In the past century, not only did commercial airliners fly their first routes, they went on to break the sound barrier. Typewriters went from manual to electronic to obsolete. Computers that began as the size of refrigerators can now fit in the palm of a hand and download a volume of Shakespeare in about a second.
Everything that depends on technology moves exponentially faster, it seems. Everything, that is, except commuter rail in Massachusetts.
A pair of yellowed train schedules from the first part of the 20th century provides the proof. They show at least five instances when steam-powered trains from yesteryear outpaced today's diesel trains into Boston during morning rush hour.
The quickest express train from Scituate to Boston in 1911 outpaced current morning rush-hour trains by 11 minutes. The fastest morning ride from Framingham came in 10 minutes quicker in 1925 than it does today.
This year, some routes are getting even slower.
A few weeks ago, 6 to 12 minutes of travel time was added to the Worcester/Framingham routes after complaints about tardy trains. The fastest train from Framingham that took 36 minutes last month now takes 43 minutes officially. A 76-minute train from Worcester now takes 88 minutes, according to the new schedule. And so on.
Beyond the modern politics of train schedules, there are logistical reasons why service has declined in some cases. In the old days, there were more express routes, part of a schedule with built-in diversity for an era when people relied more on trains. Overall, times on the old trains were less consistent than today's standardized routes and some took a great deal longer.
But, even measuring them stop for stop, several of the old schedules are remarkably competitive. For example, a train leaving Lowell at 8:01 a.m. in 1925 made one stop during a 41-minute trip to Boston. Today, the fastest morning train from Lowell makes three stops as part of a 44-minute journey. The fastest train from Framingham in 1925 made one stop, but was a full 10 minutes quicker than its modern counterpart, which makes three stops.
Modern-day commuters have endured months of train delays, leading many to curse the lack of a reliable schedule, much less a faster one. Some who wait by the tracks are jealous of their grandparents' and great-grandparents' ability to hop on an express.
"Why don't they do that today?" John Marden, 49, a cellphone company service representative, said while he was waiting for his train to Abington Station on a recent afternoon. "The world wasn't express then, was it? It is today."
Thousands of commuters who flock daily to South Station's cavernous lobby tap on their Blackberries and check voice mail as they stare up at a jumbo board that delivers the latest departure times and track locations.
"We've moved this [far] along," said Mark Pazdyk, 31, a financial analyst from Weymouth. "And the train system's still archaic."
Still, others were more forgiving, arguing that the emergence of more populous suburbs between train stations renders express trains impractical. "It takes a little more time, but everybody's trying to get home," said Sam John, 47, a financial analyst en route to Brockton. "It sure beats driving."
Today's trains are also hampered by lower speed limits - 60 miles per hour through much of the system - and tracks that cross more suburban streets.
The MBTA says the lack of federal safety regulation of older trains makes fair comparisons impossible.
Before the Federal Railroad Administration was established in the early 1970s, "the railroads operated just as they wanted to without any regulation," said Joe Pesaturo, spokesman for the MBTA. "They could be in an accident a day and continue to run."
Another factor is the size of today's trains, said Carl Byron, a rail enthusiast from Groton who has written 10 books on the history of New England trains. The private companies that once ran commuter rail service used shorter, more frequent trains. That had two results. It meant the trains could accelerate faster between stations because they were lighter. And the companies could schedule a wider variety of routes.
But running frequent trains cost more money per passenger, because it required hiring employees to staff them and buying additional locomotives, he said.
"I guess I find it a little bit sad that more investment wasn't made in commuter rail, so that the times could have been reduced," Byron said. "If you go back and look at the volume of people using commuter rail, you had no choice a century ago."
The best way to speed up trains would be to straighten the tracks, limiting the number of curves that require engineers to slow down, Byron said. Today's trains follow the same zigs and zags laid out more than a century ago.
But carving out straighter lines for the tracks would require the government to take private land within developed suburbs, an option that has grown more expensive and unpopular with time. Decades of political and legal fighting over the impact of the $513 million Greenbush line to Scituate, which opened as a new service in October after a 48-year hiatus, demonstrate how resistant some homeowners are to the building of new tracks in their neighborhoods, even on existing rail lines.
Rick Patoski, Marblehead's representative on the MBTA advisory board, has been looking at old train schedules for more than a decade. He says today's slow scheduling is deliberate. He said he believes that many of the schedules are padded with about five minutes of wiggle room, the way airlines change their schedules to improve on-time performance.
The MBTA uses a private contractor, Massachusetts Bay Commuter Railroad Co., to run the service and charges it $100 to $500 in fines for each train arriving more than five minutes late.
John D. Ray, director of railroad operations for the MBTA, said that there is no deliberate attempt to pad schedules, but that there are extra seconds between stops because the schedules are rounded up to the highest minute. The MBTA and Mass. Bay Commuter Rail said the recent changes on the Worcester/Framingham schedule were made to reflect reality, not to doctor on-time performance statistics.
Older private train companies saw a more direct relationship between service and success, Patoski said. "They wanted to make a profit from the fast service."
As service has declined, "it's the wasted time for all the commuters on the line, a huge economic cost to the region."
Noah Bierman can be reached at nbierman@globe.com.
