Posted on 12/03/2003 1:05:37 PM PST by Willie Green
For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use.
BOSTON (AP) -- Amtrak said about 600,000 passengers boarded its trains over Thanksgiving weekend, the highest holiday ridership in the company's 32-year history.
The week that began Nov. 25 and ended Monday also brought the highest ticket sales for Thanksgiving travel, totaling $30.9 million, Amtrak spokesman Dan Stessel said.
Stessel stressed that the figures were preliminary and that official numbers would be released next week.
In 2002, Amtrak recorded 545,000 passengers for the Thanksgiving travel week.
In 2001 - a big year for Amtrak due to air-travel anxieties following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks - ridership was 567,000 for the week.
Yeah, that's true, especially if your friend didn't need to rent a car at the other end. For a family, of course, the numbers crunch a little differently. There's no "Child Credit" on an airliner. ;O)
Insufficient capital.
The railroads could have never raised the funding had they not sold land to the settlers that they receieved as a subsidy from the government.
Internal improvements are not the place of the national government.
I suppose you don't approve of the Interstate Highway system, either. Or the system of locks and dams that make our inland waterways and rivers navigable. Or our major airports and air traffic control system.
And having someone else pay for it..
But it should be involved in building highways and runways and airport security?
You can't imagine crossing the Mississippi at sunset in a viewing car, until you've experienced it.
As a matter of fact, no.
Most historians argue tht the transcontinental railroads would have never been built if the only source of financing came from private capital markets, but that view is wrong. All of England's railroad lines were privately financed, and American railroad enterpreneur James J. Hill did in fact build a transcontinental railroad, the Great Northern, without government subsidies. Hill's line was built fifteen years later than the government subsidized ones but it likely would have been built even sooner had his competitors not received millions of dollars in subsidies. The Great Northern was a famously efficient and profitable operation; by contrast, the Union Pacific and Central Pacific were so inefficient that they were bankrupt as soon as they were completed in 1869--The Real Lincoln, Thomas DiLorenzo, pp.247-248
It doesn't take much to cross a dinky little island that's slightly smaller than Oregon, especially when major cities and towns are already in place to ship freight and passengers as soon as you build it.
Well three cheers for the America First! GOP that I used to love and admire. They favored tariffs too, you know.
Now all they seem to do is giveaway marxist drugs to our senior citizens while they undermine our own industries with imports.
Nope. It's not the same Party anymore.
Yes and the tariffs they favored, at the levels they wanted, started a most bloody war. I am for tariffs, as envisioned by the Founders and I think somewhat at the levels we discussed (8-10% across the board), especially with nations that are not dealing fairly with us as well. But the GOP of that day was a big government party and least of all conservative.
Never heard of him. But, a Google search turned up some interesting stuff.
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