My son texted me from the platform at Huntington. Everyone just got off the train. Not delayed, not canceled, just off, the whole car of people standing up in that particular hurried, resigned way commuters move when they already know the choreography. They crossed to another platform and got on a different train, one that sounded different before it even started moving, a low diesel growl instead of the electric hum he'd been riding since he boarded.
He was headed into the city, on his way to meet family flying in, or to catch a train south back to us in the DC area, I don't remember which trip it was exactly anymore, there have been a few of them since he started at Stony Brook. What he did not know, because why would he, is that he had just crossed an invisible seam in the railroad that has been there since before either of us was born.
The wires end at Huntington. They have ended there since October of 1970. Everything west of that station, the tracks running back into Queens and under the East River into Penn Station, runs on third rail, clean and electric and, when it's working, nearly silent. Everything east of Huntington, the twenty-three miles up through Cold Spring Harbor and Northport and Kings Park to Port Jefferson, past Stony Brook itself, still runs on diesel. A scoot train, they call it, the word itself sounding like something smaller and less serious than what it actually is, which is a full diesel-electric locomotive hauling passenger cars the same way a freight train hauls containers, just with fewer of them and people instead of cargo.
I looked into why, because I wanted to be able to tell him something more useful than that's just how it is. And the answer is almost more interesting than the inconvenience itself. In the early 1980s, the Long Island Rail Road actually started building toward full electrification of that line. They laid a second electrified track between Huntington and Syosset in 1986. They built full twelve-car high-level platforms at every station out to Port Jefferson, the same platform height used everywhere else on the electrified system, years before anyone thought those platforms would sit unused at that height for diesel trains that don't match them. The plan at the time was to electrify at least as far as Northport first, then finish the rest once the money came through.
The money never came through. It went instead to build the West Side Yard in Manhattan. And so the platforms out on the North Shore have been standing there for almost forty years now, built for a train that never showed up, like a table set for a dinner guest who called to say something came up.
Meanwhile the Ronkonkoma line, a few miles south, runs fully electric the whole way, express trains that could shave half an hour off the trip into the city. My son could, in theory, take that line instead. Except it doesn't run through Stony Brook. So every time he heads in to meet family or catch a train home to us, he gets the scoot train first, the older one, the one built to a standard that was already considered a stopgap when it was new.
The more I sat with this, the more I realized Huntington isn't some quirky local exception. It's practically the norm. Once I started looking at how the rest of the world splits between wires and diesel, the same seam kept showing up, just at a different scale each time, and for reasons that made a strange kind of sense once you saw them laid out.
Take the country I'm sitting in right now. The United States has about eight hundred miles of electrified track total, nearly all of it stitched into the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington and a short stretch of the Keystone line out to Harrisburg. Everything else, every long-haul freight train run by Union Pacific or BNSF or Norfolk Southern or CSX, every double-stacked container train crossing Nebraska or climbing through the Rockies, runs on diesel-electric power, an engine turning a generator turning the wheels. Part of that is honest math. The country's rail network covers something like a hundred and forty thousand miles, and wiring that much track, with the substations and bridge clearances and the sheer scale of it, would run into the hundreds of billions. Part of it is also the shape of the cargo. Double-stacked containers need clearance that overhead wires don't leave much room for. Canada runs the same way, for the same reasons, one of the most intensive heavy-haul freight networks on earth, almost none of it wired.
Amtrak is its own strange case, really two railroads sharing one name. The Acela and the Northeast Regional glide the length of the Corridor on pure electric power, drawing straight off the wires the same way the LIRR does out to Huntington. But nearly everything else Amtrak runs, the Silver Meteor down the Atlantic coast, the Crescent to New Orleans, the California Zephyr climbing through the Rockies, runs on diesel the whole way. Some of those trains start out electric and then swap locomotives entirely at Washington Union Station, trading the electric engine for a diesel one before continuing south, the exact same kind of changeover my son makes at Huntington, just with a different machine doing the work. Amtrak is trying to shrink that seam a little with a new fleet of dual-power locomotives from Siemens, due in 2026, engines that can switch between overhead wire, diesel, and battery power on the move, cutting that Washington changeover from close to an hour down to something like fifteen minutes. It's a smaller fix than full electrification, but it's the same instinct at work, someone deciding the seam is worth narrowing even when it can't be erased outright.
