Posted on 05/13/2015 12:22:18 PM PDT by Publius
Thirty-nine minutes into his southbound ride from Wilmington, Delaware, to Washington, DC, Joseph H. Boardman, president and CEO of Amtrak, begins to cry. We're in the dining car of a train called the Silver Star, surrounded by people eating hamburgers. The Silver Star runs from New York City to Miami in 31 hours, or five more hours than the route took in 1958, which is when our dining car was built. Boardman and I have been discussing the unfortunate fact that 45 years since its inception, the company he oversees remains a poorly funded, largely neglected ward of the state, unable to fully control its own finances or make its own decisions. I ask him, "Is this a frustrating job?"
"I guess it could be, and there are times it is," he says. "No question about that. But—" His voice begins to catch. "Sixty-six years old, I've spent my life doing this. I talked to my 80-year-old aunt this weekend, who said, 'Joe, just keep working.' Because I think about retirement." Boardman is a Republican who formerly ran the Federal Railroad Administration and was New York state's transportation commissioner; he has a bushy white mustache and an aw-shucks smile. "We've done good things," he continues. "We haven't done everything right, and I don't make all of the right decisions, and, yes, I get frustrated. But you have to stay up." A tear crawls down his left cheek.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationaljournal.com ...
L.A to San Diego.
Trains put my grand father into retirement when they eliminated stage coaches and trains should be elinated by the invention of the car.
What year? Trying to see what service this is/was the Santa Fe RR versus Amtrak San Diegans versus Pacific Surfliner; the last one listed (present-day) has an average speed of just under 34 mph and about eight stops at least, which is very slow, needlessly so.
why .....just remember the RR in amerika used to be PRIVATELY OWNED and the ones that work STILL ARE....
need say no more... the government cant do ANYTHING worth a sheet,... much less run a railroad.......
why .....just remember the RR in amerika used to be PRIVATELY OWNED and the ones that work STILL ARE....
need say no more... the government cant do ANYTHING worth a sheet,... much less run a railroad.......
Take a plane ride from New York to Miami to get there much quicker and for less money. A quick search brought up $46 one way to $104 round trip cost. Flight time one way about 3 hours. Car rental about $30 and up per day.
Price for modes of transportation:
http://www.wikihow.com/Travel-from-Miami-to-New-York
Train is about 30 hours or 10 times longer then a plane.
Woo! Woo!
Spend $100 billion like Jerry Brown wants to in California and still not have high speed and not be anywhere as quick as a plane.
Because Amtrak is a bloated bureaucracy that lives on government subsidies. Amtrak is basically a government enterprise like the USPS that is little different than a government bureaucracy and thus is incapable of doing anything right.
1980
any trip under 500 miles I’m driving, over that it will by air or driving.
Passenger trains should be illegal!!!!!
Oh I think this paragraph might contain a clue.
Thirty-nine minutes into his southbound ride from Wilmington, Delaware, to Washington, DC, Joseph H. Boardman, president and CEO of Amtrak, begins to cry.
Need a Tissue, Princess?
Because buses are cheaper, safer and more flexible?
Then it was the Amtrak San Diegan. The Santa Fe railroad, who named the trains, made that same trip in 2½ hours, with four intermediate stops (some trips had four additional flag stops); fastest average speed about 51 mph. Amtrak’s average speed is almost 20 mph slower; modern technology ought to have made the trips faster (e.g. average speed of 70 mph would mean a journey time of 1 hour 49 minutes), but that’s the feds for you.
It’s not the fault of the mode; it’s the government.
The same government that took over the highways, too.
Safer? Most buses I’ve seen going through the interstates by me always speed, usually 10-15 mph over the limit. Imagine a bus company having to build and maintain its own roads. “Flexibility” brought to you by the nanny state is always to be questioned.
Trains are 100 year old crap!
All public transportation is crap,
Well, I hope you have a long-range VTOL flying car in that case. Not all mechanized transportation can be tailored to one’s autonomy; it can only be the best it can be, and the government prevents that.
Why can’t we have nice trains? Because we don’t generally WANT nice trains. And the few that do want them seem to want other people to pay for them.
Being a resident of Tennessee, I find it really hard to fathom why the heck my tax dollars subsidize a railroad that doesn’t travel within 350 miles of my home.
If you ever saw the kind of regulations the Federal Railroad Administration has with respect to running passenger trains, I do not think you would have the opinion that people “don’t generally want nice trains”. The government makes them very, very difficult to realize and very, very expensive to run and maintain, especially when they never used to be. And of course, when the government does run the trains themselves, mostly in left-wing constituencies, they make the operation and maintenance even more expensive than it ought to be on top of all the regulations, and run them at any speed they want, usually very slowly.
To a significant degree that is an artificial problem. Passenger rail service in America was undermined deliberately by a collaboration of government and lobbyists for the tire and auto industries after WW II. In Los Angeles, for example, they literally bought up useful transit track and tore it out, to make way for roads and streets.
The Interstate Highway system was the lethal blow to long distance rail travel, as was airline travel, subsidized by government construction of airports and ATC.
Prior to these developments, intercity rail service was viable and extensive. Along the south shore of Lake Erie, for example, there was rail access from Buffalo to Detroit, with every city in between being served. Those private lines all went under with the completion of I-90 and associated freeways.
The irony is that by now, the interstates have created a new alignment of point destinations. While not of the density of the old central cities, projected rail lines could be drawn to follow the interstate corridors with suspicious fidelity and increasing efficiency.
The real problem is the reliance on the government for top down large scale development rather than facilitating market driven enterprise. The old intercity lines were private and small scale, and they made a profit for a long time. they could do so again, beginning with judiciously chosen stems of routes.
IOW, Amtrak is not the near term answer. The Cleveland-Akron Inter-urban, followed by the Akron-Canton Connector, may well be.
Because former Target cashiers and such keep crashing them.
“The Silver Star runs from New York City to Miami in 31 hours...”
In the first paragraph of the article. Why go on reading?
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