For the first time since 9/11, Amtrak is requiring passengers at some stations to submit to luggage inspections by armed guards. These measures make sense, but let’s hope that they do not lead toward making train travel as miserable as air travel has become.

For now, it doesn’t appear that passengers will be inconvenienced all that much. Only random passengers will be checked, and train stations will not play host to the winding security lines that are the bane of airports. Amtrak officials insist that they understand that air and train travel are much different: A train can move many more people than a plane, and, of course, the menace of gravity is far less extreme.

“This is not about train delays,” Bill Rooney, the railroad’s vice president for security strategy and special operations, told the Associated Press.

That’s good. One factor driving people to use trains is the unprecedented hassle of flying these days — the requirement to arrive hours early at crowded airports, the long lines, bored and surly guards, patdowns, undressing and dressing, rules for conveying toothpaste and shampoo, orders to produce paperwork and identification, etc. If such procedures were introduced at train stations along the Northeast Corridor, much train travel would cease. We need to encourage the use of trains, and create more train lines, not give people another incentive to get in their cars and inefficiently burn more fossil fuel.

There is cause, unfortunately, to step up security. Terrorists have made it clear that they will target trains and slaughter passengers to advance their agenda. In 2004, bombings on commuter trains in Madrid killed 195 people. In London a year later, 52 people were killed in a number of blasts, most of them on subway trains. In Mumbai, India, in 2006, terrorists killed 200 people on commuter trains. But America’s railroads and subways have not yet been hit.

The new security program should make it harder for terrorists to plan an effective attack, while giving security guards a chance to spot possible suspects before they can strike. Regrettably, terrorists have forced the West to be less open and convenient, and more suspicious of those who walk among us. That’s the world we live in.