Wrong town? What’s Pem Schaeffer talking about?

Brunswick has always been a train town. Trains and railroads were in Brunswick from the beginning. Rails helped build Brunswick, moving people and freight in and out of Brunswick and the Mid-coast area all before Mr. Schaeffer, Mr. Gerzofsky and most everyone in the Bouchard Drive neighborhood were even born.

So, trains are right for Brunswick. Trains could and do help with Bowdoin College, Brunswick Landing business park and airport, Bath Iron Works and tourism, in general.

One locomotive can move a lot of cars, no matter what’s in those cars — passengers or freight. I guess there will be some pollution in the air and stormwater runoff, anything’s possible, but that one locomotive or two or three, compared to the hundreds or thousands of passenger cars and freight trucks we have in Brunswick and the Midcoast.

I bet it would surprise people how much pollution is put out in the Bouchard Drive neighborhood. Let’s see, each house has oil/gas furnace in the house that pollutes. Each house had a car or two that pollute when they idle and move about the town. They wash their cars, water the grass and gardens, there’s pollution with stormwater runoff.

Wrong town? What’s wrong is that Brunswick and the towns in the state don’t embrace mass transit.

Rail service would take more traffic off the roads. Maine roads are bad and need repair because of too much car and truck traffic on them, and more cars and trucks means more pollution, and wear and tear on the roads. One locomotive moves many cars with freight or people, meaning less pollution, and less wear and tear on our crappy roads.

Regardless of the outcome with Amtrak and layover facility in Brunswick, I only hope that the people that make up the Bouchard Drive neighborhood, Mr. Gerzofsky and the Brunswick West group put their time, mouths, money and energy into other causes like better jobs, welfare abuse, better schools, roads and lower taxes.

But they won’t, because all they care about is their own backyard, not the betterment of the town, Mid-coast and state as a whole. Remember, they built or moved to that neighborhood with train tracks there, the train didn’t build in their backyard. They live in the railroad’s backyard.

Tim Halpin Harpswell