I love riding on trains, and fortunately for me, I get to take one to work every day. It’s about a twenty-minute ride one way, and I get to read about five pages of my massive book on Ulysses S. Grant that I’m currently plowing through. This past weekend I was up in New York City, cheering on my niece as she ran the marathon – and we took the train up from DC, and then we came into the Big City from New Jersey, where we were staying. We did everything in reverse yesterday, which is part of why this edition of MMN is out on a Tuesday.
So I’ve had all sorts of quality train time this week.
Trains are awesome because they’re not complicated. They have to stay on track, can only go forward or backward, and, if operated effectively, can get you from one place to another on time with minimal effort on your end. Plus, you get to read.
The DC Metro system turns 50 this week, which means I’m older than the train system I ride, and it’s incredibly young for a metro of this size and global importance. After World War II, DC began to experience an influx of people, and traffic got to be terrible, so they began surveying the possibility of creating a public train system underneath the city. Congress passed the National Capital Planning Act in 1952, which started the studies. It didn’t approve the compact creating the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (DC Metro to me) until November 6, 1966, and they broke ground in 1969 because everything in Washington, DC, had to take forever.
If you are an experienced train traveler, the DC Metro is elementary in comparison. Everything flows into the city and then out to the suburbs of Virginia and Maryland. Since I arrived in 1998, the metro has expanded to areas well outside of the District itself – a few months ago I took an hour-long train ride to Dulles Airport – which was unheard of just a few years ago.
Building out train infrastructure has always been a contentious issue, with people on one side who would love affordable, safe, and reliable transportation, and others who would rather you own a piece of machinery you cannot afford, to drive to a job that doesn’t pay enough to afford that machine, or the gas to fuel that machine, while being stuck in traffic.
And since today is Election Day, not only is the country headed to the ballot box to decide what the next edition of Congress will look like, but a few tax measures to support train efforts are also up for the electorate to decide.
In the Bay Area, voters in five counties must decide on a 14-year sales tax (a full cent in San Francisco, a half-cent elsewhere) that would raise almost a billion dollars a year for BART, Muni, Caltrain and the region’s buses, which are trains but with tires and operate on roads.
Voters in about 30 Front Range cities are being asked to add 33 cents to every $100 spent to pay for a passenger train from Fort Collins to Pueblo, through Denver and Colorado Springs. I bet that view looks nice.
Pro-transit advocates have had recent victories across the country, like in Charlotte, where voters last year approved a sales tax for a new commuter train and more light rail. The county’s first transit tax built its original light rail line before the money ran out about 15 years ago. Phoenix-area voters also extended a half-cent sales tax that helps pay for buses and light rail.
Funding the DC Metro is never on the ballot because three government jurisdictions share the cost. But the new proposal asks for $460 million a year in new money, growing 3% a year after that. Each local government gets to figure out how it will cough up the dough.
The big project here is the creation of the Purple Line, a 16-mile light rail line that will cross the Maryland suburbs from Bethesda to New Carrollton without going through DC. The Maryland Transit Administration is building it, so it only has one budget entity to worry about. The project has taken about twenty years to get across the finish line, and I believe it will be done by next year.
New York and New Jersey finally began their Gateway Tunnel Project, which will build about 9 miles of new tracks from Jersey into the city. The federal government froze the money – because why not- and fortunately it was overturned by the courts. The new tunnel is expected to open in the mid-2030s.
Anyway, check out some train pictures from this weekend.
I don’t think anyone would be surprised that the two states Anonymous and I are connected to, Ohio and Florida, both rejected new train projects this century. Part of the issue in Ohio was that the proposed train connecting Cleveland to Cincinnati would have taken longer than just jumping in your car and getting on I-71. In Florida, JEB! Bush vetoed funding for a state constitutional amendment that demanded high-speed rail statewide, then Floridians voted to repeal the amendment itself. Now we drive 14 hours to Florida and just six hours to Ohio. Fun!
For this week, I’d like to combine some elections and how trains played a role in their campaigns. So let’s dive in and look at a few major elections whose anniversaries end in 5 or 0 this week.
1. Abram Hewitt won the New York mayoral race on November 2, 1886. Hewitt won a three-person race for mayor of the United States’ largest city by capturing 41% of the ballots. The man who finished third would eventually become the 26th president of the United States, Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt, of course, is famous for being the 7th-ranked president in the OKH presidential rankings back in 2021. The train connection here is that Hewitt is the “Father of the New York City Subway System” and, as mayor in 1888, he laid out the route and financing plan that the Rapid Transit Act of 1894 put into law.
2. William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan on November 3, 1896. Ranked 48th in our 2024 presidential election rankings, the race saw Bryan campaign almost entirely by train, while McKinley stayed home in Ohio, and hundreds of thousands of people piled into trains to visit him and hear his speeches. One day, 40 special trains rolled into Canton, Ohio, just to hear him talk about tariffs or how he used to be a cook at the Battle of Antietam.
3. Samuel Tilden thought he had defeated Rutherford B. Hayes on November 7, 1876. The worst presidential election ever in our history, according to me (which didn’t include the actual election of 2024), saw a side deal that was incorporated into the bigger deal leading to Hayes’s win and the withdrawal of federal troops in the South: a Southern transcontinental railroad that would have cut through Texas all the way to the Pacific Ocean. But the Southern Pacific used its political influence to kill the subsidy, then built its own line from California to New Orleans, finished in 1883. Hayes went to bed thinking he lost, and the South got the train route they wanted, just not from the government.
Okay, so I will be off to my annual retreat beginning Friday and won’t return until late Sunday afternoon, so there will be no Maundy Monday Newsletter next week.
If you were around a year ago, you may remember the history I shared about the retreat center – which sits on the banks of the Potomac River and on the route John Wilkes Booth and David Herold took while trying to escape after Booth assassinated Lincoln. You can read more about it here. I’m looking forward to getting away, being with God, and turning off the world. Only wish I had a train to get me there – I actually have to rent a car.
Thanks for the support – I hope you don’t mind a Tuesday edition! Have a great week.
Okay,
Chris
