Between the Coasts: Why American Rail Still Matters
Forty years of highway subsidies hollowed out the heartland. A functioning rail network is how we stitch it back together.
I spent two weeks last January riding the Crescent from New York to New Orleans, watching the country change outside my window. Past the Jersey marshes, through the Virginia Piedmont, across the Carolina fall line into the red clay of Georgia — every mile a reminder that this nation was built on rails, not highways. The tracks are still there, buried under decades of neglect, waiting for a country willing to invest in them again.
The Cost of Abandonment
When Congress passed the Highway Act of 1956, it committed twenty-five billion dollars to an interstate system that would reshape American life. Railroads, once the backbone of passenger travel, were left to wither. By 1970, intercity rail ridership had fallen to a fraction of its postwar peak. The communities that depended on their stations — towns across Ohio, Indiana, and Missouri — found themselves stranded, connected only by roads that demanded a car and the fuel to run it.