The future is rail: Conservation of the Reading Railroad

I sometimes wonder why anyone chooses to remain enslaved to commuting in a motor vehicle and why are we not investing American dollars back into our American railroads, big time?
Suburban sprawl, highways and environmental events increasingly affect our lives through tornadoes, increased rainfall and the ensuing flash flooding, heat islands and domes, loss of important farmlands, woodlands and natural habitats, urbanization of once suburban and rural places, loss of animal and plant species, building of warehouses away from our cities and ports, pollution and depletion of our natural drinking water supplies, aquifers, rivers and streams, inability to grow our own food locally, increased commuting times on our deteriorating highways, roads and bridges, loss of productivity and time away from family and friends, exposure to road-rage incidents, vehicular accidents and impaired drivers, which can lead to injury or death.
Toll booths and speed radar are both controlled by artificial intelligence (AI) wherein the AI will even mail you a ticket to your home and cause loss of human working hours. A host of other issues for our region are brought on by poor and misguided land-use planning; unthoughtful zoning; absolute zero zoning for solely agricultural lands, woodlands and waterways
The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which was signed into law on Nov. 15, proposes to build 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations when it should propose to restore and conserve or build 500,000 train stations across our nation.
There was a time, not that long ago, wherein all one had to do was walk, bike, trolley or take a short commute to the nearest train station. The trains of the former Reading Railroad could take you almost any place you needed to go within Southeastern Pennsylvania or offer you connections to other train networks, at regional stations, some offering routes beyond our state’s borders.
The former Reading Railroad tracks are now used by entities such as SEPTA and Conrail while others were abandoned. Some of the rail line has been converted into pedestrian and bike trails through the Rails-to-Trails program as seen in parts of Hatfield Township, Montgomery County and Richland Township, Bucks County; however, the highest and best use of the old railroad easements and tracks would be an actual railroad line for railcars or a monorail system, not trails.
More important, the railroad easements, are all public record, running with the land, in perpetuity, waiting for the railroads to be brought back to life or reimaged in the form of a new monorail passenger and freight system.
Dependance on motor vehicles, no matter how they are powered, can only offer us increased suburban sprawl and dependence on warehouses which are being built farther and farther away from our nation’s ports and cities, which in turn make us even more dependent on the auto makers and tractor-trailers and all the apparatus tied to them, except trains are the missing link with the newer warehouses, which is by design.
Schemed and crafted by our auto, oil, finance, insurance and technology industries, they’ve managed to keep trains out of our collective, public conscience. They’ve removed trolleys powered by electricity in our cities and given us buses on tires that require oil and gas to power them; they removed trains powered by electricity and given us each expensive motor vehicles on tires that require oil and gas, among other things.

Naturally, the most environmentally friendly option would be the train running on electricity, not a motor vehicle on tires powered by gas and oil or unrecyclable batteries. We now have vehicles powered by electricity or hybrids, all under the pretense of saving the environment, but that only serves to make us always dependent on the auto industry, and parts and battery makers located outside our national borders and encourages continuance of further suburban sprawl.
Apple and Samsung have partnered with the automakers to make vehicles “smart” which really make us all “stupid” for being further enslaved to the automobile, and turning them into rolling entertainment devices. Cars were designed to get us from A to B, not originally designed to entertain and distract us. We are all but worker zombies slugging our way down our nation’s highways and roads, and we’ve managed to become the great drive-through society in the process, which only serves to offer us obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure which all lead to our eventual and premature deaths.
Never forget, those that got us away from trains were, mainly but not solely, the big three automakers, at the time, who are now in a concerted effort with other tied industries, and our governments, leading the charge into alternative, powered vehicles while using our own tax dollars to fund the initiative, and suggesting we allow AI to drive us around, into the future which all in turn keeps us dependent on the automakers and their apparatus, ignoring the railroads.
Who in their right mind want to sit in traffic in a robo-taxi? General Motors is evidently funding one such company in San Francisco which they named, “Cruise,” which shall eliminate taxi, Uber and Lyft driver jobs; and they’ve developed an automobile driven by a computer auto-pilot system, as seen in present-day Tesla vehicles, that could potentially be hacked and driven off the road or into another vehicle or object, and be tracked by our government.
We can hope that one day you can ride a brand new train or monorail system, which have been proven to be the safer, faster and the more ecologically-friendlier and sustainable option, all the while not using one single drop of oil from the Middle East, nor a single, pollution-causing unrecyclable battery produced in China.
Our world neighbors in Europe, Asia, Africa, Central and South America all still use trains to this day.
Why aren’t we?
Jacob F. Kratz lives in Quakertown.

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