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BNSF derailment in Montana on Empire Builder route
Meanwhile, bus service will prove once again that Amtrak is redundant and a waste of taxpayer money. Mysteriously, those roads which passenger rail people claim do not exist, seem to appear out of nowhere.
Jeffery, if you hate railroads so much, why do you get this magazine?
It would be interesting to see a tally of BNSF derailments on the Hi-Line this summer. There seems to have been many. I would guess an off-the-cuff count would be atleast 6 since May?
My mother was once stuck in Montana at Glasgow when the engine failed and there was a washout in WA. The bus driver did not know where Everett, WA was. So there are pitfalls to alternative transportation on Amtrak. Of coarse the passengers knew but it was not know if the bus made it back to Montana.
With more traffic on the Northern Transcon line (oil trains) it is probably time for some real major work on that route.
My guess, Mr. Guse, is that the roads you take to work each Monday through Friday is heavily subsidized well beyond the little gas tax you and other commuters pay. Someone has a lot of skin in those roads who are necessarily driving them. That makes them subsidized. Let’s make drivers (and truckers, since without trucks most roadways would last decades longer without major repairs) cover the true cost of road construction, maintenance and snow removal in northern climes. Once we add up those costs, let’s compare them to the roughly $1.4 billion year in pocket change we flip to Amtrak.
“Redundant” with the Builder as the only train crossing our whoole northwest? Oh, everyone should take a bus, even from Chicago to Spokane or Seattle? Or pay big dollars to fly to a doctor’s appointment at a city a hundred miles away. That is assuming that there is bus or air service to all the towns on the Empire’s route. This is absurd!
Does Mr Guse never get tired of blasting Amtrak and rail passenger service, as a reactionary to TRAINS “New Wires”? But this is simply more “tea party” in the extreme. Enough already!
Having just spent part of August and most of September travelling through the northern rockies, I encountered “near record setting temperatures” every week. Such temperatures could be the reason that there are more derailments this year. However, the increase in the gross weight of rail cars could also be a contributing factor in rail failure during heat stress.