Cornwells Heights Safe
This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the
end of the beginning. – Winston Churchill, 1942
Good Morning, America. How Are Ya?
Tuesday, September 20, 2005
about us/me contact archives Bucks County TMA Driving Directions to the Station
Welcome,
Philadelphia Inquirer Readers!
If
you’ve come here after reading the article mentioning this site in today’s
Philadelphia Inquirer, please let me explain a few
things and orient you to these web pages.
This
web site, the first I’ve ever tried to run, was initially developed to fight Amtrak’s
plan to stop service to the one and only station it stops at in Pennsylvania
between Philadelphia and New York in Bensalem, Bucks County, just one mile
north of the Philadelphia city limit along its northeast side, five minutes
from the Franklin Mills Mall. In only a
month now, the station has been saved, but the larger problem remains, that
Amtrak itself may not long survive under relentless political pressure to cut
its public support down to nothing.
Nada. Zip! Every time I put gas in my car these days, I
kind of get the shivers that killing Amtrak right now is maybe not
in America’s best interest.
Unlike
virtually every other industrialized country in the world, America makes annual
blood sport of trying to draw and quarter
its own national passenger rail system, usually framing the debate around the
question of whether to kill it this year or wait till next. A chronic denizen of death row, rail
transport over the years has gotten last minute reprieve after last minute
reprieve, but stays of execution may soon run out. The system is even now going into organ shutdown and failure.
Not
now. This is not the time to kill rail
travel in America. This is the time to
thank our lucky stars that we still have enough of it left to be strengthened
and restored. The world is starting to
run out of gasoline. This country has a
choice. We can spend our nation’s
wealth bidding up the price of foreign crude until MasterCard and Visa lob
introductory zero percent offers at each other from their new head offices in
Mecca and Medina, or we can find ways to keep America’s wealth in America with
smarter, more efficient transportation alternatives. Like trains of old that ran on coal, today’s Northeast Corridor
and most urban rail transit systems run on electricity, and electricity in this
country comes predominantly from coal – American coal. There’s no shortage. America is unusually rich in coal
deposits. We’ll still need to figure out
how to use it well without destroying the planet in another way or two, but at
least we’ll have the opportunity to try.
Since
the Cornwells Heights station has now been saved, there isn’t a lot of
political clout left in this website’s name, www.savecornwellsheights.com. Therefore, I will soon be transferring over
to another new site I picked up a few days ago, www.spreaddemocracytoamtrak.com. Few people realize what an arcane, medieval
structure controls Amtrak. It’s
technically structured as a private sector company with a board of directors
that is pretty much hand picked by America’s president. And America’s president wants to cut
Amtrak’s subsidies down to nothing. Do
you think the board fights him tooth and nail for preservation of rail
travel? [pregnant, rhetorical pause
inserted here] I think not, too. Board meetings and the criteria used to make
internal decisions are not open to public scrutiny. America can’t see what’s going on at the helm – and probably
wouldn’t like what it saw if it did. If
I can believe what I read in some spots on the Internet, one of the five
current directors even admitted during his confirmation questioning that he had
never in his entire life ridden on an Amtrak train. I think he was from Texas.
America
needs to take charge of its own energy destiny, start parking its cars, and
learn to ride the rails again. Please
browse the site archives for a better understanding
of what it took to change the fate of one station in Pennsylvania. Please also read the following article on
this page, and when you get to the words “Half way home -- we'll be there
by mornin',”
please keep the possibility of saving Amtrak and beginning to build some great
new American transportation infrastucture in your thoughts.
Please
check back here from time to time to see how it’s going.
-- Rick
The
Story of The City of New Orleans
[This story was originally
presented on Sunday, September 18, 2005.]
It’s
Sunday. Cornwells Heights survives.
Continuing the job of fixing Amtrak can wait till tomorrow.
Ask
anyone, especially a bluegrass fan, what the best train song, or even what the
best song of Americana is, and you may come back with a vote for The City of
New Orleans, the ballad with the famous refrain, “Good morning,
America. How Are Ya?” It was written by Steve Goodman, and first
performed only a few miles from our station at the Philadelphia Folk Festival
in 1970, almost exactly 35 years to the day before the beginning of the
campaign to save Cornwells Heights.
