I know it’s a small thing, but I enjoyed the all-too-rare pleasure of eating lunch with a real knife today — and a real fork, and a real spoon, not those cheap plastic imitations — while traveling from New York to Boston. In case you, too, have forgotten how nice these little pleasures are, I recommend that you take the Acela Express next time you need to travel from the Big Apple to either Boston or Washington.

Admittedly, the lunch and associated silverware were provided only because I bought a first-class ticket; if I had purchased a business-class or economy ticket, I probably would have been munching peanuts in the cafeteria car. But amazingly, the cost of a round-trip first-class train ticket is roughly half the cost of a round-trip shuttle flight on Delta Airlines; so I don’t feel like too much of a spendthrift. I was reasonably sure the train was cheaper than the plane, but just to be sure, I logged onto the Internet just a moment ago — while sitting here in my train seat — and checked the price on Delta’s website. When’s the last time you were able to access the Internet while sitting in a cramped airline seat? Yes, this was made possible with a high-speed wireless modem card; but the point is that it doesn’t work on an airplane, and I understand that Boeing is planning to remove its airplane-Internet connection technology by the end of the year.

The security ramifications of the metal-knife service are interesting to contemplate. I don’t understand how a knife-wielding terrorist could force his way through the reinforced doorway to the cockpit of today’s airlines, but I guess it’s a good idea to eliminate the possibility of such terrorists running up and down the aisles of the plane, randomly stabbing flight attendants and passengers. But doesn’t the same apply to trains? In theory, I could grab both my metal fork and knife, charge up the aisle and wreak havoc upon the flight … err, train … attendants before moving on to the front of the train to attack the guy who drives the train. Of course, I’m such an incompetent would-be terrorist that I don’t even know whether I’m at the front or the rear of the train right now, and I don’t even know what they call the guy who drives the train. Not “pilot,” presumably, but maybe “engineer” or “train-driver.”

While we’re at it, the security on these trains is so lax that I could have lugged two suitcases full of explosives into my comfy first-class compartment. There were no metal detectors in the train station, and only a cursory (and I mean really cursory) look at my photo-ID, after I got on the train. And the guy sitting in front of me boarded the train with 13 of his friends, and simply handed over a pile of 14 tickets to the conductor. Fortunately none of them looked like terrorists … though they did have British accents, which one could consider a suspicious character trait, if one was really paranoid.

Obviously, the bottom line is that nobody is expecting serious terrorists to blow up a train — so we’re all allowed to brandish our metal knives as we eat our lunch. I guess this is a reasonable conclusion; after all, it’s pretty hard to fly a train into the 93rd story of a high-rise office building. But I can’t help remembering the spectacular train wreck at the end of the hilarious 1976 movie, Silver Streak, with Gene Wilder, Jill Clayburgh, and Richard Pryor. So who knows what’s in store for us when we pull into Boston’s South Station in a couple of hours…

Heh! I’m uploading this blog entry from the train, as we zoom along the Connecticut coastline, looking out over Long Island Sound. Try doing that from a plane…