Ever sat forever at a railroad crossing?

There's a crossing near Albion with a train that, I'm certain, lies in wait for me, every time I'm tooling down Iowa Highway 330 en route to Des Moines. As soon as I approach, the red lights start flashing, down go the gates, and I wait for a three-mile-long coal train to slog its way past.

Could that be a glimpse into Iowa's transportation future?

I got to thinking about that crossing the other day, when I read about the Obama administration's top railroad official talking about the $8 billion the feds have set aside for high-speed rail development.

Don't expect to wake up and suddenly find high-tech, timely and ubiquitous bullet trains criss-crossing Iowa in the coming days and weeks, or even years.

But the White House has said it is committed to upgrading train service, according to Federal Railroad Administration head Joseph Szabo, who recently addressed a railroad industry conference in Chicago.

Any federal dollars pumped into the nation's railroads will be relative pocket change, though, he said.

Certainly not the stuff of which dreams of a return to passenger-train prominence are made.

But such dreams do exist.

This is a mobile society. We have built a multilayered transportation system that moves by air, sea and pavement. The Interstate Highway System, which President Dwight D. Eisenhower launched in the mid-1950s, took decades to build and transformed the automobile into a symbol of our culture.

Meantime, the nation's railroad systems were virtually dismantled over the decades. Fewer towns had their own train depots. Miles of tracks that connected small towns were ripped out and the land, in many cases, was turned over to bicyclists.

Now, with uncertainty over the availability and price of fuel continuing to grip the country, jobs becoming more scarce and the car industry in meltdown mode, more people are talking once again about train travel.

The odds against reversing course and reinstating train travel in a metro area like Waterloo-Cedar Falls would seem long.

But organizations like the Midwest High Speed Rail Association say it can be done.

"You could get service established pretty easily," said Rich Harnish, executive director of the Chicago-based association. "The track's already there."

Already there is once-a-day train service planned between Dubuque and Chicago, Harnish added.

The Cedar Valley could connect to that service and branch out to other regions by rail, but it depends on how badly residents want it, he said.

"It all comes down to how willing you are to fight in Waterloo to keep connected to the rest of the world," he said.

Some 40 states have submitted 278 proposals, with some initial decisions on who will win grants expected soon. Iowa is among them, the state's Department of Transportation having announced Sept. 11 that it has begun submitting applications seeking $109 million in funding for rail projects.

A proposed high-speed rail network in the Midwest and one in California are reportedly on a fast-track for federal money, although Szabo suggested some projects for new high-speed rail lines and networks may be too ambitious.

It also would take time, perhaps additional decades to rebuild a system that, 50 years ago, seemed obsolete.