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January 22, 2013

Western Front

Pacific Surfliner

by Geoff Young

Everyone starts somewhere and ends up somewhere else. This is what my wife tells me when I ask her for an angle. “Place matters,” she says.

It is Saturday in January, my wife's birthday. Like Barry Zito going from high school to college, we start in San Diego and end up in Santa Barbara. We will not continue north to the Bay Area because our train does not go that far.

According to Wikipedia, “railroad” means “To run into and knock over the catcher when running home from third base, or to run into a first-baseman when running from home to first.” This is news to me, but then, Wikipedia tells me many things I did not know. Some of them are even true.

We are on the Pacific Surfliner, which spans 350 miles from San Diego to San Luis Obispo, stopping at various points along the way. This is a popular and profitable train, carrying nearly 2.8 million passengers during fiscal year 2011 and generating more than $55 million in revenue. That is more people than attended games of all but 12 MLB teams in 2011. It's about what the Diamondbacks spent on players that year if you gave them one more guy making league minimum.

This train might not win championships, but it will compete. And it will take people somewhere else.

We have no interest in knocking over the catcher when running home from third base. We desire only safe passage via what other sources call “a track or set of tracks made of steel rails along which passenger and freight trains run.”