The
song apparently didn’t really catch hold until Arlo Guthrie recorded it and
sent it up the charts in 1972. Many
other artists have performed and recorded it since then. I’ve checked. I bought eight different CDs yesterday, looking for just the
right rendition. The “right” rendition
for contemporary ears, in my opinion, is the version recorded by Randy
Scruggs. The original Goodman and
Guthrie versions are also great, and if you have a chance to listen to all
three in chronological order, you can hear the song age like a very fine wine. Randy Scruggs pierced the song’s sweet spot
with the right tempo, the right orchestration, the right choral backup, and
just the right clacking of the tracks and the tracks and the tracks…
Just
before he died, John Denver put out a very good album of train songs, entitled All
Aboard, which includes The City of New Orleans, and which can easily
be justified as an additional CD purchase by the hauntingly poignant song
thereon, Jenny Dreamed of Trains, which begins (and secretly ends) the
album. John Denver died in the crash of
a Long-EZ airplane he had bought the day before in October, 1997. Apparently he either forgot to gas up his
secondary fuel tank or failed to switch over to it in time when the first one
ran dry. The last song listed on the
last of his albums is The City of New Orleans.
In
1970, the year the song was written, The City of New Orleans was a train
run by the Ilinois Central Railroad from Chicago to New Orleans. Also in 1970, Amtrak was created by
an act of Congress. Shortly thereafter,
Amtrak began to take over the no-longer-profitable passenger rail services of
various railroads around the country, including the Illinois Central.
Rescued
thirty-some years ago from sure death by Amtrak – which is threatened, even as
I write, with a slow starving death of its own – today there still exists
a train called The
City of New Orleans. Miracle be
that this old lonely train through America’s heartland has survived to roll and beat its way to the
sea this long – by an odd twist of fate, it’s now the city that’s missing. Amtrak, four good trainmen I met with three
days ago, and perhaps even the steel heart of the crying rails itself tried to
rescue those they could from the City.
But they couldn’t, because the City said, “No, go quickly now before the
winds take your trains and your tracks.
Hurricanes, I’ve seen before.
Save yourself, lest I need you the worse tomorrow.” And the train left empty for
Memphis, with only the screams of the winds at its back to cover its own
mournful cry in the night, a lullaby the delta has slept to for ever, ever so
long, in soft nights and dark nights alike.
“Amtrak
offered
to evacuate people from New Orleans, but city officials declined and the
last train left the city - empty.”
But
the City will come back someday, and the lonely old train will yet come back a
survivor to the City.
I
have here transcribed, as best I possibly can without the sounds, the Randy
Scruggs rendition of The City of New Orleans. If, in the reading, a tear should come to your eye at first in
sorrow, hold on to it – read on and read again, until the sound of the tracks
and the steel in the rails, and the steel in the memories, and the steel in the
men who made them come back to you – and then perhaps the tear you held in
sorrow will hold hope.
Please enjoy as you can, and hum or sing along with one of the greatest songs from America’s heartland, The City of New Orleans.
by Steve Goodman
as sung by Randy Scruggs
Ridin' on The
City of New Orleans,
Illinois
Central, Monday morning rail,
Fifteen cars,
and fifteen restless riders,
Three
conductors, twenty-five sacks of mail.
Out on the
southbound odyssey,
The train
pulls out of Kankakee
And rolls
along past houses, farms, and fields.
Passin' towns
that have no name,
Freight yards
full of old black men,
And the
graveyards of the rusted automobiles.
Good morning,
America. How are ya?
Say, don't you
know me? I'm your native son.
I'm the train
they call The City of New Orleans.
I'll be gone
five hundred miles when the day is done.
Dealin' card
games with the old men in the club car,
Penny a point,
ain't nobody keepin' score.
Pass the paper
bag that holds the bottle.
Feel the
wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor.
And the sons
of Pullman porters,
And the sons
of engineers
Ride their
daddies' magic carpet made of steel.
Mothers with
their babes asleep
Are rockin' to
the gentle beat,
And the rhythm
of the rails is all they feel.
Good morning,
America. How are ya?
Say, don't you
know me? I'm your native son.
I'm the train
they call The City of New Orleans.
I'll be gone
five hundred miles when the day is done.
Nighttime on
The City of New Orleans,
Changin' cars
in Memphis, Tennessee.
Half way home
-- we'll be there by mornin',
Through the
Mississippi darkness,
Rollin' down
to the sea.
But all the
towns and people
Seem to fade
into a bad dream,
And the steel rail
still ain't heard the news.
The conductor
sings that song again.
"The
passengers will please refrain.
This train's
got the disappearin' railroad blues."
Good morning,
America! How are ya?
Say, don't you
know me? I'm your native son.
I'm the train
they call The City of New Orleans.
I'll be gone
five hundred miles when the day is done.
– Rick