Your daily source of fresh takes on news affecting America's passengers. See also the weekly NARP Hotline.
September 30, 2013
Written By Colin Leach If you’re planning to travel on Amtrak in the next few weeks, you might be wondering whether or not your trains will run on time, if at all. Fortunately, you can breathe a sigh of relief. Unlike most federal agencies, which are expected to send all non-essential personnel home beginning at 12:01 AM tomorrow, Amtrak will remain in normal service. Passengers across the coun...
September 26, 2013
Written By Abe Zumwalt I have at many times in the past referred to the great train stations of this country as “Secular Cathedrals”—temples to the ideals of commerce and civic pride. Train stations and train travel assume a baseline of civility, as a shared experience moving from a public temple to mobility, to a public means of mobility. Even at the height of elite train travel at luxury...
September 24, 2013
Written By Malcolm Kenton In the first post of a series for the blog Urbanophile, Robert Munson explores what aspects make train stations true “centerpieces of sustainable transit in major North American cities” and what factors may be keeping some stations from reaching their full potential in this regard. This speaks to one of NARP’s three core tenets for how our transportation system mus...
September 23, 2013
Written By Sean Jeans Gail Photo: Bryan Derballa, Wired Wired has been doing some outstanding coverage of artist Doug Aitken’s Station to Station series, a charter train that uses rail travel to connect a series of art exhibits, musical performances, food displays, literary events, and film showings. NARP’s already reported on the trip, but when we saw Wired had profiled longtime NARP m...
September 20, 2013
Written By Malcolm Kenton Welcome to a periodic NARP Blog feature where we take a look back at the archives of our members-only newsletter, NARP News, which has been published eleven times a year since 1968. If you join NARP, you will receive NARP News either by email or postal mail. Today’s installment reviews a few stories from the 1990s that show that we were fighting the same battles nearly...