It’s Time to Try Something Else

Waiting for the Train Co-founder Mimi Phifer responds to a recent article in The Paper that complained about wait times during a passenger train trip.

I was happy to see the column about the train in The Paper (“The Good, the Bad, the Ugly” 8/31/24). I’m happy because one of our goals at Waiting for the Train is to raise awareness about the current proposal to return passenger rail to western North Carolina, and since all publicity is good publicity, we’re thrilled to get the issue into the press and into the public eye.

And I’m happy that it gives us the chance to state our case:

The thing that came to mind when I read the article was a line from Henry Ford: “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”

Two local examples of doing “what we’ve always done” are:

1. The Asheville (pop. 94K) I-26 Connector Project, planning begun in 1989, completion date yet to be determined, cost $1.2 billion.

2. The Statesville (pop. 29K) I-77/I-40 interchange improvement, construction begun in 2012, opened 12/2023, cost $260 million.

The “what we always get” is the need for more and more cars, more and more interstate highways, more waiting, waiting, waiting in traffic, and more and more of our beautiful land flattened and paved over.

And so it seems like it’s time to try something else.

It’s been 50 years since we focused on passenger rail in this country; give it a little time and whatever wrinkles there are will be ironed out nicely.

We’ll reconnect with one another, improve the environment, boost the local economy, and we’ll all be better off when passenger trains once again stop at the Morganton depot, and we can ride the rails together.