It seemed as if Amtrak and its host railroads forgot to do track maintenance between Washington DC and Mississippi.  The persistent turbulence wasn’t anything comparable to an aircraft, or a rough day out on the Chesapeake, but more like being inside a slow motion lateral agitiator, like shaking up a can of paint in a hardware store.  Maybe I got the Charlie Brown car with the bad suspension.  The rolling stock is old – the newest coach cars in the east coast fleet left the factory in 1983.  Passenger rail has received short shrift indeed in the transportation funding sweepstakes.  America deserves better.  It deserves a fully functional, intermodal system that, if not to be the best in the world, should at least approach what it was sometime around 1930.

Article written by Steve Allan, regional planner for the Maryland Department of Planning