According to the Drudge Report, Amtrak’s governing board has decided to go ahead with the idea of splitting the NEC operations from the rest of the system.
We shall see.
According to Trains News Wire today the Amtrak Board did vote to split the Northeast Corridor from Amtrak. This is a bad move in my opinion. It was tried in Great Britain when BritRail was privatized, and it was split into an infrastructure company, Railtrak, three equipment leasing companies, and 25 train operating companies.
It did not work because the infrastructure company controlled the track, and the dispatching so the train operating companies were at the mercy of the dispatchers and the infrastructure company for getting their trains over the lines. I noticed the problem first hand when we visited London in October, 2000 when a serious derailment on the East Coast main Line outside of London brought attention to serious defects in the track. Railtrak abruptly closed down several lines to fix serious track defects without notifying the train operating companies thus causing chaos.
Another reason it will not work is the infrastructure company will be managed by a multi-state consortium that the Northeast Corridor serves. What if one of the states refuses to, or can’t, contribute its share of the operating cost of the Northeast Corridor infrastructure?
Will Congress approve the split? Stay Tuned.
Rocky
Shutting down Amtrack is the whole point. If plan “A” does not work, try plan"B".
It is much easier to break a large rock into little pieces one piece at a time than with one single whack.
If it means that Amtrak will become a focused on being a national system, then I am all for it. Let’s face it, for three decades, Amtrak’s management has been more focused on the NEC. With the the BOD taking away the NEC, Amtrak will have no choice to divert its money to improving national routes.
[#ditto]
To repeat what I said yesterday, all of this is subject to review, which could take considerable time. Then,too please note 2006 is an election year and the fight over this will be very partisan[:(] and very ugly[:(!].This will be a large part of the campaign of the Dems[:o)] to seize back the Congress, [:(!]somthing which I think will have us saddled with higher taxes and manage to kill [xx(]amtrak altogether! Naturally, the[:o)] Dems [:o)]will try to blame the GOP, but there are those of us that know the truth[^].There are more profound consequences, but they are for another forum, at another time.
The NEC has been Amtrak Money Pit for a long time, its time for amtrak put money into LD trains with Amtrak needs about 1200 New Cars Now.[2c]