The mountains remain the problem. This barrier to westward expansion has defined Pittsburgh for centuries: as the first city of The West, as a place set apart from the Great East, as the de facto capital of the in-between space called Appalachia.

But even in the 21st century, they remain a tremendous barrier to modern transportation.

Sure, we can fly over them now. But Pittsburgh is close enough, purely as a matter of mileage, to the cities and metropolises of the East that ground transportation should be competitive with, if not preferable to, enduring the various indignities of modern air travel.

Specifically, if you look at a map that doesn’t include terrain, Pittsburgh looks like a natural hub for passenger rail. North to the cities of the Great Lakes; west to those of the Midwest; and, of course, east to the Acela Corridor that runs from the nation’s capital through Philadelphia and New York to Boston.

Yet while the city remains an important center of freight traffic, especially at the Conway Yard along the Ohio River in Beaver County, its prominence in Amtrak’s network has long been limited.

The launch of a second train on the Pennsylvanian route next month is a happy sign that passenger rail has a thriving future here. But for all those who dream of being integrated into a truly high-speed rail system — the Alleghenies still have the last word.

Forbidding terrain

The Allegheny Portage Railroad National Historic Site is the last of Western Pennsylvania’s five National Park Service units for my family to visit, and I’m eager to remedy that. It may seem like a place only of interest to a few varieties of nerds, at the intersection of which I happen to sit, but it’s hard to overstate its importance to the history of this region.

This was the first way to transport large amounts of goods to the frontier south of the Erie Canal, ensuring that Pittsburgh could not be bypassed. It was necessary because the Allegheny Front, running from southern Pennsylvania south to western Virginia, could be traversed by no other way than climbing the steep escarpment — and climbing agrees with neither traditional railroads nor canals.

That’s why the Allegheny Portage Railroad was considered a wonder — Charles Dickens traversed and admired it — when it was completed. It allowed barges to be lifted through the ruggedest terrain in the East at astonishing grades of 7% to 10%. For comparison, today’s Norfolk Southern Pittsburgh Line, over which Amtrak runs, drops at a roughly 1.5% grade into Altoona, and that’s considered steep.

The idea of plowing high-speed rail through this terrain is in some ways even more daunting than Europe’s famous crossings of the Alps, which depend largely on tunnels from base to base. You can’t tunnel through a rise like the Allegheny Front unless you want the tunnel to be a several-mile-long underground climb. And the closer scale of the Allegheny Plateau, which on a topographical map looks like crinkled aluminum foil, means there’s no way to build the sweeping curves high-speed rail depends on — without dozens more miles of tunnels.

Such a project would be even more impressive today than the Allegheny Portage was two centuries ago.

New options

So, if the dreams of getting to Harrisburg in 90 minutes (or Philadelphia in two hours or New York in three) by train are doomed to remain dreams, train-loving Pittsburghers are going to have to content themselves with expanding the existing service.

Luckily, that’s exactly what we’re getting. But to keep it, we have to use it. Let me say a word, then, in favor of taking the train.

Two routes pass through Pittsburgh’s embarrassing train depot: the Pennsylvanian and the Floridian. The latter is a temporary combination of the Capitol Limited ( Chicago to Washington) and the Silver Star ( New York to Miami).

I’ve only taken the Pennsylvanian myself, which is the route that’s doubling service from here to New York. The case for the overnight trek to Chicago has always seemed weak, and the 7-hour ride to Washington departing at 5 a.m. has never seemed very practical. There’s a reason the vast majority of Pittsburgh riders are on the Pennsylvanian.

Let’s briefly consider three destinations: Harrisburg, Philadelphia and New York.

Take the train

The five-and-a-half hours on Amtrak to Harrisburg compares unfavorably to the Turnpike’s three-and-a-half. But it offers major benefits in productivity (just don’t count on the wi-fi through the mountains) and safety. If you get sleepy on the train, you can just doze off.

Philadelphia may be the hardest sell, because the train competes with driving and numerous inexpensive flights. Remember, though, that the speed of the train is competitive with car-travel after Harrisburg, and you don’t have to navigate their awful airport. Plus, 30th Street Station is one of the last remaining gems in the U.S. rail system.

There’s a very good case for New York. Taking the train, you give up a few hours on driving, but you avoid having to drive in Gotham. And LaGuardia doesn’t have a transit connection, so you have to shell out for an Uber, which will take who-knows-how-long. By contrast, the train dumps you in the middle of Manhattan. I’ll never forget the first time I emerged from Penn Station onto 42nd Street, and neither will you.

A bonus: I took the train to New Haven last year, because there’s no good way to fly to coastal Connecticut, and I’d do it again without hesitation.

Maybe we’ll never get an American TGV or Shinkansen in Western Pennsylvania. But we can choose to embrace the rail options we have, and appreciate our geography all the more in the process.

And we should, because if we don’t, we risk losing it once again.

Brandon McGinley’s previous column was “Imagine if money for new highways were spent on old bridges.”

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