At the end of last year, Bruce Springsteen’s long Broadway run concluded with a Netflix special and a soundtrack album. One of the recordings, “Land of Hope and Dreams,” an old song from 1999, was released a week before the midterms, presumably to inspire people to vote. “This train,” as Bruce sings, is carrying everything—“saints and sinners,” “losers and winners.” Dreams, faith, freedom . . . wheels a singin’: check, check, and check.

Why trains? Why are Americans still fixated on trains when so few of us ride them? Springsteen is not singing about the socialist high-speed rails of Europe and Asia but the kind of train that carried FDR’s coffin around the country, the kind that nineteenth-century populists like William Jennings Bryan campaigned from. “Big wheels roll through fields where sunlight streams”—that seems to get to people across the political divide. But then it could also be the sunlit fields part that does it. Budweiser’s Superbowl commercial pushed every button with an ear-flapping dog, a wagon full of beer, and a team of Clydesdales cutting through wheat fields and a windfarm to the tune of Bob Dylan.

Springsteen’s nostalgia is completely separate from the MAGA nostalgia that’s got America in a chokehold. (And so is Budweiser’s, given that Donald Trump despises windfarms about as much as he does sharks.) Trumpworld nostalgia is for the days of Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry and Gran Torinos glistening in the sun, the days when suburban flight and the razing of inner-city neighborhoods transformed “public” into non-white and poor. It seems insane, but MAGA nostalgia is for every bad thing that made Sesame Street necessary.

Even when data about carbon emissions creates a will to conjure rail travel back from the dead, we have anti-transit forces like oil billionaires Charles and David Koch heaping undisclosed bundles of cash to sabotage popular local initiatives to build light-rail trains and other public transit in Tennessee, Arkansas, Arizona, Michigan, and Utah.

One of our many railroad ironies is that the fossil fuel billionaires behind Trump do everything in their power to derail any movement toward passenger rail service when the one percent got its start through the marriage of trains and oil. There’s a reason trains occupy the north-south-east-west of the Monopoly board. The men who built the transcontinental railroads were probably our nation’s first welfare queens. They got free land from the government, they used labor from China and other countries at slave wages and working conditions, they paid no taxes on their handouts, and they gouged homesteaders when they sold what they’d got for nothing.

For almost a century, railroads dictated how America’s population was dispersed. Their length of trackage nationwide peaked in 1916, with 254,037 miles of tracks. Trains were the means for the great rural-to-urban migration in the nineteenth century. They were the means for the Great Migration north in the face of Jim Crow and the launch site for our civil rights wilderness years, when Plessy v. Ferguson officially declared “separate but equal” the codewords for institutionalized racism.

Trains were central to American life until Henry Ford started building cars that his employees could afford. His assembly-line products were the start of the shift from public to private in America (a chicken in every separate-but-equal pot). As cars came to rule America, trains became a ubiquitous metaphor for financial and personal ruin. People willing to travel alongside strangers on the ground were classified as poor. Artists from Woody Guthrie to Johnny Cash sang about trains not to exult them but because they were the only way out for those trapped in poverty. Dust-bowlers didn’t have the luxury of opening an envelope to 0% financing on a Chevy Tahoe.

Our nationwide networks of passenger trains might have disappeared completely if not for the National Association of Railroad Passengers, which lobbied Congress to pass the Rail Passenger Service Act in 1970. With the last of the big passenger railways looking at dissolution and bankruptcy, the act created a quasi-public corporation that would pool willing railroads into a single body to be managed as a for-profit organization but receive taxpayer funding. The hope on the pro-train side was that this new entity, Amtrak, could eventually be unleashed as a private corporation, whereas most of the government people who pushed the initiative expected it to fail. They went along with the plan while privately anticipating a quiet, offstage death that would be more palatable to the public.

Even though this hybrid monster could never make it as a private operation, Amtrak refused to die. Or rather: Amtrak’s passengers refused to let it die. Thus, we have a “sort of” train system plagued by two major impediments to growth: a half century’s worth of pulling up train tracks and either selling the property or allocating it to other civic uses, such as walking and cycling trails, and a rail status quo whereby much slower freight trains have right of way on the remaining rail infrastructure. (Those old Coors Light commercials of a bullet freight train are meant to be hilariously ironic.)

