OTG and the World

OK, I go off the grid for a lousy two days and the stock and oil markets go crazy. It does tend to feed my solipsist fantansies - not that the world is doing much better when I am plugged in.

We took the Cumbres and Toltec narrow gauge railroad out of Chama, New Mexico yesterday and it was remarkably pleasant. This old style steam train is more Old West than Hogwart's Express and its pace up the four per cent grade to the 10,015 ft. summit (or cumbres) is slow enough to give mounted bandits plenty of time to catch up and jump aboard. After a week of mostly 100+ temperatures in the low lands, it was nice to see snow on the ground, a patchy inch or so from the previous day's snowfall with occasional two and three foot drifts still melting from last winter (when they were ten times that depth). Elk and deer were a common sight but scenic pride of place went to the mountain meadows and valleys where spring was busy with all its burgeoning greenery and trickling streamlets.

In the median of the highway from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, there is busy construction, the result of our governor's promotion of a commuter train running between the cities in question, and ultimately, so it is planned, beyond. Trains have huge advantages in fuel economy for point to point travel, but the infrastructure costs are large, especially in cities where they are most useful but real estate is most costly.

If energy cost is to remain high, or perhaps go higher, trains may come back for both people and freight. We should not fool ourselves into thinking that they would be cheap, though. The great infrastructure advances of the past were built with government help and vast governmental subsidies - the railroads, canals, the interstate highway system, and the air transport network. Very likely something similar would be needed if the railroads were to be re-imagined.

The big pieces, the arteries, are actually the easy part - the 300 mph trains, the tunnel under the Bering Strait and similar engineering feats. The tough part is the capillaries. How do you deliver goods and people to their subburban homes, offices, and multifarious other destinations? Are buses still the best that we can do?

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