Okay, here you go. Defending the statement that Amtrak LD trains are irrelevant…
Are LD train USEFUL to some individuals in the areas they serve? Sure. Are they relevant, generally to the movement of people between towns and cities in the US. No. In this sense, they are irrelevant.
What is their purpose?
If it’s to generally connect rural areas to urban areas, they fail because there are great big swathes of rural areas not served by LD trains.
If it’s to connect urban areas to urban areas, Amtrak moves an irrelevant number of people.
If it’s to connect some, specific rural areas to urban areas economically, they fail because there are cheaper ways to do it.
If it’s to connect urban areas to other urban areas for those who can’t/won’t fly or drive, once again, there are cheaper ways to do this. (and we don’t provide similar alternatives for overseas travellers)
If it’s to provide for tourists, domestic and foreign, once again, the numbers are very small and I’d question why we should provide a travel subsidy for upper middle class patrons.
Even when you add up all these purposes, you’re still left with very little in total. That’s what makes them irrelevant.
The LD train are a vestigial remnant of the once-great streamliners that served the general population just before the dawn of the fly/drive era. Amtrak treats them as such, not changing schedules or mode of operation to suit how times have changed and population has shifted.
The LD trains have no defined purpose.
If
Dakotafred,
I went back and looked. I can not find the post I was responding to. I guess the moderators pulled it. The screen name was someone I never saw before, ChicoJack IIRC. That is all I know.
Mac
His screen name was “calicos jack.” I considered asking him if he were a pirate–about 300 years ago, a man named Rackham (or something like that) irritated the settlers in the Albemarle and other areas of the Carolina coast. Because he liked to wear clothing made of calico, he was called “Calico Jack.” He was captured, and he gave pirating up.
This man had a little history of posting, but his posts were few and far between.
In response to Schlimm’s post, the railroads paid for all of the land grants in the form of free or reduced rates for government traffic (one of the conditions of the grants), which remained in effect through two world wars. There was a congressional study that came to this conclusion after WWII, and which formed the basis for repealing the favorable rate treatment going forward. An analagous situation for passenger trains would be if the government provided “front money” for capital investments, which the passenger railroad was then required to repay over time. No major passenger railroad is in a position to do this.
That is a debatable point, dependent on calculations of land value. No doubt the grants were paid back, forfeited, and through lower rates paid back in kind, over a 50+ years period. My point was that it was a proper government function to subsidize the construction of the lines at no cost to the government. The entire nation benefited.