I was listening to the radio in the car the other day and caught one of those sixty-second news breaks. They were talking about how Amtrak would love to scan luggage with the same (perceived) level of scrutiny as the airlines, but they just couldn’t afford to do it. Amtrak said the airline industry was given a tremendous sum of money by the U.S. Government to subsidize all the electronic whiz-bang sniffer-thingys (my terminology in case you were confused) and that the government would just have to do the same thing for them.
Then the kicker, an Amtrak spokesperson said – quite seriously – in rebuttal to the pressure to provide such high levels of baggage scanning, “…besides which, in our history a train has never been hijacked.” You could almost hear the sarcasm dripping out of the radio speakers onto my dashboard.
Ominous train hijacker: “Engineer, take me to Poukeepsie! And no funny business!”
Engineer: “But the tracks only run to Scranton…”
Brakeman: “Hey, aren’t you the guy from the news who hijacked a trolly car?”