"One random fantasy I always have is going back to using zeppelins. Man, comfy, roomy, relaxing, you can nap, walk around.... I think this whole obsession with fast transport has really taken away from what could be meaningful travel experiences."

It's an interesting thing, yes. Zeppelins do take up a lot of room in the sky, though, for a relatively small capacity. Still, I'll admit to liking the image of Gotham with a good dozen zeppelins over it in some of the mid-90's Batman cartoons. I understand that some of the buildings in New York were constructed with the idea of providing dockage for zeppelins, but this could just be a rumour.

Yes, we are overly obsessed with fast transport. Personally, I'm a train freak. When I get on a train, I get this sudden, overwhelming sense of contentment. I can relax and read or work at my computer or whatever, and there is more leg room than on an airplane, even in coach.

The nice thing about my current job and my current location is that I never have to travel far, and only once have I ever had to do so by means other than a train (not counting the commute, which I do by bus). I live two miles from a train station, and work three miles from a different train station. The trouble, of course, is that Amtrak almost always runs late, for reasons that I could explain another time.

There was a feature in our local newspaper that gave me kind of mixed feelings. It was about a new railroad called Railex, which primarily transports food, and runs a really tight ship. The good was that they *do* run a really tight ship. When they are on time, they get from coast to coast in 124 hours, but they frequently get as much as 30 hours ahead of schedule, and have only been late twice. The bad, of course, is that they are transporting food, which should be grown locally to the greatest extent practicable.

However, if they can do so well, they qualify as a shining example of how to do rail transport, and it would be fantastic if others would follow that example.