Welcome to Train Time. I’m Karen Christensen, and we’re talking today with Jim Mathews, CEO of the national Rail Passengers Association, about innovative ways of looking at the value passenger rail brings to our country and to our communities.

We spoke about Jim’s awareness from an early age that trains make things happen, that all kinds of activity takes place wherever trains bring people. As he became professionally involved in the train world, he saw plenty of evidence that this was so. But he wanted to move from anecdote to data about rail as an economic engine. In this podcast he explains some of the things the Rail Passengers Association is doing to produce that data and to look at network scenarios.