Toget, en sosial energisparer

En herlig togartikkel fra Resilience, av hans eminense John Michael Greer!

- Too much energy?

Hva jeg elsker med tog? Det er så mangt. Kanskje først og fremst fordi det er så anti-atomistisk? I motsetning til privatbilen, som på samme vis som den avsondrede eneboligen er et symbol på modernitetens fremste kjennetegn, sosial atomisme.

Gjøvikbanen butter stadig imot på Gjøvik, mens Hitlers store norgesprosjekt snart er fullført. Helt horribelt, med tanke på all plasten som havner i Mjøsa med alle disse bildekkene.

I Japan er ikke høyhastighetstog en fiasko, og det nye magnettoget som skal erstatte Shinkansen, er stipulert til å gjøre unna en strekning tilsvarende Oslo-Trondheim på 35 minutter.

Selv foretrekker jeg imidlertid den langsomme togreisen.

-Flickr.

Et lite utdrag fra dette herlige og underholdende (selvsagt fra JMG) essayet om togets fortreffeligheter:

Still, the energy efficiency of train travel is only part of the picture. Another is the simple fact that train travel, even in these days of reduced budgets and limited routes, is among the few really civilized modes of travel left. Take a car and you can count on doing battle with traffic hour after hour on one freeway after another; take a plane and, after you trudge through the lines and get ogled or groped by government functionaries who apparently believe that the Fourth Amendment can be suspended by executive order, you get to experience the joys of being stuffed into a winged sardine tin, breathing your fellow passengers’ stale exhalations, and staring at blank cloudscape, for however many hours it takes to get where you’re going.

On a train, by contrast, there’s plenty of room and fresh air; you can sit back, put your feet up, watch the scenery roll by, and enjoy the experience. If the child two rows ahead gets fussy, you’re not stuck listening; there’s always the lounge car, where you can duck downstairs, pick up a beer at the cafe, and sit at one of the tables and read while four old guys at another table play pinochle. The food in the diner car’s on a par with most roadside restaurants and better than most of what you’ll find at an airport, and if you spring for a cabin in one of the sleeper cars – on long runs, I highly recommend this – the meals are included.

If all this suggests that I’m an unabashed partisan of train travel, well, that’s a fair assessment. There are good reasons for that just now, starting with the very high energy efficiency of rail travel, and the advantages of a mature technology that could be redeployed in a hurry without the bottlenecks and dead ends that are an inevitable part of bringing any new technology on line. Most of the world’s other industrial societies, and quite a few of the nonindustrialized nations, won’t even have to go through the redeployment process; they had the common sense to keep their rail networks intact when the United States was busy selling most of its own for scrap, and thus may end up with a critical economic advantage in the difficult years immediately ahead of us.

Europa er fullt av jernbanespor, som ligger og venter på deg for å ta deg med på eventyr, samtidig som man kan reise sivilisert. Toget, den mest siviliserte form for transport!

Bildet er fra en togtur i Danmark, hvor togene er meget presise og velholdte.

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