Washington Post: A high speed rail story that, hurrah, has some context to ease US envy
A superb story is one that tells readers something they didn’t know and is not handed out by a press agent, is compelling and accurate, and makes a difference (for the better, preferably) to some aspect of society. Those are rare, the prize winners. But even good stories, addressing a topic readers can be expected to know something about already, can do more than provide incremental addition to general knowledge. They can provide along with the latest some outside references that put the topic in a new light.
Chugging along here, a good example ran yesterday in the Washington Post by freelancer Brian Palmer. It’s about high speed rail in the US. The usual tack in such pieces is to compare the pitiful passenger train system in 
the US to the blindingly fast railroad systems in Europe, Japan, and increasingly, in China. Palmer does that too while examining the impact of federal stimulus dollars on US plans. But he starts off with an overall salute to US railroads for doing well what they make money at: hauling freight. The US is not entirely a wastrel on rail energy – we carry more goods than Europe does, by far, as a percentage of all commercial transport.From there he works into the historic context for rail as it is found in the US and elsewhere.
We’ve noticed before the explanatory work in the Post by Palmer, a regular at Slate. The last one was on solar energy. At Slate he works for the Explainer running feature. Some interesting ones there.
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- Charlie Petit
July 21st, 2010 at 4:02 pm
A pleasure to read this story. My father was a railroad buff, and often pulled articles discussing these issues out of the train-fan literature; there’s such a gap between industrial knowledge and public perception when it comes to trains, and this article spans it excellently.
Two more cents I’d like to add: people often say that passenger rail in the U.S. is a money-loser — which is true (though it doesn’t help that Amtrak used to be a reward for career hacks like Mike Dukakis) but ignores the enormous subsidies given by the government to the airline and trucking industries. And other countries don’t expect their public rail systems to make money in the first place. That’s not the point of a utility.
August 18th, 2010 at 4:33 am
Brandon makes a good point passenger rail has been ignored in US.
September 15th, 2010 at 2:15 am
Thanks for sharing these thoughts and information about the american railroad system. I do live in Europe and it’s quite normal for me to have passenger rail whereever I go.