Within living memory there was frequent passenger railroad service north and south out of Hartford, and the railroad company, the New York, New Haven, and Hartford, known simply as the New Haven, was as famous as any. Thanks to Hartford-born financier and monopolist John Pierpont Morgan Sr., the New Haven practically owned transportation in southern New England for the first half of the 20th Century, having acquired most of its competitors.
The line north of New Haven to Hartford and Springfield, Mass., was double-tracked to hasten the heavy traffic. But the New Haven was usually over-indebted, went bankrupt twice, was crippled by cars and highways in the 1950s and '60s, and was taken over by the government in 1970. One track north of New Haven was torn up to reduce maintenance costs. Since then the passenger service maintained on the line by the government railroad, Amtrak, has been only nominal.
Now Connecticut's Transportation Department hopes to revive passenger service frequent enough to serve commuters from Springfield to New Haven, connecting there to the Metro-North commuter railroad system, the busiest in the country, serving Grand Central Station in New York and the whole metropolitan area. Double track north of New Haven has been restored and the new trains (refurbished ones, actually) are running. This is thrilling as it shows that state government still can do something more than pay pensions to its employees, do something of potentially general benefit.
But it may be a long time before the new train service can be considered a success. For just like the old New Haven, the new service, dubbed CTrail, will lose money -- probably tens of millions of dollars per year -- and each passenger paying $8 per trip between Hartford and New Haven probably will be subsidized by state government by many times that amount for a long time. Busy as Metro-North is, fares still don't cover its costs and never will. State government pays tens of millions each year to keep the line running.
Of course highways cost money too and are vital to commerce and development. But a railroad can support commuters and development only if its stations have frequent trolley, subway, bus, or van service to connect them to their communities. Such systems are not yet in place for the new line, and when they are they will lose money too.
Ironically, at the outset the new rail service's biggest beneficiary may be the MGM casino under construction in Springfield, which more easily will siphon Connecticut and New York customers away from the Indian casinos in eastern Connecticut, costing the state still more money. State government has authorized the tribes to build a casino in East Windsor to intercept Springfield gambling traffic but the railroad doesn't go through East Windsor. No one seems to have thought of that when the site for the interceptor casino was chosen.
Even so, on the whole the new rail service will accentuate Connecticut's excellent position between New York and Boston, especially if, as is contemplated, Massachusetts extends its own commuter rail service from Boston and Worcester west to Springfield.
After all, nearly everyone in Connecticut goes to New York and Boston sometimes. Now it is easy again for people north of New Haven to go to New York by train and use the time not to stew in traffic but to read, work, or just relax or nap. (If only Metro-North and CTrail trains could be equipped with wireless internet service.)
So "puff-puff, toot-toot, off we go" -- just, please, not to another bankruptcy.
Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Alyssa Aquino: What happened to Trump's transportation plan?
Commuter rail in Westchester County, N.Y.
Via OtherWords.org
Every time the train derails, my mother begs me to stay put. But how can I?
Along the densely populated Eastern Seaboard, your life is structured around transport. Not everyone can live in New York City or Washington, D.C., so millions of people who work there commute in. The car traffic qualifies as its own hell, so many take the rail.
Joe Biden famously commuted on a train from his home in Delaware to D.C. most days as senator. These days, I less famously commute from Maryland to D.C. So when Donald Trump announced an ambitious $1.1 trillion infrastructure plan, I was actually excited.
You see, American infrastructure isn’t so great. We have the world’s biggest economy, but our transit systems rank behind 10 other countries, according to the Global Competitiveness Index. Our trains are tied with Malaysia’s.
For a commuter, these statistics aren’t surprising.
New York, a global financial capital, boasts an intensely convoluted transportation system, where the subway stalls and overcrowds and overheats amidst the press of 4.3 million daily commuters. The stations leak so badly you could say many have permanent waterfall features.
The D.C. metro? It catches on fire. No, really. It does.
The derailments along the lines connecting neighboring states to New York are an even deadlier inconvenience. In 2015, 237 people were killed from Amtrak rail incidents alone, according to the Infrastructure Report Card.
That’s nearly double the number — 136 — who died in airline crashes. And nearly 1,000 more were injured.
As someone whose livelihood is intimately tied to accessing a city, transportation is important to me. So I was a bit let down (if vastly unsurprised) when Trump’s campaign promise didn’t pan out.
