Amtrak Guest Rewards - Book about AMTRAK

Waiting on a Train: The Embattled Future of Passenger Rail Service--A Year Spent Riding across America
by James McCommons

http://www.amazon.com/Waiting-Train-Embattled-Passenger-Service/dp/1603580646/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1268756712&sr=8-1

I've just finished this one as a library book, and thought it might be of interest to folks here. McCommons does give the highlights of his experience on each AMTRAK route, but it's not really a travel narrative - interspersed among the voyages are interviews with federal and state transportation officials, as well as those from the freight lines (although not UP, who flatly refused to cooperate), on the future of rail service; there's also background on how the system became what we see today.

The wonkiness might get to the average reader, but I don't think that'd be as much of a problem for FT'ers. ;)

Thanks for the recommendation. I may have to check it out for reading material for my next trip.

AMTRAK

But as a train lover and a copy editor, I had to use Amazon's "look inside" just to make sure you weren't taking that capitalization straight out of the book -- I don't think I could have taken an entire book of "AMTRAK" instead of the correct "Amtrak."

AMTRAK is my brain's way of automatically mis-spelling the term as I see the word as an acronym, when it's really not. :(

There's also Peter Millar's: All Gone to Look for America: Riding the Iron Horse Across a Continent (and Back), which my library doesn't own (yet).

Many libraries offer inter library loans of books they don't have, for low or no cost, you might inquire at your local library.

My library charges $5/item and has a policy of not accepting requests for books less than a year old (this one came out last year).

Just picked this up and started reading it over the weekend. I only got through the first 30 pages so far, but it seems interesting and I am looking forward to finishing it... I'll try to remember to post back here once I'm done.

Thanks for the item about the book, which I then bought and read. I thought that it was well-written and was a good read. I like the railroad industry and follow it closely and the book seemed to be consistent with what I'm seeing otherwise in the railroad news.

Sidenote: thank goodness people like Al Runte, profiled in the book, aren't in charge of transportation policy (with his solution to passenger train delays due to freight congestion to be "Nationalize the *(#)#(*!" (speaking of Class 1 freight railroads). Um, all you have to do to fix congestion problems is just build additional tracks on existing lines, which is a lot cheaper than nationalizing a massive industry.

I got this from the library a while back, and was able to read part of it before my 2 wks were done. It was a popular book, on a waiting list. Interesting to read about the RR industry in general.