PDX, you're finally asking yourself the same question I first asked myself back in 1995 after the Sunset Limited was derailed by sabotage in the Arizona desert. The "biggest and brightest" in TV and print media got so many things horribly wrong about that incident, it made me begin questioning so much more of what we see in the news. Darn near everyone on this forum, no matter your political or social persuasion, can agree that our mainstream media suffers from the dual diseases of bias and ignorance. We could all post thousands of words here about the bias and hypocrisy in MSM coverage of events happening in just the past 30 days, but let's not go there.

As for last night's episode of America Revealed, yes, they painted a very screwed-up picture of railroading in the U.S. Blaming freight congestion for all the woes of transit in Chicago and elsewhere. Running video clips (many supplied by the railroads themselves) which show big long trains of intermodal and merchandise plodding along at a snail's pace. On Cajon, where some shots were taken, that's fine, although the viewing public won't get it. But elsewhere across our nation these trains actually move at speeds equalling or exceeding what trucks are able to do on the highway. Only rarely does the public get to see that. It's an image crisis that has only recently been overcome by TV scenes like the GE commercial with a BNSF strack train gliding along the Columbia River at something better than barge speed.

This appears to be a recently-produced PBS series, but it fell a couple decades behind with its brief look at rail transit's revivial in the L.A. area. They honestly made it sound like the construction of new light rail routes and the introduction of new commuter rail operatations were only now getting under way.

Plenty of pretty pictures and some nifty graphic representations of air, auto, and rail traffic zipping across the map. And a few moments where trains almost looked like they were doing this country some good. But overall, a poor job of research and reporting.

Having seen other episodes where they show how a pizza delivery is managed in the city, and then how the ingredients for the pizza are grown on farms on the opposite side of the country, etc., it would have been nice if last night's episode could have more closely illustrated the link from container port to stack train to store shelf, or from wheat farm to elevator to unit train to either export dock or flour mill, etc., etc.