I've gotten grumpier and grumpier about this topic with every year's turn of the calendar.
By my accounting, it's been roughly twenty-five years since the train to NYC has been a done-deal, and today it's no more done than it was in 1985. My recollection is that the in-earnest talk began the day Steamtown announced it was relocating to Scranton. It was almost a joint announcement, making it a given that NYC/Scranton rail passenger service was maybe a couple years away. That was 1984.
How many follies, fads, and delusions have come and gone while we wait?
When you get right down to cases, all we've ever had have been hopes and dreams, and even those flimsy traces are vanishing right before us. The pain lies in having those hopes and dreams perpetuated by some really important and powerful people. What I've found enormously fascinating is that, should you gauge optimism for the return of rail passenger service over in New Jersey, you'll find that there really isn't any. On the other side of the Delaware, they know better, they think it's kind of comical that we keep on waiting for some train that's never coming.
Isn't the time for that over? Doesn't someone need to step up and admit that, if this ever does happen, we are now looking at another twenty-five years before it does? A child born today might set foot on Mars before a steel-wheel turns.
Each time a feeble and wobbly step forward is made, five enormous shoves backward immediately follow.
For those at all interested, I wrote about this some time ago, then explaining the situation.
The latest news is not good. In fact, the latest news is dreadful.
With eight billion federal dollars up for grabs, neither PennDOT, nor our senators, nor any other interests involved, managed to come up with eight dollars in furtherance of this project. Nothing, zero, bupkus, not a nickel out of eight billion dollars. Did I say dreadful? Add pitiful and jaw-dropping as well.
Failing so miserably when there is that kind of money available is enough to justify finger-pointing. Even that might be a waste of time.
For all the assurances that this project has been alive since Cagney&Lacey lit up our TV screens on Monday nights, I've believed that to be less and less true with each passing year. Waiting since 1984, I sort of figured it to be largely meaningless talk about eight years ago. My skepticism has now turned to a granite-solid certainty that there will no passenger rail service between Scranton and NYC for decades to come, and that there may never be any such service; a claim I've made before.
Never is indeed a long time. So is twenty-five years.
There are those who've already begun spinning this as a setback. One congressman has called it a "...bump in the road." Yes, and the Grand Canyon is just some old hole in the ground.
Maybe all involved should come clean and recognize the project for the trainwreck it's long been.
