a total of $100 million for long-term improvements must be found. If not, the alternate, passenger-train-ready BNSF tracks many miles to the south beckon. It might not make much difference to the long-haul passengers who are riding between Chicago and California and don't much care where the train stops along the way. And it certainly won't make any difference to all the travelers who fly in jet airplanes across the country and seldom look down. But there is something about a small town that has never gone a single day, in almost 150 years, without a passenger train pulling in and pausing to see if anyone would like to step out onto the streets of Garden City, or if anyone from Garden City would like to climb aboard and join the other cross-continental travelers... "You get on the Southwest Chief downtown," John Doll said, "and within five minutes Garden City is all behind you. You're gone, just that quickly." When the interstate highway system was built, it managed to leave Garden City out, he said; it is an 80-mile drive on two-lane state roads to the nearest entrance to I-70. "It would be a setback if we were to lose the passenger train," said Matt Allen, the city manager. "We like to think we are the center of activities in western Kansas, and having the daily train service is an important part of that." And, of course, there is the romance of the rails, a romance that has somehow been