HOW A TRAIN TICKET could have saved the Clinton campaign. “Hillary Clinton ignored her husband’s advice and thus neglected the Rust Belt when campaigning. The Rust Belt ultimately rejected her. These rural voters — who heavily supported Barack Obama on the prospect of hope and change — voted for Trump in what they may believe to be their own economic self-interest. . . . The Capitol Limited is a 780-mile Amtrak route from the nation’s capital to Chicago. It traces several hundred miles of flyover country, a slow burn through the Rust Belt and the remnants of a 20th-century economic boom. Politicians en route to Chicago clearly prefer the two-hour flight to an 18-hour train ride. But if Clinton or any other Democratic leader had simply boarded the train, they might have seen first hand what this stretch of land has become over the last 40 years. . . . This is where Americans used to make things, the backbone of a rich and great economy. In these towns there are no “up-and-coming” neighborhoods, no HGTV fixer uppers, no grand plans to push capital back into desperate communities. From the train window, all one sees are the skeletons of something once great, something gutted in favor of cheap Chinese imports and trade deals that underestimated the economic impact on middle America.”