It doesn’t have emissions. And the electricity could come from cleaner sources, like hydropower and (in Chicago) nuclear. A nationwide network of electrified trains would drastically reduce the need for expanding our highways.
Q: How does the U.S. compare with the rest of the world on electrified trains?
A: It’s just about at the bottom of the list. We have the smallest percentage of electric mainline rails of any industrialized country in the world. Japan is just about all electric. Germany and France went directly from steam to electric. They did it the intelligent way because they didn’t have General Motors telling them how to do things.
Q: Where do we have electrified trains in the U.S.?
A: We have high-speed electric trains in the Northeast Corridor, from Washington, through Baltimore and Philadelphia to New York.
Q: Are all high-speed trains electric?
A: Yes. In other countries they can go 180 mph, and 225 mph in France. There’s a new line under construction in Japan that will be able to go 250 mph.
Q: Would we need to lay new track for high-speed trains?
A: The Northeast Corridor is on tracks engineered and built in the 1800s, so those trains can only go 120 mph (still faster than Amtrak’s 79 in the rest of the country). New tracks would be needed for really high speeds.
Q: Why don’t we have more high-speed lines here in the U.S.?
A: They think you can only have them where cities are close. But Chicago and Milwaukee are only 90 miles apart. And Detroit, St. Louis and Indianapolis are all within striking distance. We should have high-speed rail there now, as an alternative to short-hop airlines and highways – both a major source of pollutants.
Q: What about the rest of the country? Is it too spread out?
A: A train going 250 mph could go from Chicago to LA in less than 10 hours, and from New York to LA in less than 15. You wouldn’t have to get there 2 hours early, and the ride would be smooth instead of bouncing up and down in the air currents. You could see the country instead of the tops of clouds.
Q: What about freight trains? Can they use the same tracks?
A: Yes, if they are built as high-speed trains. High-speed freight trains would take heavy trucks of the highway, eliminating most of the need for frequent, expensive highway maintenance.
Q: Where would the money come from?
A: If it were like the highway system, we could do it with taxes, instead of pouring the money down a rat hole in another country and killing people. We could save people instead; we’re killing 45,000 each year on the highways.
(Photo of high-speed train in Amsterdam from Flickr and photographer Mike Noestheden.)
To get involved, learn about the Midwest High Speed Rail Assn., which will link you to Save Chicago Transit.
To read about high-speed rail expansion in Europe, see the blog treehugger . For a PR video on California's plan for a high-speed system, see YouTube.
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