Railroads and disasters

Very little comment has been made about the railroads, what happened to various lines (freight and Amtrak), services lost or cancelled, at the time of Hurricane Katrina, August 27-29. It's as though they didn't exist, didn't have tremendous jobs to do all along the Gulf coast and into New Orleans. Even as clean-up procedures began nothing was said in the media, other than references to the effect of shipping various products from the north down the Mississippi. What little I could learn was thanks to an email service that covers all sorts of transportation affairs and it had more to say about what was happening to the freight lines than what happened to Amtrak and the New Orleans station. Amtrak's own web site did report changes in schedules: the City of New Orleans would run only to Memphis, the Crescent to Nashville and the Sunset was totally wiped out from Florida to Louisiana, which we easily understood having ridden it in July. One news source did say something about Amtrak having offered rides out of New Orleans either at the time of the storm or shortly thereafter when living conditions deteriorated so badly but apparently nobody pursued the offer. There was such an overall snafu that it's no wonder lots of things got overlooked or ignored. (School buses left to the flooding when they could have been used to get people out of the city.)

I find it incomprehensible that people in the transportation business--buses, planes, trucks--seem to have lost track of the value of railroads. It's as though we never transported people in passenger cars on railroad tracks, that thousands, if not millions, of people once crossed the United States by rail. Today people look at you oddly when you refer to riding a train, especially if it's over a great distance. It surprised me no end to find several people as we crossed the country who were riding the train for the first time and enjoying it.

When I worked for Pennsylvania in the 1940s in a New York City ticket office, people bought tickets to go across the country despite the fact that we were involved in a world war. There were enough railroad cars to supply the military's needs as well as the private sector. It was still possible to call up an entire second section of the Broadway Limited if the passenger demand was there. Now Amtrak has to struggle to keep old equipment suitable enough for service.