U.S. communities depend on reliable, safe, and secure rail systems. Each weekday, more than 12 million passengers take to U.S. railways. This book explains a framework for security planners and policymakers to guide cost-effective rail-security planning, specifically for the risk of terrorism. Risk is a function of threat, vulnerability, and consequences. This book focuses on addressing vulnerabilities and limiting consequences.

During the tumultuous year of 2008--when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California--journalist James McCommons spent a year on America's trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism. Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible? Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads. While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America--and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.

U.S. communities depend on reliable, safe, and secure rail systems. Each weekday, more than 12 million passengers take to U.S. railways. Recent attacks on passenger-rail systems around the world highlight the vulnerability of rail travel and the importance of rail security for these passengers. The use of passenger rail and the frequency with which terrorists target it call for a commitment to analyzing and improving rail security in the United States. This book explains a framework for security planners and policymakers to use to guide cost-effective rail-security planning, specifically for the risk of terrorism. Risk is a function of threat (presence of terrorists with intent, weapons, and capability to attack), vulnerability (likelihood of damage at a target, given an attack), and consequences (nature and scale of damages if an attack succeeds). While effective security solutions may address all three components of risk, this book focuses on addressing vulnerabilities and limiting consequences, since these are the two components of risk most within the realm of rail-security personnel. The analysis is based on a notional rail system that characterizes rail systems typically found in the United States. The methodology presented is useful for planning rail-security options.

North America faces a transportation crisis. Gas-guzzling SUVs clog the highways and air travelers face delays, cancellations, and uncertainty in the wake of unprecedented terrorist attacks. New Departures closely examines the options for improving intercity passenger trains’ capacity to move North Americans where they want to go. While Amtrak and VIA Rail Canada face intense pressure to transform themselves into successful commercial enterprises, Anthony Perl demonstrates how public policy changes lie behind the triumphs of European and Japanese high-speed rail passenger innovations. Perl goes beyond merely describing these achievements, translating their implications into a North American institutional and political context and diagnosing the obstacles that have made renewing passenger trains so much more difficult in North America than elsewhere. New Departures links the lessons behind rail passenger revitalization abroad with the opportunity to recast the policies that constrain Amtrak and VIA Rail from providing efficient and effective intercity transportation.

In Divided Highways, Tom Lewis tells the monumental story of the largest engineered structure ever built: the Interstate Highway System. Here is one of the great untold tales of American enterprise, recounted entirely through the stories of the human beings who thought up, mapped out, poured, paved - and tried to stop - the Interstates. Conceived and spearheaded by Thomas "the Chief" MacDonald, the iron-willed bureaucrat from the muddy farmlands of Iowa who rose to unrivaled power, the highway system was propelled forward through the pathbreaking efforts of brilliant engineers, argued over by politicians of every ideological and moral stripe, reviled by the citizens whose lives it devastated, and lauded as the greatest public works project in U.S. history.

From the Santa Fe "Super Chief" to modern Amtrak high-speed intercity services, this sprawling photographic history rambles through two centuries of passenger trains and presents a wealth of archival imagery and period color photos. 200 illustrations, 150 in color.