Legendary investor Warren Buffett made a $26.3 billion bet on America's future last week. He plunked it down to buy the Burlington Northern Santa Fe, acquiring all of the great Western freight railroad that his company didn't already own.

Mr. Buffett is 79 but isn't thinking short-term. He's looking 10 and 20 years down the road. He's betting that higher fuel costs will give railroads an ever greater advantage over trucks, and the American freight rail system is already the best in the world.

Our generally pitiful passenger rail service is its direct opposite.

I was thinking about this Friday as I walked from Downtown across the Smithfield Street Bridge to Station Square for lunch. As I reached the South Side, a long CSX freight train rumbled along the Monongahela River as another long Norfolk Southern train hugged the lower slope of Mount Washington, hauling coal.

When I finished my meal in the Gandy Dancer an hour later -- in what was once one of several grand passenger rail stations in this city -- two more long trains from the great Eastern railroads were heading in opposite directions. But there's reason to hope that American passenger rail is heading in the same direction as Mr. Buffett, preparing for a future where cheap gasoline is a fond memory we share with our grandchildren.

Passenger rail just has a lot longer to go.

A few years ago, Amtrak and the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation wisely invested $145.5 million in a dedicated passenger track between Harrisburg and Philadelphia, and ridership now warrants 14 fast daily round trips.

Meantime, here in Pittsburgh, there is one daily train east to Philadelphia and New York, and one daily train west to Cleveland and Chicago. A recent study says a second train from Pittsburgh to New York would increase ridership by 144,400 per year, but would also produce a $6.7 million operating loss at the start.

The state is broke and can't afford that. Not now. But taking Mr. Buffett's long view, with the inevitability of higher fuel costs and fewer short airline hops, PennDOT plans to extend its Eastern rail success to Pittsburgh and beyond.

The state has applied for $750,000 in federal stimulus money toward a $1.5 million study to improve service on the "Keystone Corridor West'' between Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. Democratic U.S. Reps. Tim Ryan of northeastern Ohio and Jason Altmire of McCandless also have been pushing to extend the Keystone High-Speed Rail Corridor from Pittsburgh to Cleveland.

The Federal Railroad Administration will award $8 billion in stimulus funding nationwide this winter -- but the states have managed to ask for $57 billion in their applications. So most projects will have to wait, but there's reason to believe the Pittsburgh-New Castle-Youngstown-Cleveland slice, which has about 5 million people across 135 miles, could be declared a high-speed rail corridor later this year. Money would come later.

None of this is rocket science. Rights of way are already there, though the very success of American freight increases the difficulty of improving passenger rail. The trick will be improving the latter without harming the former.

As Rudy Husband, spokesman for Norfolk Southern, put it, "We have customers on both sides of the tracks.'' Even if a dedicated passenger line like the electrified one between Harrisburg and Philadelphia were added, the freight trains would still need sidings to get across the passenger line to Norfolk Southern's freight customers.

Freight traffic is far heavier between Pittsburgh and Chicago than between Harrisburg and Philadelphia, but it's still possible to have "free-flowing freight and reliable passenger service,'' says Ken Prendergast.

Mr. Prendergast is spokesman for All Aboard Ohio, a nonprofit rail advocacy group. Smooth service will take additional track and improved switching, but it can be done.

Ohio is also applying for $564 million to get eight daily trains on its "3C Corridor'' from Cleveland south to Columbus and Cincinnati. There are about 6 million people in the 250-mile corridor, and its freight lines stay busy, but there is no north-south passenger rail service.

The Ohio Hub plan also calls for rail service from Columbus east to Steubenville and Pittsburgh, which a small advocacy group called POW V (Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia) also champions.

It's conceivable, Mr. Prendergast says, that one of these routes might bring a passenger station back to Station Square. That could be decades hence, or it could be in three years. But as more of the world sucks up gasoline supply, getting other travel options on track is a must.