First, the numbers kept changing. Was it $1 trillion? Or $500 billion? Or $200 billion, mostly in tax breaks for businesses?
Well, he figured out his math eventually — his budget proposal actually cuts $2.4 billion from the Department of Transportation.
The money needed to fix the Metro-North line? Gone. That’s a pretty callous way for Trump to treat his home state.
But it’s also cruel to Trump’s supporters in places like Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana — rail-poor places sometimes jeered as “flyover country.”
Indeed, most of Trump’s proposed transportation cuts come out of railway systems that those states use, too. Trains through the Midwest already run late half the time, yet all 15 long-distance Amtrak lines get the axe in Trump’s budget.
Right now, 23 states are only serviced with long-distance trains, a figure that breaks neatly into 220 communities and 140 million people. That service is at risk — and so are thousands of jobs for the people who work the trains.
And who knows how many jobs might be lost by commuters? Already, delays along the Northeast lines cost the area $500 million a year when people can’t get to work.
Beyond the economic impacts are the long-term consequences that could arise from a less connected country. Historically, rail expansion didn’t just connect heartland areas to coastal cities — it allowed the agricultural industry to really take root, a fact of huge cultural as well as economic importance.
Protesters rallying from Denver to Cincinnati decided, no thank you, we want our trains. And Congress paid attention, kind of — it’s decided to keep the status quo for now. But that status quo was enough for Trump to decide that a $1.1 trillion transfusion was necessary to fix it. So where’s the plan?
Meanwhile, as I wait each day on D.C.’s often-late subway, I can’t help but think the people in “flyover country” are missing the same thing.
Alyssa Aquino is a Next Leader at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Robert Whitcomb: Private-sector passenger rail?
Since the disappearance of private-sector passenger rail service decades ago, intrepid entrepreneurs have tried to bring it back. None have succeeded.
However, in some densely populated places, passenger rail has even thrived in the public sector, at least as measured by passenger volume. This mostly means Amtrak in the Northeast Corridor and several major cities’ long-established commuter-rail networks. But new commuter rail is also catching on in some unlikely places, including such Sunbelt cities as Dallas and Phoenix, which now have popular light-rail systems.
Now, with an aging population, the proliferation of digital devices that many people would prefer to stare at rather than at the road and the increasing unpleasantness of traveling on America’s decaying highway infrastructure amidst texting and angry drivers, private passenger rail looks more capitalistically attractive.
Consider All Aboard Florida, a company that plans to offer extensive rail service starting in 2017. It will connect Miami and Orlando in just under three hours, with stops in Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach.
Its advertising copy eloquently describes commuter rail’s allure in populous areas: “{Y}ou can turn your stressful daily {car} commute into a productive or peaceful time by choosing to take the train instead of driving your car. By becoming a train commuter, you’ll also help the economy and environment while you’re at it.’’
Southern New England, like much of Florida, is densely populated, with some unused or underused rail rights of way. So our entrepreneurs occasionally propose private passenger rail for routes not served by Amtrak or such regional mass-transit organizations as Metro North and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority.
Consider the Worcester-Providence route, on which a new company called the Boston Surface Railroad Co. wants to start operating commuter rail service in 2017 on the (now freight-only) Providence and Worcester Railroad’s tracks. Most of the commuters going to work would be traveling from the Worcester area, via Woonsocket, where there would be a stop, to Greater Providence. While Providence itself has fewer people -- about 178,000 -- than Worcester (about 183,000), the two-state Providence metro area -- about 1.6 million -- is much bigger than the latter’s metro area’s about 813,000.
The density is there for rail service. That the region has an older population than the national average and frequent bad winter weather also give the idea a lift.
But the old rail line needs to be upgraded if the trips are to be made fast enough to lure many travelers. The company hopes to offer a one-way time of about 70 minutes on a route that you can drive in about 45 minutes in moderate traffic and clement weather. That could be a killer.
What this project and similar ones need is new welded track, rebuilt rail beds (with help of public money?) and some entirely new routes to make service competitive with car-driving times. We need more passenger and duel-purpose passenger-freight rail lines, not more highways. But getting them will be tough in a country that so blithely tolerates crumbling transportation infrastructure and has a deeply entrenched libertarian commuting habit of a single person driving long distances to work. Unless gasoline tops $5 a gallon and stays there for at least a year, it’s hard to see millions of Americans deciding that they’ll quit their cars to take the train.