It’s not clear whether Donald Trump’s virulent anti-train-ism owes partially to his being in the pocket of fossil fuel billionaires, or whether it’s all because he hates blue states. In March of last year, he threatened to veto a massive omnibus spending package and shut down the entire federal government unless Congress blocked funding for New York City’s $13.5 billion Gateway project to build a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River and refurbish the existing one between New York and points west and south. This year’s budget also includes no funding for the critical project and cuts the amount of funding for Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor that could be used to start it.

Trump was reportedly seething at New York Senator Chuck Schumer for trying to block money for the elusive southern border wall. Another railroad irony here is hard to miss: Trump wanting to put up a wall instead of laying new tracks, the very emblem of America’s phenomenal growth in the nineteenth century.

Meanwhile, on the other coast, the $100 billion Los Angeles-to-San Francisco bullet train project has hit a rough patch thanks to Trump. In May, he cancelled nearly $1 billion in federal money for the project and threatened to make California return the $2.5 billion it has already spent. He was reportedly mad at Governor Gavin Newsom, who scaled back the state’s ambitions from laying 800 miles of track to just a 171-mile stretch (at least until 2033).

Although Bruce’s train assures us that “dreams will not be thwarted,” both of these efforts have stalled for years. In 2008, California voters approved nearly $10 billion in bonds for the high-speed rail project, a beacon of hope for reducing carbon emissions. They agreed that the project would also be funded with federal dollars and revenue from the state’s cap-and-trade program that requires polluters to pay to emit greenhouse gases. But the project has been plagued by cost overruns and delays. On the New York side, the existing tunnel under the Hudson—the one carrying more than 800,000 passenger trips per day between New Jersey and New York—was opened in 1910. The push for a second tunnel has been on for decades, but the astronomical price tag has made securing federal funding difficult across administrations.

If it’s trains themselves Trump hates, he won’t like what the country’s only privately owned and operated intercity passenger railroad is doing in his beloved Florida. The company Brightline started revenue train service between Fort Lauderdale and West Palm Beach in January2018 and between Miami and Fort Lauderdale in May 2018. The Miami-Orlando rail line boasts an average speed of 70 miles per hour, making it the fastest in the country. Amtrak’s Acela line between Boston and Washington, D.C., can reach 150 miles per hour, but only for about 50 miles of the 457-mile route. That’s a far cry from the world’s fastest train service, China’s G trains that practically fly from Beijing to Shanghai at 217 miles per hour.

There is no other place in this country where people get on as many trains in a single day as in New York City. People talk about the blight of New York in the 1970s, but even graffiti-covered subways back then ran on better time than they do today. We fortunately don’t have that era’s crime, but instead we have an existential dread of rush-hour trains that is absurdly inconsistent with the city’s economic health and the pink marble of the train station built by Cornelius Vanderbilt.

The MTA operates in its own special needs time capsule, forever the down-at-the-heels grandma who can’t produce rent for the villainous landlord. When the New York State Senate finally turned Democratic after years of Upstate Republicans sticking it to the city that supports their districts, the Legislature was able to vote in congestion pricing to provide the MTA a desperately needed revenue stream. But this will only keep things going; it won’t cover massive system upgrades. That was supposed to happen with the pied-à-terre tax that would have raised $471 million per year, half of which would have come from just 280 homes worth more than $25 million. But Democrats in Albany caved to lobbyists for luxury real estate developers and killed the deal.

It is truly bizarre that most Americans think of trains in terms of nostalgia and not practical need. If we had China’s 217-mile-per-hour G trains, we could ride the rails from California to New York in a single day. But the chance of that ever happening is remote, since what little action there is on trains is happening along each coast and not the “flyover states.”

Perhaps America’s greatest railroad irony is the fact that much of our transcontinental railroad—30,626 miles of tracks laid between 1830 and 1860—was built by Chinese laborers we imported, worked to near death, and did not want to grant citizenship to. The “tracklaying race of 1869” was an unofficial contest between crews of the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads to see who could first reach Promontory, Utah, first. The Chinese and Irish crews of the Central Pacific set a record on April 28, 1869, by laying 10 miles and 56 feet of track in a single day.

And what did America do 100 years later? Start ripping up much of those tracks. And the track-ripping coincided with our manufacturing decline and China’s phenomenal economic growth. Today, China not only has the fastest trains, but countries that want to buy the fastest trains buy them from China. Yes, if we had 217-mile-per-hour trains like China, we could ride the rails from California to New York in a single day. And you know what else? Those “flyover states” would no longer be known as such. You could stop there, at places along the line. You could get out, walk around, have dinner, buy some stuff . . . see what America is really like. §