This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, October 8, 2018.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The golden and silver ages of passenger rail are long gone and yet governments continue to push for more rail be it heavy or light

In his new book Randall O'Toole argues that despite his love for them

Trains just don't make sense for the

overwhelming majority of modern travelers. The book is, Romance of the Rails,

why the passenger trains we love are not the transportation we need. We spoke last week.

When I was five years old, I took the great northern Western star from Grand Forks,

North Dakota to Portland, Oregon and I've been obsessively in love with trains ever since.

In 1989, I moved from Eugene, Oregon to Portland, Oregon to

work on the Spokane, Portland, and Seattle 700, which is the third most powerful operating steam

locomotive in the world.

We got it operating in 1989, and I eventually purchased five railroad passenger cars that we were going to restore and operate with this locomotive.

Unfortunately, we lost the lease on the land that we were restoring the passenger cars on and so we had to sell them.

But it was fun owning them and feeling like I was a private rail car owner for a while.

One of them was a dome car. It was particularly beautiful and we sold it to some people who have restored it for operation with another steam locomotive down in California.

The point is, I just love passenger trains, the very first job I ever had was restoring an old streetcar and I have traveled hundreds of thousands of miles on passenger trains all over Europe, Asia, and the United States and Canada.

So it's a hard decision, but it's hard for me to support subsidies to passenger trains when they don't really work very well.

They cost taxpayers a lot of money, they end up going from the poor to the rich, and they are not carrying that many people. So that was why I wrote

romance on the rails to try to reconcile my love for passenger trains with my opposition to subsidies.

What do you consider to be, I think you refer to it as the silver age of passenger rail?

When was that?

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