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I was talking to a 10-year-old the other day about trains and planes and discovered one more big difference between her generation and mine.

"Have you ever ridden on a train?" I asked. "No," she replied, "but I've flown on airplanes."

When I was her age, I had ridden on several trains because they were a common mode of travel. But I never set foot on an airplane until I was in my 20s.

My first flight was from New York to Birmingham, Ala., and, despite some first-flight jitters, I thought it was wonderfully swift. By train, the trip had been an overnight ride with a multitude of stops; by plane, the trip was reduced to mere hours.

And that's part of what happened to travel in America. Americans took to the air in commercial planes and to the roads in automobiles. Train travel plunged into decline.

But skyrocketing fuel prices for cars and planes are suddenly making Americans turn to cheaper train travel for relief. We're also waking up and calling for more intercity routes. Still others are calling for a high-speed rail service similar to France and Japan's. (America regrettably has no high-speed system.)

Meanwhile, ridership is up. Amtrak, the government-run system that oversees intercity passenger trains, reports that all tickets for the July Fourth weekend on The Crescent, the train running from New York to New Orleans, are sold out. So is the train linking Seattle to Vancouver, Canada, as well as other Amtrak lines.

Last year Amtrak had 25 million riders; this year it's expected to jump to 27 million. The month of May, usually a slow one, was a record-breaker for ridership and revenue. The Piedmont, the train linking Raleigh and Charlotte, saw a 40.3 percent increase in riders over the previous May; the Carolinian (New York to Charlotte) saw a 26.9 percent jump. The Sunset Limited (New Orleans to Los Angeles) increased 25.2 percent.

But here's the hitch: Train travel can make only a limited comeback because trains and their routes have dwindled, a fate that began decades ago when automobiles and airlines became popular.

Amtrak currently has only 632 rail cars in operation, some of which are more than 30 years old. It needs new rail cars and more of them - all of which is a laborious process involving bids and manufacturers that can take years. The best short-term solution is to refurbish the dozens of mothballed rail cars, even though it would cost several hundred thousand dollars per rail car.

Aside from more rail cars, Amtrak needs more intercity routes. The Greensboro-Charlotte link is catching on with some businessmen, I'm told, and a Greensboro-Winston-Salem route would help others.

But the expansion of Amtrak will ultimately depend on the federal government, as The New York Times recently reported. Congress sets Amtrak's policy and authorizes subsidies that have totaled more than $30 billion since the government established Amtrak in 1971.

Some members of Congress want the government to continue running Amtrak but to give states 80 cents for every 20 cents they spend on establishing new intercity passenger routes. (The 80/20 system is used for highway funding.)

But other members of Congress, plus President Bush, think the federal government should stand aside and let the private sector operate the nation's rail service. Some congressmen think Amtrak should focus solely on intercity routes, not cross-country trains.

The two presidential candidates have also weighed in on the future of rail service. Sen. John McCain opposes federal subsidies to Amtrak while Sen. Barack Obama co-sponsored the 80/20 federal-state financing plan that would expand intercity trains and routes.

In recent years, train travel was barely a blip on the presidential campaign screen because the public wasn't interested. But now it's morphing into an "issue."

And the future of rail service in America will depend, in part, on who wins the White House.

Rosemary Roberts writes a Friday column. E-mail: rmroberts@triad.rr.com.