Still, I applaud the project’s CEO, Vincent Bono, and hope that thousands of commuters will give his railroad a try. While the trip would be long, think of how much uninterrupted Web surfing (free Wi-Fi!), reading and snoozing you could get on these trains, with their reclining seats.
xxx
An Aug. 10 USA Today story was headlined “Smaller cities emerge among top picks for biz meetings.’’ Depressingly, Providence was not on the list of the top 50 places for “meetings and events’’ in 2015, say evaluations by Cvent. But many far less interesting and attractive places were.
The reasons probably include Rhode Island’s under-funded and balkanized self-promotion and the long delay (now finally being addressed) in building a longer runway at T.F. Green Airport.
Robert Whitcomb (rwhitcomb51@gmail.com), a Providence-based editor, writer and consultant, oversees newenglanddiary.com and is a partner in Cambridge Management Group, (cmg625.com), a healthcare consultancy, and a fellow at the Pell Center. He used to be the editorial-page editor of The Providence Journal and the finance editor of the International Herald Tribune, among other jobs.
Chris Powell: Muslims ask to be seen as they are
MANCHESTER,Conn. Being Muslim in America these days may be almost as hard as being a young black man -- not quite as hard, since, if they want to, Muslims can conceal their religious affiliation. But these days both groups can't escape the hurtful stereotypes -- young black men because poverty and crime are so racially disproportionate, Muslims because their faith is being hijacked by theocratic gangsters whose crimes grow more horrifying by the day. Are these stereotypes being taken as license for murder in America? Many blacks think so whenever a young black man dies in a confrontation with police. And now many Muslims think so because of the murder this month of three Muslim college students in Chapel Hill, N.C. The motive of the man charged with the atrocity awaits official confirmation. At their mosque in Berlin, Conn., last week Muslims from the Hartford area gathered to mourn the murdered students and protest the stereotyping, especially as they find it perpetuated by television newscasts, where sensation is often the objective and where “Islamic” can hardly be spoken without some connection to gangsterism. That's not us, the Hartford-area Muslims told their neighbors last week, continuing: The world wants to see "moderate" Muslims -- normal people, good people wishing only good for others -- so here we are. Take note of us! Adherents of most other religions in Connecticut came to the mosque to join the Muslims in their mourning and their demand to be seen as they are. As this is America, Muslims shouldn't have to protest so that they might be considered as individuals any more than young black men should have to. Their own blameless lives should be enough to fend off prejudice. They should not have to call attention to themselves. But if they choose to do so, as the Hartford-area Muslims did last week, they can declare that they mean no harm and want to live in a pluralistic and democratic society with a government that respects and protects all, as the ethnic and religious groups that preceded them here wanted, and thereby oppose the gangsters and do the world a service. They also will be astonishing and shaming the prejudiced and thus making it easier for their children. All ethnic and religious groups that came to America faced prejudice and even aggression from some of those who preceded them, though even Jews, most vilified of all, may not have had to deal with the defamation that Muslims have faced lately because of the hijacking of their religion abroad. But then the country's hard-earned precedents of individual liberty and equality before the law have never been stronger. Muslims should claim those precedents boldly, grant them gladly, and make themselves at home. The universal nation will not refuse them. * * * As improvements on the Metro-North commuter railroad are not happening as fast as its riders in Connecticut would like, some state legislators are proposing that state government should seek another operator for the part of the railroad that serves Connecticut, the tracks long having been state property. This would not be practical, since Connecticut's part of the railroad is inseparable from New York's part and most of the railroad's commuters move back and forth across the state line every day. Connecticut has only itself to blame for its dissatisfaction with Metro-North. For nobody made the state assign its railroad to a New York state agency when the railroad's private operator failed four decades ago. Connecticut simply wasn't prepared to take responsibility then, and it still isn't prepared. But Connecticut could take responsibility for improving the railroad by seeking membership on its board and sharing credit for success and blame for failure -- if Connecticut's elected officials are ever interested in more than being able to blame someone else about the railroad. Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Chris Powell: Empty buses, broken train line
Last week brought another disastrous service interruption on the Metro-North commuter railroad in southwestern Connecticut as a 118-year-old swing bridge over a river in Norwalk malfunctioned and took hours to repair. The state Transportation Department said a replacement for the bridge is being designed and might be completed in ... 10 years. Meanwhile, the state Transportation Department hopes to have the crown jewel public-works project of Governor Malloy's administration, the bus highway from Hartford to New Britain, operating in 10 months-- remarkable progress, except, of course, that there is no need for the busway, whose buses probably will run mostly empty for many years between hubs that have become mainly centers of welfare dependence and government bureaucracy.
