Even for a famous transportation writer, it is amazing how many factual errors Tom Vanderbilt, the author of a book on traffic congestion, managed to pack into a single article in Slate. Is it because he ventured into a field beyond his expertise and is relying someone else’s erroneous data? Or is he being deliberately deceptive?
The Milwaukee Road’s Hiawatha was one of the nation’s first “high-speed trains,” but it began service in 1935, not in the 1920s. Otto Perry photo.
His thesis is that “trains are slower now than in the 1920s” because railroad technology “is worse now than it was in the early 20th century.” Both these statements are flat-out wrong: trains are faster today, and rail technology has been thoroughly revolutionized since the 1920s.
