Trains are different from airplanes. For airplanes, taking off and landing is a big deal, both time-consuming and expensive. That leads to centralized airports, and the “hub system.” For trains, stopping and starting is not a very big deal. It requires skill, of course, but a skilled locomotive engineer can make it no big deal, on a routine basis, just as a cook routinely cooks every item correctly. Even for the fastest trains, stopping and starting at intermediate points does not slow the train’s average speed down very much. A train which makes a number of intermediate stops can often be ninety percent as fast as a nonstop train over the same route. Between New York and Washington, the Amtrak North-East Corridor stops at Newark, NJ; Trenton, NJ; Philadelphia, PA; Wilmington, DE; Baltimore, MD; and Baltimore-Washington Airport– that is, about every fifty miles.

The multiplicity of train stations makes it very difficult to control passengers. This has certain implications– for example, it is difficult to do the kind of price manipulation which airlines do. A passenger can always buy a ticket from Washington to New York, and get off at Trenton, if the fares should be distorted enough to make that logical. So the fare to Trenton has to be less than or equal to the fare to New York.

Another implication is that a lot of the stations which make the system work are comparatively small and simple compared to the main stations. Passenger railroads sometimes have “flag stops,” places where the train stops if there is a passenger to get on or off, but not otherwise. There are stations where the railroad does not have anyone to sell tickets, where you traditionally have to buy a ticket from the conductor after you get on the train and after it is moving again. There are a lot of stations on Amtrak’s network where it doesn’t have any paid employees. Instead, it has Honorary Stationmasters, railfans who take care of the station, and come in at train time. They get a fine-sounding title, and the right to wear a funny hat, and they generally help out new rail travelers, who might become confused. They can’t actually sell tickets, but nowadays a website or an 800 number can do that. Under the circumstances, anything approximating an effective security cordon would be absurd.

In any case, attacks can easily come from outside the train. In West Virginia, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, mountaineers who resented the railroad used to stand on hilltops with rifles, and shoot down at trains in the valley. Say a range of 200-300 yards, and 200-300 feet down. By the time anyone climbed up the hill, of course, the sniper would be gone.

When the TSA tried to search all the people getting off the train at Savannah, what was happening was that the logic of the train system was forcing the agency into a “Theater of the Absurd.” One might very well find that the agents involved were part of a “re-assignment pool,” that is, agents who had been removed from regular TSA jobs because there were complaints against them, or something like that. Those are the sort of people who are likely to be available for an impromptu performance.