Let me tell you about the irony of our compost heap.

We have this big, round black plastic cylinder in our side yard, into which we throw table scraps: no meat or bones or dairy, but vegetables, fruit peels, coffee grounds, tea bags and egg shells.

Once every few days, I take a small container from under our sink, go out to the Earth Machine, lift the lid, dump the leavings, maybe add a few brown leaves, stir it a bit with a shovel, replace the lid and go.

This thrill ride has been going on for more than a year, ever since a neighbor gave the composting contraption to us. (She couldn't have brought over a pie?) But it hasn't given us good compost, by which I mean that aerobic decomposition of biodegradable organic matter that my wife craves for her garden. The bin also has become so misshapen it can no longer deter rodents. Not to be picky.

So my one-and-only said we ought to just let what's in there "cook'' and add nothing more. Meantime, we've started a second pile-o-peelings in a makeshift compost pit next to it.

OK, Felix, here's the irony. We had a garage built behind our house a few months ago, and the workmen moved a huge pile of leaves and left them massed under a sheet of plastic. I was planning to haul the leaves to the city recycling center in the West End, but when I moved the plastic last weekend I found a great mass of . . . compost.

Yes, the wet leaves had degraded under the plastic sheet and had become by mistake what we didn't get by trying. Brimming with the nutrients your soil loves, this rich, black matter, thick as oatmeal, was alive with earthworms the size of eggplants.

OK, maybe not eggplants. Would you believe the width of ziti? How 'bout fusilli? These worms were at least vibrant and abundant enough to scare Indiana Jones. I spread the compost and worms around the garden and tossed a few of the wigglers into the compost bin in hopes they'd do some magic there.

I'm thinking there's an analogy here for our nation.

Four-dollar gasoline has a lot of people pining for The Next Big Thing. People dream of electric cars, solar panels on rooftops and sundry other forms of George Jetson wizardry. Sen. John McCain has proposed a $300 million prize for anyone who can produce a super-efficient car battery, and Sen. Barack Obama has said, "The age of oil must end in our time.''

But no form of alternative energy answer will come fast enough to ease the current pain. Nor will any new oil wells make enough impact to drive down prices (which is not to say we shouldn't drill them). Many attempts at alternative energy will be the equivalent of dry holes, as disappointing as that composting bin in my side yard. But it could well be that an older, less glamorous answer to our needs is just waiting to be noticed.

We should see the return of passenger rail. In fact, we already are.

Amtrak ridership is expected to go up this year for the sixth straight year, topping out around 27 million passengers. That is no real surprise, with driving now highway robbery and flying a humiliating hassle, but anyone who has taken a long rail trip knows that it remains a slow go.

Except in the Northeast, where Amtrak owns the track, the system leases the lines from freight railroads. Passenger trains must cede the right of way. Thus the trains have run chronically behind schedule.

The House and Senate both have passed bills that create federal incentives to invest in rail service, but $15 billion spread across five years in a country our size is not going to bring back the days when a transcontinental rail trip made sense. Less than $2 billion is targeted for the development of new high-speed rail corridors. That's less than one week's tab in Iraq.

Still, this would be a start. The federal government would invest up to 80 cents for every 20 cents the states kicked in, similar to highway projects.

Not every way to reduce our unhealthy reliance on oil needs to be high tech. We just need to move more people with less energy.

A train ride from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia now takes seven and a half hours (if you're lucky) and there is only one train a day. Without checking, I will bet that trip was considerably faster in 1940. And 1950. And 1960.

As we refigure the way America gets around, we could do worse than take notice of what's already in place, waiting to be rediscovered and used again.