On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 04:55 AM, Thomas Shaddack wrote:
Yes, and I spent 7 weeks traveling around Europe with a Eurail Pass. Except in Italy, where the trains were noticeably grubbier and Americans were warned that armed robberies of passengers are common, the trains were well-run, clean, and "they ran on time."Railroads are for hoboes and untermenschen.I don't know how it works in the US, but railroads are both comfortable and pretty reliable in Europe.
Reasons for this are historical, political, social, geographical, and are well-known.
We're discussing here the situation where 95% of the frequent posters live, the U.S.
To a European traveler in the U.S., I would never recommend that that make Amtrak (our
"national socialist rail system") their means of getting around the country. Here in California, for example, as I said, the train stations are usually in the inner city urban ghettoes. Not a lot of Europeans would be comfortable disembarking from trains with their families and finding themselves in a negro neighborhood with negroes yelling insults at "honkies" and "whiteys." Or in a Mexican barrio with cars sitting on their rims, with crack pipes littering the restrooms, with 15-year-old boys selling their 13-year-old sisters. And there are very few decent hotels within easy traveling distance of the rail yards in American cities.
All of my European friends who visit California either rent cars or have friends driving them around (several have been driven to my house for stays, for example). None of them rely on trains and buses to move them around...at least I have never been asked to drive to darkest Salinas to pick up a friend from Europe before he vanishes forever.
(I'm exaggerating slightly, of course, about the inner city dangers. But it is fact that in Europe the inner cities have tended to remain safe, and places where the museums and cultural attractions are. The inner cities in America are not like this at all, for the most part. In the U.S., many inner cities are welfare havens, where people collect money stolen from the suburban workers. And most European tourists come to see the Yosemite, Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, the Golden Gate Bridge, the redwoods, the mountains, the rivers, Disneyland, Hollywood, etc. Few of these sites are reachable by trains. Tour buses are one popular approach, but not the subsidized mass transit system.)
--Tim May
"Extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no vice."--Barry Goldwater
