A former Tennessean colleague 20 or so years my senior had a comically pessimistic view of his life expectancy: “Man, I don’t even buy green bananas,” he used to say.

I’m now a few years older than he was then, and while I’m fairly optimistic about my chances for living to see store-bought fruit ripen, I appreciate his sentiment. I’m not planting fruit trees.

Which brings us to the prospects for passenger rail service in Tennessee.

A recent report by the Tennessee Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations suggests the state pursue Amtrak service in three phases:

• First, from Nashville to Chattanooga and on to Atlanta

• Second, from Memphis to Nashville and from Chattanooga to Knoxville to Bristol

• Third, from Memphis to Carbondale, Illinois, and on to Chicago, and from Nashville to Louisville.

The only current Amtrak service available in Tennessee runs through Memphis between New Orleans and Chicago. Nashville has been without Amtrak since 1979 when the Floridian line between Chicago and Miami petered out.

I’d love to see it return.

It’s a topic I’ve written about before. In 2020, I did a column about legislation filed by State Rep. Jason Powell of Nashville calling for the advisory commission to look into the potential for expanded passenger service.

“I’m a lifelong lover of trains,” Powell said then. “I grew up interested in rail transportation and have always enjoyed whenever I’ve been in a city that had subway transportation or rail service.”

I can’t lay claim to being a lifelong train lover. But since I first started traveling in Europe in 1982, I’ve used rail time and again to ramble about from one place to another in England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, France, Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and Spain.

Most recently, it quite pleasantly and quickly got us from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in Israel. In this country, Amtrak has taken me to baseball games in Philadelphia, Boston and Washington, D.C.

And, for a more mundane purpose, commuter rail ferried me back and forth to work from Long Island to Manhattan five days a week for more than 17 years. For pretty much any distance, rail beats driving. And for some distances, it beats flying.

The study lists a variety of potential benefits of rail:

“[P]erhaps most significant is that passenger rail can generate economic and mobility benefits, which can manifest in the form of new jobs, increased Amtrak procurement spending within a region, reduced congestion on highways, increased travel options for business and tourism, new local development, and more.”

How much benefit: “[T]he Southeast Corridor Commission estimated that a Nashville to Atlanta route could potentially produce a total economic output of $18.2 billion.”

It wouldn’t come without expenditures, obviously, including for infrastructure costs and the likely operational subsidies needed to supplement ticket revenues. Because the routes would be what are considered short-distance – less than 750 miles – the state would be on the hook for the tab.

But hey, Tennessee is flush, right? Speaker Cameron Sexton says we don’t even need the annual $1.8 billion in education funding from the federal government. Why not do something less stupid, more fiscally responsible, and actually provide a benefit for the state?

The main obstacle, from my perspective, is time. Passenger rail projects “can take decades to implement,” the study says, which is one reason it also recommends starting the process with expanded bus service.

Bus travel is considerably less appealing. My one extensive experience, decades ago, took me and a group of other high school athletes from the Mississippi Coast to Black Mountain, North Carolina, an overnight journey that didn’t provide ideal sleeping conditions. To top it off, while we were going to Black Mountain, our luggage was headed somewhere else.

So, no thanks, buses.

Passenger trains, even the high-speed versions, offer a nostalgic throwback to the day when the country was young and they provided the height of travel. They’re rooted to the earth in a way that even automobiles aren’t – steel rails dictate the prescribed path – and the gentle rocking and swaying can be as comforting as a lullaby.

And, depending on route, the passing countryside can be a wonderful way to experience the beauties of a country. (In Britain, that includes lots of sheep.)

As for whether I’ll ever see train service expanded here, I should mention that my green-banana-averse colleague in fact lived another 25 years or so. If I were to be so lucky, maybe I could someday catch the train to Memphis or Chattanooga. For that to happen, the state needs to start soon.

I have my doubts about legislators doing so. It makes too much sense.

Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.