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 ...
Primarily the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) and their draconian regulatory requirements. And of course, the creation of Amtrak pushed them out for the most part. Before Amtrak, there used to be high taxation on railroads’ properties as well, and also a 10 percent federal tax on passenger rail tickets.
It costs about $90 to take Amtrak from Pittsburgh to New York City ($180 round trip), and the last time I was on one it was 1/3 full (daytime). If they were to try to match ticket price to demand like airlines do, they could actually fill them and make a profit, instead of losing money on over-priced seats. I would love to ride to NYC for $45 but will balk at $90. Try some creative pricing! I don’t need to get there in a hurry, so don’t do 100 ti make up time, either.
You get off the plane and rent a car and vice versa
The only way I could see a robust passenger rail system possibly working here would be a public-private collaboration similar to what you have with other transport modes, with the government owning the infrastructure and private companies operating the service.
They could, but that would mean a few neighborhoods in Port Richmond get “relocated”. Does not excuse the engineer going double the speed limit, however. (Since the feds own this railroad, the costs will be at least five times what a private railroad would need to spend.)
Take note that this highlights a failure of the so-called Advanced Civil Speed Enforcement System (ACSES) too, which ought to have slowed the train down IINM.
Because they were all around to watch the passenger companies go bankrupt and no it’s not a profitable business.
The business models and operating requirements for freight and passenger service are very different.
The Teamsters drove the trucks that competed with the railroads. He means the teamsters wanted to shut down the competition from the railroads.
PUBLIC UNIONS protected by the government that have and will destroy any train company.
Largely, the railroads were taxed and regulated out of profitability, and now we have the Amtrak boondoggle.
Everything liberals get their tentacles into they corrupt and destroy.
Amtrak Prez JoJo "Crybaby" Boardman is part of the problem, as is Hillary's lesbian gal pal, Eleanor “Eldie” Acheson who is vice president and general counsel of Amtrak.
Even today, Wall Street gets nervous when the Class I railroads put a lot of money into expanding infrastructure. BNSF is the only railroad that doesn't have to pass muster with Wall Street because Warren Buffett owns it totally.
Thank you for reading the article. You may be the first.
LOL, I didn’t realize that was the thread. I contributed to that thread (post 29). That was 5 years ago. Man time flies.
A: Government.
Next?
The railroads were both freight and passenger and both business sectors were going bankrupt or went bankrupts. The U.S. government owned and ran Conrail (freight only) for several decades. Some railroad, like Union Pacific, actually kept their passenger trains running for a few years after Amtrak was formed.
Passenger travel by rail is largely a relic to be enjoyed for the sake of history and sightseeing. It should not be subject to taxpayer underwriting. Heavy freight by rail is another matter, because there is no viable alternative in the near future for moving that amount of material that quickly, and it is often material from which the general public receives great benefit, transportation infrastructure notwithstanding.
Not that there is no room for improvement in rail freight. Would not be surprised if there are breakthroughs in the near future that allow for bigger loads with far less stress and friction on the rails. Transient micro-cogs for stops and starts, and a quantum magnetic function for coasting. The former may allow for locomotives that weigh half as much but have twice the pulling power. Both would alleviate wear and tear on rails and roadbed; in fact rails may soon become a thing of the past as well, but not major rights of way.
The future of transportation is in personalized, comfortable independent devices capable of safely navigating without human intervention other than programming some coordinates, with the ability to traverse land, sea, and air at speeds of up to Mach I, also capable of payloads of 10 passengers plus their baggage and beer.
Europe has high-speed trains, public transit, the whole nine yards. Most American cities don't outside of the largest once. Case in point. I live about 40 miles from work in a rural count east of Kansas City. Jackson County, where KC is, has been trying to establish commuter lines which will run into Lafayette County, where I live. Nothing would make me happier than to trade the daily I-70 hell for a comfortable train ride into work. But my problem is what happens when I get there? Kansas City public transit is a joke, and the commuter terminal is seveal miles from where I work. So it could literally take as long to get from the north part of the downtown to where I work down near Union Station as it would to get from Odessa to KC itself. I work with people who drive in from Topeka or Warrensburg. There isn't any alternative.
I've taken Amtrack. I've ridden the train from KC to St. Louis. I did the City of New Orleans from Chicago to Louisiana. And I didn't enjoy either trip, what with the rough track, the slow travel, and the damned train horn going off every few minutes as we passed another crossing. That won't change without the investment of billions of dollars. If you build it they may come. But nobody is going to invest that much money on spec. The only source for that would be the federal government. And there is no way Congress will vote for that.
Our planes and automobiles run far faster and to far more cities and towns now than they ran in the 1920s!
Another one was the Southern Railway. The Crescent stayed out of Amtrak until 1979—during the Carter administration.
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