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 ...
Horse cart traffic in New York City in 1890 moved faster than automobile traffic there today.
You sure of that?
Horse cart traffic in New York City was extremely productive, though. It produced the Great Horse Manure Crisis.
In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced nearly 1,200 metric tons of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of. In addition, each horse produces nearly a litre of urine per day, which also ended up on the streets.
Population density. Places that have great trains (many European countries, Japan, and the U.S. Northeast) have high population densities.
How much feces and urine is on New York streets today?
Also, not as much as when "Occupy Wall Street" was committing nuisance on Wall Street:
Well of course, we built a beautiful and effeddtive federal highway system
It's old, but it's a funny read.
No, Amtrack has lost money every year it has been in operation. Trains may be okay if your country is the size of South Dakota, but who wants to pay a ton of money for 31 hour ride from NYC to Miami when a plane fare is the same and takes 3 hours?
Which makes it undesirable and unprofitable and without Nixon creating a federal one would have evaporated long ago.
a real shame...one of my fondest memories was climbing aboard the Phoebe Snow, 59 years ago when I was seven years old, and going to visit my grandparents in upstate NY...the conductor kept an eye on me, making sure I got to the dining car and off at the right stop...those were the days, my FRiends...
Upstate NY would probably still have a train system. The NE corridor is the only part of AmTrak that’s profitable. The rest of the country, where towns get further apart and flying becomes more likely, is really where trains died the minute there was an alternative.
Average population density of an entire country is not a factor when the primary goal of fast trains is connecting major cities of great population density while traveling through agricultural areas of low population density.
Sweden has its X-2000 tilt train (one of the trains tested prior to the “Acela”), and its average population density (54/mi²) is lower than that of the USA (84/mi²).
High-speed trains usually run at average speeds of 145 mph, so a train like that running between New York and Miami would take about 8½ hours, FTR.
The route of the Silver Star is 1,389 miles long, and therefore the average speed is 44.8 mph. Passenger trains of today are usually 20 mph slower in terms of average speed than trains that ran in the 1950s.
Horse cart traffic in NYC had the potential to move faster than today’s cars. But the photos I’ve seen show it as at least as congested as today, and them horsies weren’t going anywhere fast.
You aren’t counting stops which will easily add 6-8 hours to the trip. Also, how many hundreds of billions of dollars are you willing to spend on a money losing light rail network?
I thought the adults were telling us the Teamsters were behind the scenes crippling the trains so freight would have to be handled by long haul truckers. When I was a kid, the roads were not so clogged with semis as they are now, so who knows? I do remember long, long trains when we traveled on road trips.
The surprise is that the long distance trains are cash cows. Why? Because the same seats and sleeping compartments are sold many times over the distance the trains traverses. Most travelers on the Empire Builder don't travel form Chicago to Seattle. They travel from Detroit Lakes (WI) to Browning (MT). But the absence of GAAP accounting permits Amtrak to allocate certain Northeast Corridor costs to the long distance trains, which should be a no-no.
In the 9 years that I've tried to come up with a viable privatization paradigm for Amtrak, I've found myself stymied when I try to make sense of their books. A lot of things we think are true about Amtrak simply aren't, but it's hard to prove when you don't use GAAP principles.
Light rail is a fancy name for trolleys. Amtrak and the freight railroads are heavy rail.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
