Alfred Runte didn't spend all of his time on an unsuccessful challenge to Greg Nickels in last year's Seattle mayoral race. He was also writing a book that is part memoir of a railroad traveler and part policy brief on why the passenger train ought to matter more than it does.

"Allies of the Earth" is hardly the first book to lament the loss of the passenger train. But most such arguments are based on appeals to nostalgia, or praise of a leisurely way of travel or, in more practical terms, outlines of how to relieve airport and highway congestion.

Runte makes a much different argument: What Americans lost with the passenger train was a mode of transportation that reinforced "an American sense of place," a place that people would be more inclined to protect if they saw it from closer than 30,000 feet overhead or whizzing by at 70 miles per hour on the interstate.

"We Americans have been without good railroads so long we have virtually forgotten what railroads do -- do for people, that is, not just for commerce," Runte writes in the preface.

"Above all, railroads encourage us to respect the land. Once it would have been unthinkable that Americans would abandon a technology so complementary of natural beauty, but we did abandon it."

Runte, who has written before about the relationship of the railroads and the development of national parks, illustrates his point, and the book, with brochures and timetables that emphasize just how the railroads, particularly those in the West, sold the trip even more than the destination.

If the idea of the railroad being kind to the landscape raises eyebrows (particularly among those who have actually seen most trackside cityscapes), Runte argues that "at least the railroads were considering landscape and tried not to leave hopeless scars.

"At least a railroad right of way allowed the scenery to recover, if not initially to prevail. In contrast permanent scars are the legacy of the automobile," not just because of the roads but the development that inevitably follows them.

He also argues that preservationists, conservationists, environmentalists, whatever the term, missed a bet by not fighting harder, or at all, to save the train.

Whatever those missed opportunities, Runte believes the cause of the passenger train is not entirely lost. His model is Europe, which "sees transportation differently -- as a way to encourage human interaction."

Or maybe Europeans just want to get where they're going like everyone else. Also dubious is the assertion that Europeans have saved their trains out of a sense of communal obligation that Americans should match.

Recent events suggest that the culture of obligation Europe labors under is an expectation that someone else is obligated to provide jobs or free health care or whatever else they desire.

Runte is on much surer footing comparing the reach and practicalities of the European rail system to the long and self-accelerating cycle of decline of American passenger trains, first under the auspices of the railroads, then under Amtrak. Fewer trains and less convenient schedules and connections result in fewer passengers, which leads to calls for fewer trains, Runte notes.

The answer, he says, is not still more cuts or selling off pieces of the system, but adding enough trains to make them a convenient, efficient and realistic option for travel.

"Imagine a country served by a reasonable minimum of passenger trains, everywhere, one in the morning, afternoon and night," he writes.

It sounds suspiciously like "supply creates its own demand." But in this case, Runte might have a point, one that might have been reinforced had he explored efforts in his own backyard to develop frequent rail service in the Vancouver-Seattle-Portland-Eugene corridor.

"The passenger train ennobles us; the plane just gets us there," Runte writes. A nice sentiment, and Runte argues it well.

But what will make the case for the American passenger train will not be ennoblement, human interaction or nice views along the way, but whether the train, too, can get us where we want to go -- when we want to go there.