If Amtrak was bankrupted, could TRAINS and TRAIN.COM financially survive the obvious eventual loss of readership and patrons?
Most certainly.
What loss of readership. Just cause one railroad dissapears does not mean people are going to quit reading trains. There are many railfans that couldn’t care less about Amtrak.
? And this has what to do with that or the price of tea in China?
I must question your sanity after this and a few other threads you have created. They are totally off the wall and lack any bit of common sense.
???
Marough?
Just pointless. Why? Because the Government will do anything they want. If the people want amtrak they have to tell the morons in congress what they want to try to save amtrak. If not. Then it’s too late.
BNSFrailfan.
Hmmmm…and if Trains readership declines, there will be a surplus of trees that are not being used for paper, and that will mean that there are forests not being thinned, and those will fuel rampant forest fires, and that will cause so much smoke, that solar light will no longer make it through, and the earth will become the largest ball of ice in the solar system, and we will all die. How dare the government cut Amtrak’s budget!!!
Chris
Denver, CO
Oh no, The sky is falling and it’s all Amtrak’s fault. [(-D]
good one Chris
Unless one thinks that each Amtrak car and locomotive has several subscriptions to Kalmbach publications, why would one think that Amtrak going away would affect Kalmbach?
The end of Amtrak would affect TRAINS readership about as much as the end of private passenger service did in '71. It wouldn’t. There then would be all the articles devoted to the resurgance of passenger service, rumors of high speed rail, and all the rest that makes railroading interesting.
The North Shore Line and the CA&E have been gone for decades and still a magazine comes out every quarter with articles just on those lines.
Mitch (contributing illustrator)
Every quarter? Well maybe someone should let the magazine know the lines are gone so they can stop.
I am sure Trains would be fine if Amtrak stopped but it is true that as trains are pushed further and further into the background of life for most people it makes it harder and harder for a railroad oriented magazine to find new readers. It is no coincidence that it appears the average age of contributors on this forum is much older than the median age of the population (~35). They come from a time when people still traveled by train and trains still went almost anywhere.
I can think of many good railway magazines that used to be around but are now just memories. So while Amtrak going away may not bring Trains down by any stretch of the imagination, it is an event that will pu***rains even further out of the public’s awareness and that can’t be good for any of us.
andrewjonathn:
Your post was an insightful one.
From my observation, interest in Amtrak SEEMS exceptionally inordinate. That led me to reason that if Amtrak was out of the picture, the power of the inordinate drive may disappear, which may adversely affect rail magazine readership.
It would be interesting to hear what the professional Kalmbach staffers have to say, since they have access to more facts than most of us have access to.