New Orleans     When it comes to trains, Americans take a beating during conversations about trains in other countries.  Unlike the United Kingdom and many countries in the European Union, trains are not ubiquitous in the US.  Outside of the northeast corridor between Boston and Washington, DC, trains are at best infrequent, expensive compared to auto and bus travel, and only casually scheduled for convenience or punctuality.  Friends and colleagues would come back to this side of the water raving about the quality of the “infrastructure,” and in many cases they were expressly talking about trains.  Many judged another country on whether they could “make the trains run on time”, sometimes even when it justified authoritarian governments and parties.

Well, that was then, and this is now.  It’s not because the US train system got better. No, it’s because the trains over there got so, so much worse.  To give the devil its due, there are highlights, like the prospect of finally rebuilding Penn Station in New York City or the wildly popular return for the first time post-Katrina of train service between New Orleans and Gulf Coast cities like Bay St. Louis and Mobile.

I had been hearing a growing din of complaints from ACORN organizers in the United Kingdom for example about trains delayed and cancelled.  Sometimes the issue was labor strikes, but often it was simply problems on the track infrastructure.  A key plank in the Labor Party’s electoral success short years ago had been a pledge to end privatization and bring the trains back under national control.  The current heat wave in Britain and Europe has exacerbated the problem and brought complaints to a breaking point. This is a crippling problem, because many depend on the trains and public transport not owning cars or even having a driver’s license.  As Britons are reckoning with this issue the delay to be tested for a license has stretched to many months.

Having just returned from Scotland and England, I can testify to the problem on a personal level now.  I had a sense I was in trouble even before going.  Trying to get the cheapest ticket available, given the exorbitant price hikes triggered by Trump’s war with Iran, I was flying round trip to Edinburgh, taking a train later to meetings in Birmingham, England, and then shuffling back to make a noon return ticket from Edinburgh on a Sunday.  Birmingham is the second largest city in England after London, so I had assumed I could either catch a train or one of the discount airliners early on Sunday.  Wrong!  No planes or trains left Birmingham on Sunday morning in time to make a noon flight, meaning taking a last train to Edinburgh leaving at 5:07 and scheduled to arrive at 9:41pm.

We were hardly past the first couple of stops on this milk run before the conductor announced that there was a fire on the line up ahead, and we would be delayed.  I appealed to a fellow passenger who assured me there was a later train on my connection at Carlisle, and I would only be forty minutes late.  Even though the fire was before Manchester, as other passengers got on, the news got worse.  All trains were being delayed, and suddenly we found that our train had been canceled and would end a long way from Edinburgh.  Getting there was out of the question now.  When the train disgorged us, we all ran over to track 6 to catch one to Glasgow Central.  I had a team of fellow passengers, many who were going to Glasgow and took me under their wings, thankfully.

The short story is both good and bad.  The downside was arriving in Glasgow at midnight, seven hours along the way.  The good news was that the train service has had to come to grips with its infrastructure by bending over backwards in a most un-American way for its passengers.  Some parts of the fare are refunded if the train is 15 minutes late, and at 2 hours late, the entire fare is refunded.  Furthermore, on arrival in Glasgow, they put 20 of us in big black London-style cabs from Glasgow to Edinburgh to where we were staying. Having slept in many airports when stranded overnight, hats off to them on that score, even if it meant I was in the middle of a street in Edinburgh trying to find my generous host’s place at 130 AM.

Running the trains on time seems way down the list everywhere now as infrastructure ages, public authorities are strapped for cash, and private corporations default to profits and caveat emptor.  Surely, we can do better.