Back to the thread, probably a stupid question- is the train system considered 'critical infrastucture' because people are very dependant on it back east? Or because of shipping too? I thought one of the arguments of most people that are against amtrak in general is because the trains are not important?
Well, people are dependent on the rail network everywhere--the "train system" is critical infrastructure nationwide, and any argument that "trains are not important" is absolutely false. (Don't worry, I know you're not making this argument, but are just pointing out that many do!) Most people just don't think about this enough to realize that without rail, everything would be much scarcer and more expensive, from electricity (how else would coal and oil be shipped from the ground to the power plants and refineries?) to automobiles (shipped hundreds per train, versus about a dozen per tractor trailer) to orange juice (which was a luxury good until the Pacific Fruit Express, and later the Tropicana Juice Train). We likely wouldn't have a "national economy" if it weren't for our rail network, and standards of living would be fundamentally different and lower as a whole and completely incompatible with almost every contemporary American's idea of "how life should be".
Of course, there's a huge difference between the rail infrastructure and passenger rail, and passenger rail has different values and serves different purposes on different scales. On a regional, urban scale passenger rail is an indisputably beneficial system. New York City would collapse without it; the Northeast, from Boston to Washington, would dwindle as individual cities and a collective whole; and with these shrinkages the entire nation would suffer. New York depends on Kansas, and Kansas depends on New York, much as each would often prefer to think otherwise. It's not just "back east" where passenger rail is beneficial, though the East has the bulk of successful examples by virtue of having the most comprehensive initial, and strongest still intact, infrastructure: Chicago, and the Midwest for hundreds of miles surrounding it, depends on the people-moving on its rail system.
But on a nationwide scale, airplanes, cellphones, and the Internet have changed the pace of business, and rail can never catch up on some scales to that new pace. We're unlikely to ever see a six-hour New York to Los Angeles train, for instance--that's a route for which air travel may be necessary to maintain today's economic pace and climate. But a fast overnight New York to Chicago train is possible and would be compatible with business desires, and three-hour 500 mile trips between major cities are possible across the country. Hence the current initiatives for HSR. Once implemented they'll pay off enormously, compared to a future where they are not in place before Peak Oil is realized and air and road travel become suddenly prohibitively expensive.
And even in its current form, Amtrak's LD service provides many valuable people-moving infrastructure needs, providing efficient service to many locations and populations that would otherwise be without good transportation options--it's not just the "land cruise" operation detractors decry, and long-distance conventional trains can and must continue to provide these functions, as economics continues to make passenger rail relatively more efficient and cheaper than alternatives. But it's hard to see the potential in the current system without some investigation into economics and demographics, and it's easy to argue against rail by highlighting the short-term and current negatives and overlooking the long-term future positives. See Anthony Perl's _New Departures_ for a decent, accessible analysis of how Japan, France, and Germany each overcame this, though each dealt with a very different situation and problem than America must deal with today; and Wikipedia's Peak Oil article gives a pretty comprehensive overview of the concept.
I think it's more that people see the very simple picture, that Amtrak historically (throughout its crippled, underfunded, frequently misguided, politically influenced decline) has been painted as an economic failure, and that they extrapolate from that that all railroads are unnecessary (influenced in their opinion by the oil lobby and by the behind-the-scenes role that railroads play compared to the accessible and widely-understood highways and airplanes that convey most of the population); and so they most often go from "Amtrak is unnecessary" and "I live in Kansas; trains only work in and for New York, not me" to "trains are not important", and not the other way around.
But much of this is getting pretty far afield from the topic of this thread, and moving into territory covered pretty exhaustively elsewhere!
Are they cracking down on photos of planes/airports/buses/taxis/trolleys/freeways too? :unsure:
To return to the topic and your question on photographs of freeways and airplanes ... well, it's already much more difficult to photograph airplanes by their nature. You can stand alongside the right-of-way of a railroad and photograph trains as they go by, or visit overlooks or public property near railyards, quite easily. But you can't generally get very near an airport--not the part with airplanes taxi-ing about and taking off and landing. That's pretty well cordoned off. You can see your plane up close through a window at the gate, once you're at the gate (having a ticket, having gone through security, etc), but when else do you even have the opportunity to see a 767 or an Airbus 320 up close, outside of an air show? And passenger planes in flight are, well, just not within sight of a ground-based photographer. I don't think anyone's "cracking down" on airplane photography; I just think it's always been difficult for those reasons.
Freeways are a lot more accessible--you can stand on an overpass pretty easily, or find overlooks, and you can walk across many major highway bridges, and some are even tourist attractions that encourage photography. I don't think anyone's cracking down on freeway photography; if there have been instances of this I certainly haven't heard of them.
