My apologies. This is off-topic. <br><br>I thought I could avoid planes altogether. I never really liked flying to begin with, and, as of Sept. 11, I said I'd never fly again. After all, I could always take the train. Yeah, right.<br><br>My wife and I were planning to go to Las Vegas for our 10th anniversary sometime this year or next, whenever we saved up enough. Well, just try arranging to take a train out there. We're talking DAYS of travel there and DAYS of travel back. Not hours. Somehow, I keep thinking we've got bullet trains as does Japan. No, we don't.<br><br>It takes about five hours to fly to Las Vegas. It took us about six hours to fly to London for our honeymoon, and that's transatlantic. Basically, if you want to get anywhere in the United States, and back, within a reasonable amount of time, you have to take a plane. There's no way out of it. Groan.<br><br>I wish Scotty would get the transporter working.<br><br>If anyone has encouraging words, I'd love to hear them.<br><br>

Craig, it gets worse.<br><br>My last train trip (for good reason) was more than 20 years ago, from Washington D.C. to Connecticut, just before Thanksgiving.<br><br>I made the mistake of checking a bag. No one else was doing that. I found out why.<br><br>First they lined hundreds of us up in the terminal, and we waited, standing. Then they opened a door, and let us out to the train. The only door open for boarding was at the far end of the train, so it turned into a stampede of people, carrying all their luggage, running the whole length of the train to be the first aboard. I didn’t realize why, but it turned out that there was no reserve seating, and they had sold maybe 3 times as many tickets as there were seats. Having checked my suitcase, and being in good physical shape for the run, I got a seat.<br><br>And there I sat for 7 hours or so, for what would have been a 5 hour drive at most. The train was so packed that it was standing room only in the aisles, there were people sitting on luggage on the platforms at the ends of the cars, and there was no way you could get to the restrooms through the crowd, much less to get anything to eat or drink.. nor do I think your seat would be there when you got back. The train seemed to stop at every little town on the way, passed through every dump and junkyard, and the worst parts of each city. It was a trip worthy of any third world nation, a scene from a Pearl S. Buck movie, not anything you’d associate with the US.<br><br>When I finally got to the destination, my suitcase was nowhere to be found. I told the clerks there that I had checked it, they looked at me as though I was insane. It didn’t make it off the train, they told me to come back the next day. Then the next. Then the next. I had to threaten to call the police and report it as a theft before anyone would bother to get my suitcase off of the train, four days later. I’m very lucky that I was staying with family, and wasn’t just moving on, or I would have lost it all.<br><br>IMHO, this is what you get from government regulation. Haven’t been on one since. AmTrak, that is. I've been on commuter trains and subways.<br><br><br>

Wow, that's worse than I ever imagined. It makes riding a bus seem glamorous, and the bus is bad enough its self. No wonder our society is so dependent on the automobile.<br><br>

Making a bus ride sound glamorous. Yeah, that IS bad.<br><br>