Safety Rail

First of all, the Presidential Platforms forum I mentioned a while ago is available as a free webcast from NYU's Rudin Center for Transportation Policy & Management webpage. Mr. Obama's surrogate was the only one to mention the word "Amtrak," though both he and Ms. Clinton have professed an interest in upping the funding. Which is generally a good thing, but if there's one entity that could really benefit from Mr. Obama's "power of change," it's Amtrak.

Speaking of changing Amtrak, the National Railroad Passenger Corporation announced on Tuesday that roving "mobile security teams" will enter service shortly on North East Corridor trains between Boston and Washington. These teams will be randomly searching commuters and their luggage as well as patrolling trains with bomb-sniffing dogs. This represents the first major shift in Amtrak's security policy since the elimination of unreserved service following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. I look forward to seeing the results of these new policies evaluated--could this be the first step to enlarging the Amtrak Police into a fully-capable law enforcement wing of the US Department of Transportation?

Probably not. But consider this excerpt from the Philadelphia Inquirer article linked above: "Tim Connors, director of the Center for Policing Terrorism at the Manhattan Institute, said rail systems required a completely different approach to security from the one used in aviation. 'Rail moves a lot more people than air does,' he said. 'It's designed to be an open system that can move a lot of people fast.'" It seems to me that such a specialized mode of transportation will require a specialized kind of security, and a national intercity rail network would need to coordinate their security efforts on the same national level. Airplanes had their Air Marshals; could Rail Marshals be too far-fetched?