Me and Casey Jones

Come on with the train already, will ya’

by Jerry Fraser

Were you fascinated with trains as a youngster? I remember walking the tracks by day, and lying in bed listening to a whistle moaning through the hot summer night, and how excited I was when I rode the Great Northern’s Empire Builder to Columbia Falls, Mont., as a teen-ager.

In school we sang about the Rock Island Line (it was a mighty good road), and every week I watched Johnny Cash sing about the Wabash Cannonball and the Orange Blossom Special on TV.

I read all the books the library had on railroading in the age of steam, and I built a model railroad on a four-by-eight sheet of plywood that folded up against the wall when my mother was fed up with tripping over it.

So how come my eyes glaze over when people talk about the Portland-Boston train? Why do I tell my little nieces and nephews, “Santa Claus is coming to town, but you better hope he isn’t on the Portland-Boston train”? Where’s the “All-aboard!” in my soul?

I listen to Duke Ellington’s “Take the A-Train”, about New York City’s express subway to Harlem, and I think, “What if the composer had been a Mainer? What would have become of a song called “Take the Nay Train”?

For that matter, could a song titled “Peaks Island Line,” “Cow Hampshire Cannonball,” or “The Black Fly Special,” outlive its creator? We think not.

Here’s the problem. The Portland-Boston train is a railroad buff’s dream come true. Railroad buffs are fine around train sets, but maybe they’re not so good with public policy. This thing has been the Feel-Good Special since Day One — which was about 12 years ago. (By comparison, the builders of the transcontinental railroad crossed the Rocky Mountains and linked California to the heartland in about six years, and they had to ship steel rails around Cape Horn to do it.)

I don’t think of myself as exceptionally cynical. Trains slip wraithlike through ribbons of space, and the Europeans and Japanese have demonstrated that high-speed trains are a viable alternative to airplanes, to say nothing of automobiles.

The trouble with this train, however, is that it’s a solution in search of a problem. An expensive solution. So far the taxpayers have about $60 million invested, and no one I know seriously thinks of this money as anything other than water over the dam. With a projected annual ridership of 320,000, we’re looking at is $11 million in revenue — assuming every passenger buys a round-trip ticket to Beantown. At that figure, it isn’t going to pay its own way. But then again, what Amtrak train does?

Nor is traffic mitigation an issue. Sure, congestion is a problem, but no one is saying, “I don’t know what we’re widening the turnpike for! The Portland-Boston train is coming.”

Perhaps I should say, almost no one. “It isn’t a coincidence that this train originates in Maine for an 8:25 a.m. arrival in Boston,” Mike Murray, the executive director of the Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority, told a newspaper in New Hampshire last October.

What I don’t think he said was that any Portlander who plans on commuting to Boston needs to figure on a 6 ý.m. arrival at the depot here. Movie buffs (“From Russia with Love”, Strangers on a Train”, and so on) may think of rail travel as genteel, but it isn’t necessarily speedy. In this case, there are five stops over the 114-mile route, in Biddeford/Saco, Wells, Dover, Exeter, and Haverhill (plus Old Orchard Beach in summer). At a top speed of 79 m.p.h. the trip would take two and a half hours.

The trouble is, it’s not clear that this train will ever hit top speed. Guilford Transportation, which own most of the roadbed over which the train is to travel, has said the tracks are not designed for speeds in excess of 59 m.p.h. (Given the number of Amtrak trains that have found their way into the ditch in recent years, I would happily settle for 59. But then again, I just want to be able to drink 15 beers at a Red Sox game and get back to Maine without getting arrested.) The Northern New England Passenger Rail Authority, which wants the train to compete with automobiles, favors the higher speed.

For all of this, the press has been exuberant. If you had a dollar for every “Passenger service on fast track,” headline written in the last couple of years you could buy a round-trip ticket to Boston. Unfortunately, as we learned in the last presidential election, most newspeople report on the world they’d like to live in, not the one in which they do.

I am somewhat more pessimistic. You may be able to ride a rocket to Mars before you can take this train to Boston. You might even see the Big Dig completed, speaking of Boston.

Not everyone shares my outlook. One columnist predicted 1.5 million riders by the fifth year. (That’s 4,100 people a day. Maybe we should convert the Cumberland County Civic Center to a railway depot.) And I have been told that plans are already in the works to extend the line from Portland to Brunswick — with a stop in Freeport, of course.

Nor is Maine the only state in which all things are possible. “I expect someday to see train service to Plaistow [NH],” Murray said. “It’s a no-brainer.”

You can say that again.

Jerry Fraser can be reached at cfraser@maine.rr.com.