My grandfather worked on the railroad. He built a bona fide model train set for me to run in the early 80s. I've loved trains all my life, and I ride them as mu

My grandfather worked on the railroad. He built a bona fide model train set for me to run in the early 80s. I've loved trains all my life, and I ride them as much as possible. It was so exciting when Phoenix finally got our light rail in 2008, and I could again ride the train as an ordinary commuting human. For a bonus there's a freight line right behind here, and sometimes I hear/see it. Once, I took Amtrak up from San Diego to Santa Barbara. That was a lovely scenic trip. However, upon arriving in Arizona, it saddened me to discover that our Amtrak service is practically non-existent. There's not even a proper station in our city! Wouldn't it be lovely to hop on a local train and ride it, to Flagstaff, Sonora, Grand Canyon, Tucson, Yuma, Santa Fe(DUH!) or beyond? But that's simply impossible for so many reasons. It'd be logistically crazy for me even to ride to San Diego from here. So I've resigned myself to just abandoning Amtrak as a transportation option, and it's quite sad because they used to have a better reputation, but powerful forces ran them into the ground, and the American Southwest is so widely sprawling, that trying to get rights-of-way and tracks laid just for passenger rail is a fool's errand, because why not simply fly on Southwest Airlines? Now that the airlines are being decimated and falling apart, however, I see a future with more impetus to ground transportation like that. I feel also that a CA high-speed rail project, greatly ridiculed, is pragmatic planning for a realistic future.