Getting ‘on track’
Guest Columnist
By Father Leonard Peterson
The men who remember will be in their 60s on up. The women who remember will likely not admit it because they have by nature an “age thing.”
I’m talking about trains being pulled by steam engines. As a member of the first group, I am old enough to recall the great black monsters whose sparks and bluster piercing the night could frighten a small boy waiting at the station. Now that boy has grown up and grown old, but the love of trains remains.
All of a sudden, a large spike in the price of a gallon of gas has made us all rethink how we can best get from here to there, “best” being a synonym for “cheapest.” The automobile, the most potent enemy of rail travel, has become a bigger strain on the family budget and induced ordinary folk into something called “staycations,” a disturbing hybrid of a word, ugly to the ear of a former English teacher like me.
Of course, I cannot deny that the car offers such convenience and independence that its place will likely never be taken over completely by public transit. Airplanes, another powerful agent of change that helped take away our trains, are downsizing and up pricing, and have forced us to take another look at trains. They have made train travel for commuters a much more viable option than it was even a year ago.
So is this piece meant to be a rally for rail travel? By no means. Rather, I just drop the pebble of a question into the pond of our thought processes. Before that drop, some reference to the wider context. We have a world population suffering in many places from air pollution, China at present being the worst example as highlighted by the Olympic Games.
In addition, there is a great hue and cry from the environmentalists about global warming, ice caps shrinking, polar bears going homeless, and oceans rising. The scientists seem divided on this one, but one can easily conclude that since the arrival of the industrial age and the invention of the automobile, with its combustion engine spilling out gases never imagined by people used to the horse and buggy, there would have to be atmospheric change.
Now, having briefly presented the various factors contributing to the present situation that eventually pits private transportation against the public kind, is there a moral dimension here? Or, in other words, could it possibly be morally wrong for a person who does too much car driving? Or does so unnecessarily? Do we, in turn, have a moral obligation to pressure our legislators into shifting funds designated for highways into public transportation upgrades?
These are questions for anybody old enough to own a driver’s license, or who remembers when $2 a gallon for gas was the norm. Meanwhile, as an admitted rail fan, I can hope for the day when more cars are on track.
Father Peterson is pastor of St. Maria Goretti Parish in Hatfield.