There Is No Good Way to Travel Anywhere in America

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For Thanksgiving, I will be traveling home to western New York on Amtrak. I don’t think anything will go disastrously awry, though I don’t know. In 2019, during a snowstorm, an Amtrak train was stuck for some 36 hours in the mountains of Oregon because of a fallen tree. Earlier this year, on an Amtrak train from Northern Virginia to Sanford, Florida, passengers repeatedly called the police during the train’s 20-hour delay. “For those of you that are calling the police,” the conductor had to announce, “we are not holding you hostage.”

That debacle was caused by a freight train ahead of them, which parked on the tracks in rural South Carolina. Nothing you can do about that. A train just has to wait until whatever’s in front of it is gone. Or it has to plow through it: Just last week, a train on its way through Michigan