Touching the third rail

By G.F. | SOMEWHERE BETWEEN PORTLAND AND SEATTLE

LAST weekend Babbage went to visit his newly born nephew in Portland, Oregon. Not by car, despite having a straight shot of 180 miles (290km) from his Seattle home. That should take a moderately law-abiding driver three hours, but in recent years getting below four proved impossible due to construction, accidents and the interminable congestion that inexorably follows both. On top of that, slow driving wears at attention, and there are only so many podcasts to consume. The dubious pleasure cost some $200 in wear, tear and petrol. Less than a flight, admittedly, but a pretty penny nonetheless.

Amtrak, America's passenger rail service, offers a business-class return ticket for $96 (that is just $28 more than coach class), with $3 meal vouchers and electric sockets at each window seat. The trip is meant to last 3½ hours though it takes more one-third of the time. (The Obama administration has just allotted $600m for this route to bump up train speeds and remove causes of delay.) No matter. Babbage did not notice the slightly longer voyage—in both directions, as it happened—tapping away at this article and other tasks with occasional trips to the club car. As in most cities, the train stations in Seattle and Portland are located in the city centre so getting to and from them is a doddle. (Mrs Babbage obliged in Seattle and public transport had to do in Portland.)

A quick walk through the train showed that many travellers brandished laptops and mobile devices. Like Babbage, they were surfing the net for work or play. This is because Amtrak's Cascades line from Vancouver, Canada, to Eugene, Oregon, via Seattle and Portland, added free Wi-Fi across the whole train in early 2011 (it is also offering the service on its longer Coast Starlight run, albeit only in the Parlour Car for now).In the United States, Amtrak officially launched internet access on its (not so) speedy Northeast Acela line since March after long trials and informal availability early in the year. That's it for now, but more is surely to come.

Babbage has been hoping that Wi-Fi will bring more passengers onto trains. In September 2006 he forecast that the few wireless routes in operation at the time, like Britain's GNER or California's ACE, were harbingers of the imminent arrival of more similar services in Europe and America. "By the end of 2007," he gushed, "scores of lines and several hundred trains are due to offer the service." That did not quite pan out.

It proved more difficult to equip earth-bound carriages with Wi-Fi than to do the same for around 1,000 airliners flying over America. In 2006 the Capitol Corridor line in California that runs from near the state capital of Sacramento to Silicon Valley chose four firms to test out different ways to equip its commuter trains for public passenger internet service as well as the operational needs of the line, such as remote streaming of video surveillance, VoIP communication and information updates for engineers.

Like many trains, the Capitol Corridor locomotives chug through rural areas, forests, tunnels, rocky canyons, as well as, in cities, their concrete equivalents. (The Cascades line covers vast swathes of countryside between the scattered cities of the Pacific Northwest.) Providing stable and reliable internet access in all the assorted environments prompted the four companies to propose mixes of satellite, cellular, long-haul Wi-Fi and WiMax. In the event none was ever tested. Some suggestions seemed outlandish (a massive satellite dish placed on its own flat-bed carriage) while one of the four exited the business before stitching together a proposal.

However, recent spikes in oil prices and economic collapse have pushed commuters onto trains, according to the American Public Transportation Association. A tiny reversal in growth in the fourth quarter of 2010 attributed to the economy and lower petrol prices at the pump has already been passed with large increases in ridership since. Seizing the opportunity, train operators, both public and private, have tried to entice even more travellers with amenities such as free internet service. The deployment of faster 3G mobile networks in North America and Europe allowed passengers to carry their own internet with them, but likewise made it simpler for operators to build roof-top antennas that link into an infrastructure the train lines did not have to create themselves. Newer train routes almost inevitably tout internet service (now or in the future) as part of their offering.

Not everything runs smoothly on the Cascades, of course. Sometimes the internet disappears for a few minutes; in tunnels, for instance. Other than that, though, Babbage enjoyed a nearly continuous connection, with pauses due to mobile coverage gaps. (His iPhone 4's mobile hotspot and the train both failed at almost exactly the same points.) And sometimes other reminders of the not-so-lofty reality of train travel intruded. "Occasionally, railway operations require things to be done the old fashioned way," informed a voice over the tannoy. "The conductor is getting off to throw the switches by hand. Usually this is done by computer from Fort Worth, Texas. He gets to stretch his legs a little."