By Ben Joravsky
But that doesn’t seem likely. Coston’s been backed by Illinois senators Carol Moseley-Braun and Richard Durbin, by Mayor Daley and Chicago’s congressional delegation, and even by the major railroad workers’ union. A lot of the world can’t quite understand why a 42-year-old lawyer with a lucrative practice has spent so much time aggressively pursuing a position that seems so marginal, but they don’t see the world as Coston does.
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“I fell in love with trains. I studied trains, memorizing runs and schedules the way other kids memorized batting averages,” he says. “There were still six active passenger stations and I used to visit them all. I used to read accounts of the Hollywood legends riding into Chicago on their way between LA and New York and scooting over to the Pump Room where they’d be interviewed by the press. I loved this stuff. Trains were already dying and I thought that was tragic. I started writing letters to congressmen and writing speeches on the subject that I never gave because I had no audience. But so what? I caught the train bug–I caught it bad.”
“Our first event was a tour of rail facilities,” says Coston. “We advertised in the rail publications and chartered buses that took us from the LaSalle Street Station to the Santa Fe coach yards, which were near Chinatown. We toured the cars and ate in a double-decker dining car. We stayed up all night making sandwiches to feed everyone.”
He’d been out of the train business for almost five years when, in 1992, he had lunch with his old friend Fahrenwald.
By offering better service, he said, Amtrak could exploit growing dissatisfaction with air travel. Only the inertia of travelers mindlessly doing what they’ve always done can explain why they put up with crummy treatment by airlines that herd them into tight compartments and dump them in airports inconveniently located on the outer edges of most cities.
Amtrak officials have no comment on pending board appointees. “Nothing’s really changed in the five years that I’ve been campaigning for the board–Amtrak’s still targeting the northeast and the Pacific northwest,” says Coston. “I don’t take issue with that. I just keep saying we should not overlook the midwest. We need more regional parity. I’m not going to sit back and pretend I don’t want this appointment. I know the system. I love trains. I’ve been waiting for this almost all of my life. Not many people can say that.” o