Australia takes the same logic and stretches it across even emptier country. The mining trains hauling iron ore out of the Pilbara in Western Australia, run by companies like BHP and Rio Tinto and Fortescue, are some of the longest and heaviest trains that exist anywhere, and every one of them is diesel-electric, because there is no economic version of stringing catenary wire across that much red desert for trains that only need to reach the port. The Indian Pacific and the Ghan, the transcontinental passenger trains that cross thousands of miles of outback between Sydney and Perth, or Adelaide and Darwin, run the same way for the same reason. Nobody is building a national grid alongside those tracks for the sake of a couple of trains a week.
Britain and continental Europe complicate the picture a little, because the trunk lines are the part everyone remembers, the Eurostar gliding under the Channel, the ICE trains through Germany, all of it electric and fast and impressive. But step off the trunk lines and the diesel multiple units are still out there working the secondary and regional routes, the Class 158s and 170s rattling through the English countryside, Class 66 diesel freight locomotives hauling containers on tracks that were never worth the cost of wiring for the traffic they carry. Germany, despite Deutsche Bahn's electrified showcase routes, still runs thousands of kilometers of diesel railcars on lines that see a train every hour instead of every ten minutes.
And then there's India, which is where this got personal in a different way. My family's home country has, in the last decade, gone from a rail network that was mostly diesel to one that is now more than ninety-nine percent electrified on its broad gauge lines, ahead of the UK, ahead of Russia, ahead of China. Fourteen entire railway zones, from Northern to South Central to Eastern, sit at full electrification. It happened fast, accelerating from something like a kilometer and a half of new electrified track a day a decade ago to more than fifteen kilometers a day now. There is something almost funny about that timing, my ancestral railway system racing past a hundred years of diesel dependence in the same years my son is standing on a platform in Huntington waiting for a scoot train because a plan from 1984 ran out of money.
Russia is the one that got me, though, because I have my own unfinished business with that railway. I lived there in the late eighties, and I had it in my head that I would ride the Trans-Siberian the full distance, Moscow all the way out to Vladivostok, the whole nearly six thousand miles of it. I never did. What I actually rode was smaller and, looking back, better suited to who I was then, Moscow down to Kiev, up to Leningrad, and a trip from Moscow to Helsinki that I still think about as one of the best of that whole stretch of my life. But the Trans-Siberian stayed a plan I carried around instead of a trip I took. What I did not know at the time, and only learned writing this, is that even if I had gone, I would not have ridden it end to end under wire. The full length of that railway was not completely electrified until December of 2002, fourteen years after I would have made the trip, seventy-four years after the project began. The section I would have wanted most, out through Siberia toward the Pacific, was still partly a diesel railway back then, same as the Baikal-Amur line running north of it, which Brezhnev had called the project of the century and which was not declared finished until 1991, the same year the country I'd been living in stopped existing. My own unfinished trip and that unfinished railway turned out to belong to the same decade.
My own unfinished trip and that unfinished railway turned out to belong to the same decade.
And the pattern holds across the mining corridors of the developing world too, Vale's Carajás line hauling iron ore across Brazil, the freight lines of Argentina and South Africa, and the extraordinary iron ore train that runs across the Sahara in Mauritania, sometimes stretching two and a half miles long, every one of them diesel, because distance and low traffic density make the capital cost of wiring the line impossible to justify against what it would actually save.
What ties Huntington to the Pilbara to the Trans-Siberian to that ancestral village line back in India is the same quiet arithmetic every time. Overhead wire and substations cost real money per mile, something like two to five million dollars on a dense corridor, and electrification only pays for itself when enough trains are running often enough to make the investment worth it. A commuter line into a major city clears that bar easily. A branch line with a scoot train every ninety minutes off-peak does not, no matter how many people wish it did. There's also something else diesel quietly offers that the wires can't, which is independence. A diesel locomotive carries its own power source with it. When a storm knocks out the grid, the diesel train just keeps running while the electric ones sit dead on the tracks.
None of that makes the wait on the platform at Huntington any shorter, and it doesn't get me onto that Trans-Siberian route either, not anymore, not the way I once pictured it. My son will be riding that diesel scoot train for as long as he's at Stony Brook, standing on a platform built forty years ago for wires that still haven't arrived, on a branch of a system that, station by station, country by country, keeps making the same calculation over and over, that some places are worth wiring and some are not, and the ones that aren't just keep running on diesel, sometimes for decades longer than anyone standing on the platform, or anyone still holding onto an old travel plan, would guess.
If you've got your own unfinished railway, a trip you meant to take or a line you still ride out of habit, I'd like to hear about it. Find more essays like this one at readythoughts.com.
Shashi Bellamkonda is Principal Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group, with affiliations at Georgetown and Stony Brook. He writes personal essays at readythoughts.com and maintains a professional presence at shashi.co, drawing on nearly thirty years in technology and an earlier career in newspaper journalism.
