Riding the post-real railroad

Although this blog is supposed to be about cars and heritage, I seem to keep stubbing my toes on railroads as I’m thinking about heritage and automobility. In an earlier post, I wrote about the divergence of tourist railroads and “real” ones, and about my hope that they might yet converge again in a mode of transport that is more present-oriented, as a viable alternative to automotive travel. That seems to be starting to happen on at least one heritage railroad line, according to an article in the most recent bulletin of the National Biodiesel Board, and it’s raising some questions for me as I ponder just what is emerging or converging here.

The Strasburg Rail Road of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, which one commentator has called the granddaddy of U.S. tourist lines, recently pulled a 27,000 gallon tank car filled with biodiesel—about four tractor-trailer loads’ worth—over a short run for regional energy supplier Amerigreen, which will use it to supply its network of retailers who sell it in home heating oil and fuel for vehicles like my own diesel Jetta. Hauling freight isn’t a new venture for the tourist railroad, which has been very savvy about diversifying its business as a way of keeping itself going (the then-century-old Strasburg Rail Road found a new lease on life as a tourist attraction in 1958, and has successfully branched into locomotive restoration, parts fabrication, upscale wining and dining, and other activities in recent years).

The presence of the biodiesel tanker on the tourist route creates heartening resonances. Alongside the valuing of Lancaster County’s rural landscape for its scenic beauty is the idea that we ought to be turning toward “greener” kinds of energy for a whole host of good reasons, something that is echoed in Amerigreen’s own focus on renewable fuels and its new “100% American Fuel” campaign, which buys petroleum only from North American sources in a kind of attempt at relocalizing the oil economy (Pennsylvania’s own oil production apparently doesn’t factor into its supply, being more suited to specialized uses than to heating and vehicle fuel). And it seems that the people involved are picking up on those resonances. Dave Hessen of Amerigreen, describing the run to me, noted, “It was a beautiful day, and it was great to see the tank car coming in through the farm fields.” His comment evoked the greenness of the fuel, the landscape, and the mode of transport, all of which are easier to see and celebrate within the context of the old-fashioned train line and the pastoral setting in which it operates. You could make a case that this represents what things might look like if we came to our collective senses and started building more diverse, environmentally responsible, and regionally-oriented systems of energy production and delivery.

I think there’s something more complicated going on, though, and it has to do with where tourism fits in all of this. Rather than just being one layer of the overall scene, it seems to me that tourism actually permeates almost all the layers, from the promotional advantage being seized by the National Biodiesel Board and Amerigreen to the carefully-negotiated balance that the area's Amish farmers have developed with curious outsiders. The Lancaster Farmland Trust, which partners with the Strasburg Rail Road, emphasizes heritage in its mission, and the railroad itself, while seemingly driven by its organizers’ desire to see the old trains and the craft knowledge embodied in them survive, has embraced tourism (and its central value of authenticity) as a primary strategy to ensure that survival. The tale of the biodiesel tanker on the tourist railroad suggests to me that tourism—the marketing and consumption of places and experiences—has indeed become ubiquitous in contemporary cultural production.

So this seems like more than just a harbinger of a possible change in direction from an oil-powered, car-centric society to a greener, more local one. At every step of the way, for better and worse, we’re likely to see producers and consumers approaching what they’re doing in a touristic way, with an understanding of landscapes and experiences—from plowing fields to hauling fuel to riding a train—deeply conditioned by the expectations and promotional tactics of tourism. Culture and energy use are fundamentally entwined, and our culture is increasingly a touristic one.

The “worse” part of this equation would be that events like the tanker run become purely symbolic public relations statements or experiences to be consumed like a new wine to be sampled on one of the Strasburg Rail Road’s popular wine-tasting tours. A more positive interpretation—the one that Dean MacCannell was originally imagining when he wrote The Tourist back in 1976—is that we’ve created a touristic culture where both production and consumption are more fully participatory and able to incorporate radically new visions of what our lives might be. If the lines have irreversibly blurred between the real and the “not-real”—if we have in fact entered a kind of “post-real” culture where this distinction has become largely moot—then it probably behooves all of us to enter intelligently into the marketing of places and experiences, and to use the ubiquitous tools of publicity to delineate the kind of society that we most want to see.

Both vintage and viable

The places and activities I'm most fascinated by are the ones where the relationship between the past and present is unstable and up for grabs. This past week, as I was taking the train up to Canada and back for a family visit, it occurred to me that trains fall into that category--increasingly so, as more tourist railroad routes are developed and as more people are riding trains as an everyday alternative to cars. (While it's true that car use in the U.S. is increasing--it grew 21% between 1995 and 2008--public transportation use actually grew 38% in the same period, while the overall U.S. population grew just 14%, according to the 2009 Fact Book of the American Public Transportation Association [p. 11])

So it was interesting, as I was clickety-clacking my way across New York state on the "Maple Leaf" train, to see the current issue of Amtrak's "New York by Rail" magazine also noting the way that train travel seems to go in two directions at once. "Rail journeys on Amtrak are great for whisking you effortlessly from point A to point B," the magazine says in a page about "Scenic Railroads." That is, trains are an everyday, consequential mode of travel (and maybe close to an ideal one in many ways, combining high degrees of relative mobility, comfort, and accessibility). But our shift into automobility in the early 20th century marooned many passenger and freight routes in the past, where many of them have been re-framed as heritage. The magazine goes on, "Tourist railroads, on the other hand, offer a slower-paced journey specifically intended to bring you close to scenic vistas and historic sites." The article points out the appeal of vintage rolling stock, refurbished depots, historic locomotives, and rail museums along the many tourist railroad routes in New York.

As I noted in an earlier post about Pennsylvania's oil heritage area, these tourist railroads are deeply and somewhat weirdly entangled in car culture, since the usual pattern is to drive to the station, take the train, and then drive away again. Tourist trains don't go from Point A to Point B--they go from Point A to Point A, in a self-referential loop rather than a consequential journey. But they do hold something in public memory of the earlier extent of American rail networks, and in a time when we may actually be moving in that direction again, these symbolic journeys exist on the unstable edge of the past/present relationship rather than simply as nostalgic representations of the obsolete. We can hope.


The Amtrak route across New York offers plenty of opportunities to contemplate the shifting relationship among different modes of transportation. At various places, particularly where the Mohawk Valley narrows, you can sit on the train and see the Mohawk River, the Erie Canal that parallels it (the straighter, lighter-green band), and roads large and small, including of course the New York State Thruway (Interstate 90 on the map). The image above shows all of these sharing space in the valley just west of Canajoharie, in the same neck of the woods as the early 20th century postcard at the top of this post. (The railroad tracks are the light gray line just below NY Route 5.)