Why is it, my new friend asked, that the railroads in this country are owned by so many different companies?

She was thinking of her time in France - which has a serious kick-ass railway system. In France nearly every rail line is electrified. In France not only do rails connect every metropolitan area, but even the smaller metropolitan areas - 100 thousand to 200 thousand in population - have local rail transit.

Why are there so many rail lines? Lots of them seem to go to the same place. It seems inefficient and there is so much duplication. How hard is it to move rails?

Building and moving rail lines is pretty easy, I answered. I was thinking of how the Germans in WWII could so easily replace rail lines damaged by Allied bombing [VanCreveld]. I started to answer there are so many line because many munis and private investors built lines. And something about the land grants that went to the transcontinental railroad trusts. Different routes. In parallel.

It is the proper purpose of a corporation - "to harness private interests in service to the public interest" - I was thinking, to build large scale rail, whether transcontinental or intercity. Different routes in parallel are more than OK; they are resilient.

I didn't mention that the State was planning to rip up the Ellsworth to Calais line - to convert it to a snowmobile trail - just as Climate Change and Peak Oil put an end to snowmobiling. [More at BDN] The State will sell the steel rail to fund the project.

Was the LA Interurban associated with the mills so workers could get to their jobs, she asked? Not directly. There's a book floating around - Falmouth Public Library has a copy - documenting the history of Interurban. It was a private developer that assembled the right of way (ROW) and built it.

Building and moving rails is easy, I was thinking. Getting the ROW is the hard part. All the effort that went into getting the right of way for the Interurban is wasted; the ROW has been abandoned and too much of it has been built over. At the worst time.

I love it when a plan comes together. I didn't say that.

Further, I didn't continue, municipalities routinely required developers to put in rail as a precondition to building new suburbs - Allston/Brighton, Commonwealth Ave. Sometimes they would extend an existing system, sometimes the would start another. It should be a no-brainer requirement for Plum Creek, too. Poetic justice given Plum Creek's historical transmutation from a transcontinental railroad into a transcontinental land developer. Plum Creek - stripper of commonwealth assests - the improper purpose of a corporation.

Nor did I mention that while it seems there are many lines now, there are far fewer than there used to be. It used to be one could travel by trolley from Maine to Minnesota with only a single twenty mile gap [where's that reference?]. It used to be that citizens in Augusta would travel to Belgrade Lakes for a summer evening's theater. By trolley.

Nor did I get into standards. How it doesn't really matter much who owns the lines if the guages are the same. How one of the critical factors stopping the German invasion of the Soviet Union was the different guage rail lines - European stock could not pass into Asia but had to be reloaded or the rails and rolling stock rebuilt [VanCreveld].

Of course, standards are not quite that simple. There is the open standard Internet and the extend, embrace and extinguish approach Microsoft takes. And even with open standards - 60 cycle AC and analog phones - it still took rural cooperatives to complete the wiring of this country. Singularity of ownership - as my friend was thinking - is not enough. AT&T didn't wire the nation; it was the community based rural cooperatives. The communities did it themselves.

But I digress.

Throwing money at big business doesn't work; big business pockets it. The Baldacci administration - and the King administration before it - wasted a decade trying to get Verizon to finish wiring the state for high speed networking. In the case of Internet services, we need enabling legislation for munis and community investment trusts to provide all levels of infrastructure. To stop that from happening, to stop citizens taking care of their own business, the corporations deploy their legislative lobbies - ALEC - to make sure nothing impedes business.

Which leads to corporate personhood and rights, I thought. Santa Clara. Why corporations have more rights than citizens. The Powell Manifesto. Who runs our government. Corporatism, of which Benito spoke so highly. The paramount interest of the State, FISA, NSA, reasons to impeach and the servility of the Maine legislature.

We could run rail up the middle of the turnpike, my pretty friend suggested. Yes, or take a lane, I said. I wondered how the engineering might work - or the snow plows. Order the National Guard home to lay rail, insulate our homes and build community gardens. The proper use of Maine's National Guard.

The problem is the opposition. Too many prosper from the broken system. It's not only the automobile industry - MOFGA's Spring Growth Conference on Energy, Climate and Agriculture sponsored by Lee Auto Malls - but our every-waking-hour happy motoring style of life of which the direct costs alone, according the AAA are order-of-magnitude $10 thousand a year per car.

Getting rid of one's car would amount to a huge increase in real, personal income. Getting rid of one's car would depend not only on commuter rail, but bicycle routes, pedestrian paths, and new distribution systems. Getting rid of one's car would be terribly bad for business.

Why carpool to work if one must still drive to the supermarket? Getting there - getting to the supermarket without a car - is a qualitative jump. A jump that the corporations that run the government - the corporations that provide our corn pone - won't allow. Their interest, their legally required interest, their pathological interest, is to maximize profit. They extract that profit from our communities and commonwealth. Those piranha corporations and their government want wider roads, electric cars, biofuels and a bigger military to protect their oil. They're shovelling coal into a runaway train going the wrong direction.

But those foreign and alien corporations, the 450 Hannafords, the 61 Wal-Marts in Maine and the Sysco truck that services in one trip the military base, the prison and the school are not the entire problem. It's our very human addiction to the cheap food and cheap goods, our very human genetic disposition to More. That we get our More by taking from elsewhere we rationalize - even glorify - as market based competition. Never mind that we destroy each other in the process.

The Jamon Serrano and Patatas tapas were wonderful. The Manchego - yum. The Olives were olives. The Tomatoes - obviously Backyard Tomatoes from Madison - sucked. Silly me, what should I expect of a Tomato tapa in winter? Some creative use of sundried fruit or paste perhaps? No. An honest, home-cooked peasant French dinner - pasta aglio e olio and a few local brews - would have been much better on a first date.