(rshsdepot) Atlanta, GA

[Bernie Wagenblast <brwagenblast_@_comcast.net>]

Atlanta --- the little engine that wouldn't

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution...02/12/2002

The obstacles to Atlanta's becoming a lively railroad center again aren't
just tight money, a sense that trains are old-fashioned and a continuing
zillion-dollar subsidy of the highway system. The obstacles to creating a
new Union Station in downtown Atlanta aren't just legislative Atlantaphobia
and a natural American reluctance to admit that Paris and London have
something we don't.

The obstacles also include a certain deadness of soul. A musty lack of
adventure. A dryness and a dreariness where there should be fun, dreams and
romance.

Trains aren't just a useful way of moving people from A to B. As novelists,
artists and moviemakers have known for years, they're also exciting and
intriguing and occasionally luxurious and even beautiful.

Think of Tolstoy (the trains in "Anna Karenina"). Think of Hitchcock and
countless photographs and the echoes of rails and whistles in music.

Trains are like mystery stories. Agatha Christie alone wrote "The Mystery of
the Blue Train," "Murder on the Orient Express" and "4:50 from Paddington."

Maria Saporta had a piece in Monday's paper describing yet another chance
for the city and the state to seize the future and put together the logical
site for a great downtown railway station. Acquire it soon, warn the
experts, or else Norfolk Southern may sell it and related properties to
developers who'll make a great station impossible.

But the idea just sits there, despite the backing of numerous chambers of
commerce. (Alas, the backers of the all-purpose train, bus, subway station
insist on calling it a "multi-modal" facility. We need to return to the
lovely and romantic language of train stations, of Grand Central and
Waterloo and the Gare du Nord.) Maybe if more Georgia politicians could
taste the trains of Europe, they'd get more excited about the prospect of
passenger trains zooming about and linking Atlanta with Macon, Athens,
Savannah, Chicago and L.A.

Of course, there are bad trains, too, and we wouldn't want to inflict them
on our pols. Certain New York commuter lines spring to mind. Certain
fiendishly crowded Indian trains and Egyptian trains pop up periodically in
the press (people hanging on for dear life, falling out the windows and so
on). Yet even some very slow trains --- such as the one with wooden seats
that used to (and may still) chug between Mexico City and the Yucatan via
Chiapas --- have their sweet stretches.

What some of our gray politicians and dried-up bean counters need to do is
go off on a holiday --- by train --- and maybe have a drink, eat a feast,
meet some strangers, fall in love, and go clicking and clacking and
whooshing into the great unknown.

Kenya's "Lunatic Express." The Trans-Siberian. The great glass-domed trains
that cross the Rocky Mountains. The little trains that tootle comfortably
through southern Spain, across the Alps, and back and forth between Pretoria
and Cape Town. The bizarre trains that Paul Theroux rode through South
America. Not to mention the ordinary useful trains that millions of people
ride every day in --- trains suitable for reading, conversing, dozing,
looking out the window and talking on the phone.

You can take a walk on a train. Children love trains. Trains slice through
the countryside more neatly than highways. There's a future for trains.
Atlanta needs a new station. ccampbell_@_ajc.com

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