With Trump’s Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao already admitting that their plan for our country’s infrastructure includes making travelers pay tolls to private corporations instead of states, it is no wonder that this administration’s budget proposals for infrastructure are terrifying. Trump himself, as well as the many billionaires and wanna-be-billionaires on his staff, don’t like trains. Most of them haven’t taken a train in a very long time—if at all. Trump’s budget proposal is a disaster for most Americans in all sorts of ways, but no more obvious than its attempts to force our railway system into uselessness for almost half of our country’s population. The Guardian has elaborated on some of the less publicized work to advocate for our railway system being done by the National Association of Railroad Passengers (Narp).
Narp launched a “Rally for Trains” campaign that saw events last month across the country, from Portland, Oregon, to Miami, Florida, via Wausau, Wisconsin.
One rally was in Alpine, a west Texas town of about 6,000 people in Brewster County – an area bigger than Connecticut that gave 53% of its votes to Trump in the 2016 presidential election. A Trump-Pence Make America Great Again poster is fixed to a balcony above a store opposite the station along one of Alpine’s main drags, which could pass for a western film set but for a Thai food truck.
The fact of the matter is that one of the first things the Trump administration did when stepping into office was to stifle California’s attempts to move our country towards the high speed rail. He did this in part because he wanted to punish a powerful state that is opposed to his brand of kleptocracy. Alpine is small potatoes in comparison to California, but it is exactly the “forgotten Americans” in places like Alpine that Trump was supposed to help. The Guardian spoke with Alpine resident and train advocate Gwynne Jamieson.
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The next nearest Amtrak station, Sanderson, is 85 miles away. The loss of a service used by about 5,000 people a year, Jamieson said, would be a grievous blow for local people and tourists. A woman sitting on a bench was waiting to pick up passengers arriving from Los Angeles for the Marfa film festival.
Here, bus service to major cities is infrequent and indirect and the nearest commercial airports are three or four hours away. So the train is a valuable option, even if it does take 14 hours and 25 minutes to traverse the 596 miles from Alpine to Houston – five or six hours slower than in a car.
You can see a listing of the 220 American towns and cities that will be strangled by a billionaire’s idea of progress here.