It's official, I'm riding the rails to Indiana and back. The holidays are coming soon and this year I'm determined not to fly the (according to Google Maps) 2,233 miles home.

My mother thinks I'm being silly, so this blog post is partly for her, but partly for anyone else who would wonder why I would choose to take a 52 hour train ride inside of a 5 hour plane ride. The reasons are largely, though not entirely, environmental. There are two big considerations in taking a train over flying—consumption and emissions; essentially, "what goes in" and "what comes out".

For consumption, it can be difficult to compare the wide variety of modes of transportation. This one uses gasoline, that one uses electricity, this carries just one person, that one carries 70. We need to level the playing field a little bit. One way to do that is to talk about BTU/passenger-mile. A BTU is a simple unit of energy. Fuels such as gasoline or coal contain energy; a gallon of gasoline contains about 115,000 BTU, a pound of coal contains about 12,000 BTU, etc. Of course, converting fuel into turning wheels or spinning jets is not 100% efficient and a lot of these BTU are wasted (the internal combustion engine in your car only gets about 30%). That's why we need BTU per passenger-miles, as in "How many BTU does it take to take one person the distance of one mile in this vehicle?" With that explanation, let's see some data:

By taking a train over flying, I save 5,359,200 BTU, or almost 50 gallons of gasoline. That's just one person. A single train car on the California Zephyr would save close to 2,000 gallons!

Let's talk about emissions. Carbon = bad. People have tried to get around this fact lots of different ways, including denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. So what now?

There are other reasons, for sure. The seats are bigger, they don't harass you at the security checkpoints (I always have to restrain myself from saying, "how many terrorists did you catch today?" at airports), and the view is tremendous. On the line I'm riding, they specifically time the train schedule so that the most breathtaking views occur during daylight hours. At the end of the day, we just can't continue to fly as much as we do on this planet—something's got to give and I don't want that to mean not seeing my family gathered around the tree.

Oh yeah, and Amtrak has developed a hybrid locomotive. Eat that JetBlue!