Think respected conservative intellectual George “Dungaree” Will’s biweekly phlegm-hocks for the Washington Post are bad, but maybe not quite Richard-Cohen-bad? Well they are, and so are his Newsweek columns! Maybe. His most recent one tackles Transportation Reform. Will chastises Republican Ray LaHood, the Transportation secretary, for “wanting” to “fix” America’s “infrastructure” problems, which is his “job.” Will truly despises anyone who walks or bikes or takes a train anywhere, and he wants them to die, DIE DIE DIE, in a ditch, in Portland. MORE »

A few lovers’ quarrels aside, people in DC and New York City just love to visit each other. We love it enough that an industry of low-cost bus services has given birth to itself just to meet our human demands. Sure, it’s not as sexy as a train, or as opulent as a fancy personal automobile, but that’s what you get. MORE »

After posting the customary president-elect YouTube video to the internets, this morning Barack Obama and his family boarded a rickety old train for a daylong journey from Philadelphia to Washington, which takes about two hours on a normal Saturday, in a car. This dramatic gesture is meant to illustrate our nation’s tragic fall from a gleaming superpower to a worn-out rust bucket inching through an industrial wasteland. MORE »

The fiendishly clever President-elect will be taking a train to Washington the week before his inauguration because he caught a whiff of the shit-storm that greets any well-known figure who dares to ride an airplane into our nation’s capital. Barry said, “No thanks, I will just kick it on the train with my good friend the Amtrak whore Joe Biden,” and VOILA, our nation’s railways were saved forever from bankruptcy and neglect. MORE »

Only seven years after terrorists didn’t hijack passenger trains, Amtrak is finally getting the post-9/11 security it so desperately needs to continue pointlessly delaying trains and ruining the lives of Americans who stupidly rely upon the industrialized world’s lamest national rail service. MORE »

Every day, trains carrying unimaginably deadly materials run straight though our fair district on ancient, poorly maintained tracks, bound for god knows where, always moments away from derailing and killing thousands. MORE »

“I told you we shouldn’t have taken the Old 97″ (Mark Lennihan - AP) MORE »