Railway preservation.

Ed Driscoll writes about the Napa Valley Wine Train

Imagine traveling in an elegant dining car, full of handsomely dressed passengers, sitting down to tables laid out with white linen, beautiful china and silverware, as you enjoy a meal of chicken prosciutto, baked and stuffed with layers of sauteed spinach, wild mushrooms and provolone cheese with sun dried tomatoes and wild mushroom sauce. Lush fields of California grapes slowly roll by at about ten miles an hour. A few cars ahead, a pair of champagne, burgundy and grapeleaf green Alco FPA-4 locomotives are cutting through the air with their classic blunt noses, with the odd belch of black smoke as a reminder of their turbocharged engines.

Sound like something out of the 1950s, long since vanquished by generic Amtrak Amfleet cars that resemble airplane interiors serving "Amfood" of styrofoam hamburgers and Diet Cokes? Actually, it's a scene that's recreated everyday on the Napa Valley Wine Train.

I don't know that much about railway preservation in America, but I believe there are far fewer preserved lines than in Britain. Over on our side of the pond we have several dozen lines, largely operated by steam locomotives. Most of them are short, and almost all aren't run as commercial enterprises, relying heavily on volunteers supplying their own time and money to restore and operate the vintage steam and diesel locomotives.

Sometimes I think about the time and energy put into operating these lines and compare it with the money spent on subsidising loss-making rural parts of the national rail network. The preserved railways operate on lines closed in the 1960s and 70s because they were hopelessly uneconomic; many of them are short sections of what were once much longer routes and terminate in the middle nowhere.

Perhaps preservationists should be encouraged to take over loss-making bits of the existing national network? Something like the Central Wales line might be too ambitious, but what about lines like Liskeard-Looe? Run steam-hauled tourist trains in the summer, and run a modern railcar for the all-year round local service.

I'm thinking a bit of some of the small private railways in Switzerland. Most of them are actually publically-owned, by local authorities ('Private' here means 'not owned by the federal government'). Although the day-to-day services use modern equipment, almost all of them seem to hang on to some of the vintage trains they replaced. For instance, the Rhätische Bahn still keeps three steam locomotives in working order on the books, which regularly operate enthusiast's specials, and can even be hired - I saw one hired for a wedding party, with white ribbons and flowers on the loco!