A few years ago, escaping a blizzard in western New York, I got off the highway in a small city named Salamanca, and took refuge in a railroad depot that had been turned into a museum. Salamanca was once a vibrant hub of four different railroads, and its museum was a lovely old wooden building, built in 1912, full of the usual nostalgic memorabilia: sepia photographs of mustachioed railroad engineers posing proudly, steam engines pulling into town shrouded by clouds of coal smoke, conductors’ caps. The usual ghosts.

But the thing that caught my eye on that dead-of-winter night was a century-old railroad timetable mounted on the wall, a timetable for a long-vanished railroad called the Buffalo, Rochester and Pittsburgh. Back then, the timetable told me, to get from Pittsburgh to Buffalo, then a vibrant, thrumming city, you had to pass through 74 towns and villages along the way, including Springsville, and Ashford, and Johnsonburg, and Mount Jewett. And Salamanca, with its tree-lined lined neighborhoods, its ornate red-brick bank buildings, the canal that served to move the harvested local hardwood.

And I found myself imagining what it would have been like to be a passenger on that train. I imagined the train stopping in all of those villages, once vibrant, now rendered as afterthoughts by the interstate highways, and by the jets that travel invisible lanes through the sky. I imagined looking out the window and seeing all of those town squares. Bandstands. Gazebos. Courthouses. Shops and stores. I imagined people from each of those towns boarding the train. I imagined meeting them, and asking them about their lives, and telling them about mine.

And that’s why this past April 15 was a really good day for America. On that day, during a speech in Washington, the president of the United States announced plans for an American high-speed rail system. It’s still a vision. But now it has a beginning. And if our trains do come back, something else comes back: we’ll be back on the ground again. With each other.
The dry political facts are these: Barack Obama is asking congress to find $8 billion to build high-speed rail between our cities in a dozen different corridors: Portland Maine to Charlotte North Carolina. Portland Oregon to Seattle Washington. LA to San Francisco. Miami to Jacksonville. Yes, $8 billion is a whole lot less than the $250 billion China has committed to its own rails – a country that is a quarter-century ahead of us, train-wise – but it’s a start. Truth is, just about everyone is ahead of us. Forty years ago, just as France and Japan were inventing high-speed trains, we gave up on our trains entirely.

Today, just about every industrialized nation, from Asia to Europe, links its cities by high-speed rail. China has trains that travel at 330 miles per hour. Mag-lev trains. That’s magnetic levitation. It sounds like fantasy. It’s real.

Last year I had a conversation with a former CEO of Amtrak named David Gunn who was fired by the Bush administration. He told me, “Our national transportation system is breaking down. We’re in a deep, deep hole.” But now, and maybe not too late, the new administration sees how much money can be saved, and how much infrastructure can be built, and how many jobs can be created, by following the model of the rest of the world. And all of that is cool. That we can save money and energy. That we can move people from city to city at a fraction of the cost we pay now, for highway pavement, for extra gates at choked airports.

But the real advantage will be in the story told by that old timetable. When we start moving by trains again, we’ll start seeing America again, village by village, town by town. Which means, if you want to connect a couple of radical dots, we’ll start being a little more of a democracy founded on what it was supposed to be founded on: knowing that we are a nation that’s made up of a patchwork quilt of towns, linked village by village. That we are a people in common.
Did you ever look down from an airplane at night, as it crossed the country, and marvel at those thousands of lights, those millions of lights, each one belonging to a house, a family, a story, a life? So many neighbors. So many fellow countrymen. But so distant. So untouchable. So easy to ignore.

Think of the last cross-country flight you took. How many people did you meet from any of those places six miles beneath you? How many people did you even talk to, as you traveled 3,000 miles over a hundred thousand villages? Think of the last time you hustled between two cities on the interstate. Who did you meet on your journey? The guy you paid for your gas? unless you used your ATM card at the pump. The woman handing you the quarter-pounder through the drive-through window. Did you ask her where she was from? How she was doing? What mattered to her? How things are going in her own home town?

High-speed trains won’t stop in all of those towns. In thirty years, the Dallas to Kansas City high-speed train won’t stop in Muskogee, Oklahoma, or Emporia, Kansas. The Miami to Jacksonville bullet train won’t pause to take on folks from Samsula or Port St. John. But out the windows, America will be rolling by. It’ll be there, to feel, and to see. To remind us of how all of those millions of lights are touchable, and real.

And here’s what I wonder; here’s another dot to connect: Is it possible that the last time we had a true middle class was just before we found a way to span the coasts in a matter of hours at 34,000 feet? Or drive from city to city in motorized pods? Is it remotely possible that when we stopped moving from town to town to get anywhere, and we started leapfrogging over all of the towns that made up our national quilt, that we lost something of what made us a nation of folks who cared about their neighbors? Not their real neighbors, but the people over the next mountain range, the people down the prairie road, the people in the next town over?

I spend a lot of time thinking about the people I’ve met on trains. Trains from New York City to my home in Dutchess County. Trains from Chicago to Los Angeles. I think about a trip on the California Zephyr. That’s an Amtrak train between Chicago and San Francisco. It wasn’t the amber waves of grain in Nebraska, or the aspen trees just west of Denver, or the elk who nosed up to the train as it wound its way through the mountains that made the trip so meaningful. It was the bar car, and the dining car, where I shared drinks and meals and stories with a tire salesman, and an ex-convict, and a teacher, and a guy between jobs. They all had stories. Joys. Troubles. Villages.

Putting us back on the ground will re-remind us of the people we once were. And when we share each others’ stories again, we’ll be able to step back, get out of the little cubes of ourselves.
Maybe I should just settle for the practical, obvious advantages to high-speed intercity rail: the energy saved, the time saved, the jobs created. But I’m holding out for something more. I’m holding out for a day when, on my way to somewhere new, I can be reminded of where I came from.

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