By contrast, Metro-North is the busiest commuter rail system in the country and in southwestern Connecticut it serves people who not only work for a living in the private sector but provide the bulk of the state's income-tax revenue. The suckers are not likely to get any respect from state government until they go on welfare or join a public-employees union.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.
Conn. vs. Fla. may be equal contest
By CHRIS POWELL
MANCHESTER, Conn.
With snowstorms seeming to arrive every few days, little room left for stacking
the snow, road-salt supplies nearly exhausted, state and municipal snow-removal
budgets in deficit, and the Connecticut General Assembly reconvening, many people in
Connecticut feel that they have had enough of the state.
It's little consolation to them that Connecticut may have the best snowplowing
operation in the country, with the state's major roads almost always kept
passable throughout even the heaviest snowstorms. For besides the extra snow,
Connecticut's economy and standard of living are still declining, which may be
the cause of most of the surliness here; the snow just makes people feel their
resentments more keenly.
As a result many of them look south enviously, especially to subtropical
Florida, to which many Connecticut residents already have fled, either
permanently or just for the winter. Indeed, when the University of Connecticut's
basketball teams play colleges in Florida, the crowd often seems to favor the
visitors.
But while it may be harder to appreciate Connecticut after shoveling snow or
falling on ice, Florida has its own climate disadvantages. In the late summer
and early fall Florida can be crossed by as many hurricanes as Connecticut suffers
snowstorms in the winter, and the resulting property damage in Florida is far
greater than that inflicted by snowstorms in Connecticut, just as
weather-related electricity outages in Florida can last longer.
Because of bad weather a few weeks ago it took three days and several flight
reschedulings for a recently retired couple from Connecticut to escape the state
by air for their new winter home in South Florida, one of those tightly
regulated condominium complexes that forbid admission to anyone under 55. The
couple had hardly begun breathing the state-income-tax-free air when a line of
thunderstorms stalled overhead for 24 hours and dumped 14 inches of rain on
them, flooding their new neighborhood, closing its roads, and incapacitating
sewer lines and toilets for a couple of days.
It wasn't a snowstorm; it was worse.
Not long after the couple got dried out and settled, some university researchers
reported that alligators, which which infest South Florida, not only swim stealthily
but also climb trees, in part for better surveillance of their prey.
Told of the study, the new arrivals from Connecticut refused to be
concerned. While they had not yet read their condo association's many rules,
they figured that, in addition to excluding people younger than 55, there was
probably one against alligators climbing trees on the property and eating the
residents.
They shouldn't count on it. Annoying as Connecticut's snow has been, at least it
also has gotten in the way of the state's own many predators, both those with
four legs and those with two. There's never much crime in bad weather.
* * *
Two executives of the Metropolitan Transit Authority came to Hartford last week
so Gov Dan Malloy could reprimand them in front of the television cameras about
the MTA's mismanagement of the Metro-North Commuter Railroad, whose many recent
disasters have impaired service from New Haven to Grand Central Station in New
York. The MTA executives duly promised improvements soon.
But while the governor got to look tough, he really didn't increase
Connecticut's leverage with the MTA, a New York state agency paid by Connecticut
to operate the state's rail lines into New York. To gain such leverage
Connecticut needs a plan, just as Metro-North needs a plan to improve rail
service.
Connecticut's plan might include demanding representation on the MTA's board,
the renegotiation of Connecticut's contract with the MTA, and a study of how
Connecticut could take over the management of its rail lines into New York.
Until Connecticut has a rail-service-improvement plan that goes beyond scolding
MTA officials on television, the MTA may assume that it can take its time about
improving service here.
Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.
Please respond to www.newenglanddiary.com via rwhitcomb51@gmail.com.The anguish of 'The Organization Man'
See Paul Zahl's wonderful take on Sloan Wilson and his "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit'' (1955), that memorable but frequently misdescribed novel about what William H. Whyte called the corporate "Organization Man''.
The Reverend Mr. Zahl (he is an Episcopal minister) headlined his posting "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in Suburbia''.
The hero of the novel, the polite and quiet Tom Rath, is a daily Westport-New York commuter on the infamous New Haven Railroad (now the infamous Metro North) in shock from what happened to him in World War II.
