After 1000 miles of track, my son and I obtained a good idea of what the state of rail travel is like in the eastern United States today.

Our trip home began at Rockland Airport in Maine. This tiny facility had three TSA employees present on a Sunday morning in August to check our bags.

It was the most personal and friendly airport security check-in I've ever had. Nine passengers boarded the first of eight daily flights. It's important for even small planes to be checked, but the cost of doing this at tiny airports with limited numbers of flights around the country must be astronomical. It's being paid for by federal taxes, a subsidy airlines said was necessary to keep a functional and affordable air transport system.

We bought unlimited ride passes for the Boston Transit system at the station at Logan Airport. Renovations to the "T" are well advanced after 20 years of work. In Cambridge there was a large underground tunnel linking regional bus service at the subway. Full dynamic routing information for Boston's transit system was available through Google on a smart phone. The phone knows where you are based on GPS, Wi-Fi and phone network data. Google generates a list of travel directions for bus and subway to your chosen destination, updated based on the actual locations of the trains and buses at the moment. It's now available in 110 cities in the United States and Canada, including Atlanta and Charlotte. Walking, driving and cycling directions are also available. It makes schedules and maps irrelevant.

We took Amtrak's Acela south from Boston to New York. This is the closest thing to high speed rail running in the United States, hitting a top speed of 135 miles per hour. Boston's south train station is clean and impressive. It connected directly to the subway system. Four or more trains were running per hour, including two South bound Acelas. There was no expensive, subsidized TSA check. We could have arrived at the train station, boarded and left within minutes.

The Acela left on time, took us through some pretty landscape and delivered us to New York's little loved, but much used, Penn Station as scheduled. It was a four dollar cab ride to our lodgings. We could have walked. It was vastly faster, cheaper and shorter than a trip from the airport would have been. The Acela carried 37 percent of people traveling between Boston and New York by plane or train in 2005, faster (when you include travel to the airport, security checks and waiting) and more reliably. It's believed to be over 40 percent now. The Acela operates at a profit. Those who damn Amtrak as "socialism" might consider the federal tax money which keeps three uniformed TSA agents at Rockland airport.

After a short stay in New York, we returned to Penn Station to take the Amtrak Palmetto to Charleston. The train left 50 minutes late, but moved rapidly south to Washington, D.C. We passed the train station at Wilmington, Delaware where then-Senator Joe Biden boarded for his trips to the capital on the Acela, which also runs to Washington.

There were a lot of Amtrak employees sitting in the dining car on the Palmetto. It looked like inefficiency, but I soon understood why. A coal train had derailed south of Washington. The Amtrak Palmetto rolled into magnificent Union Station, where everyone had to take buses around the derailment to Richmond. There were a lot of people on the train. Train travel is particularly attractive to the elderly and disabled, who suffer more than most in the cramped spaces of aircraft. It was a massive job to get all the people and their baggage through Union Station, on to the buses and to load them back on in Richmond. The Amtrak employees worked patiently and steadily to get it done, making extra effort to help the disabled and elderly.

They could not, however, fix the gargantuan failure which is the interstate highway system around Washington, D.C. It took us over an hour to travel by bus the first 20 miles towards Richmond on a Friday in August. The huge amounts of money spent on highway construction around our Nation's capital fully enabled thousands of square miles of sprawl, each new road generating more automobile travel than it could move. The D.C. transit system and expanding regional commuter trains haven't been able to relieve the problem, which now includes hundreds of thousands of people driving from one suburban location to another, many of which now work for private contractors involved with defense and national security.

The train began moving South from Richmond about five hours after we arrived in D.C. We covered 100 miles by bus. The Amtrak Palmetto's trip south from Richmond finished late, but wasn't unpleasant. We saw small towns where the train tracks still ran down the middle of the business district. There were dramatic river crossings where we could see children swimming from the rocks. We had saved hundreds of dollars in airfare and had room to stretch our legs.

I've traveled farther and faster by train in Europe. However, when it's running on good track, Amtrak can compete with the plane.

(William Hamilton [www.wjhamilton.com] is an attorney who lives in I'OnVillage.)