Sentimental journey: exploring the long-ignored--and suddenly important--world of passenger rail.

• Author: Longman, Phillip
• Position: Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service - A Year Spent Riding Across America - Book review

Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service--A Year Spent Riding Across America

by James McCommons

Chelsea Green, 304 pp.

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James McCommons insists he is not a rail fan. This is not uncommon among those who work for, or with, the rail industry. To be a rail fan is to be what actual railroaders call a "foamer." In their extreme form, these are the people who chase trains in their cars while clicking pictures and listening in on train crew chatter with their handheld radio scanners. Police and rail crews often mistake them for terrorists or for some kind of nut. This has created some controversy among foamers themselves about whether the Bill of Rights should protect them from being regularly harassed and sometimes arrested. In December 2008, Amtrak police collared a man named Duane Kerzic and handcuffed him to a wall in a holding cell in New York's Penn Station for an hour after he refused to delete images of trains he had taken while standing on a public platform; it didn't matter that Kerzic was clicking away in hopes of winning an Amtrak-sponsored photo contest. The Amtrak police, unable to prove he was a national security threat, nailed him for trespassing.

So I understand why McCommons says he's not a rail fan. (Neither, I hasten to add, am I.) A real rail fan, after all, would never make the mistake of asserting, as McCommons does in passing, that the pre-1971 California Zephyr ran on the Union Pacific. (It was the Western Pacific, Jim, along with the Rio Grande and the Burlington.) Still, McCommons spent almost all of 2008 riding Amtrak trains back and forth across the country, telling folks he met along the way that he was doing research for a book on the future of passenger rail. Not a bad cover story, and he stuck to it, though he did at times draw suspicion from rail officials when they learned of his travel history. The resulting work, Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service, is part travel log, chronicling both the horrors and the pleasures of riding Amtrak, and part solid political and business reporting on the rail industry that hardly any other journalist is doing. This is the part of the book that is highly relevant to non-foamers.

Starting with the Obama administration, governments at every level across the country are gearing up with big plans for rail. Competing for the $8 billion dedicated to high-speed passenger rail by the stimulus bill, for...