Its not a matter of whose fault or fault at all. But it is a matter of being responsible. If the government is responsible for its population, then it has to act in a manner that protects the people as well as itself. And responsibility is also the responsibility of business. Therefore the agreement to form Amtrak was a responsible move by both the government and industry. Come on! Would you have had a major transportation service be eliminated dead cold in its tracks (no pun intended, but what the hey) and dumped millions of vehicles onto the road and highway system overnight? How responsible is that? What would have been the effect on the government, business, the economy?
We’ve been down the road of free wheeling, unbridled capitalism and it has netted us Robber Barons, Investment Bankers scams and near economic collapse, we have had The Great Depression. Likewise we have seen and are quite fearful of communal experiments and other socialisms. Anarchy brings chaos and chaos brings things down to the dregs. To eliminate all restrictions and regulations brings anarchy. To over restrict and regulate chokes off major parts of society. Yet our success, our most prolific and best times have come when there has been an understanding and cooperation between the two extremes: both sides need the other to successfully exist and thrive. Europeans have, for the most part, been successful in finding the common ground.
I would suggest you examine the histories again. The rails paid relatively little to opt out of a requirement to provide passenger and freight services in their original charters or articles of incorporation. For an example of the typical language of those, in Illinois, the General Railroad Law of 1847 (which is the foundation for and part of the incorporation of the railroads) provides for "the railroad “to take, carry and convey persons and property on their railroad.” They also received various government incentives, assistance, etc. in building in many cases, beyond the lands received by the transcontinentals, most notably the power of eminent domain. Railroads have always been considered and treated as fundamentally different than manufacturers and other corporations.
According to the Rail Passenger Service Act 1971, participating railroads bought into the NRPC using a formula based on their recent intercity passenger losses. The purchase price could be satisfied either by cash or rolling stock; in exchange, the railroads received NRPC common stock, which the rails declined to sell back in 2002. [summary from Wiki article]
The Airline Deregulation Act (Pub.L 95-504) was signed into law on October 24, 1978, long before Reagan became President of the United States. It was an initiative of the Carter Administration.
Deregulation of the airlines amongst other things spawned the growth of discount airlines, which in turn have made it possible for millions of Americans who theretofore could only dream about flying to do so. Not only did it open up the possibility for Americans to see more of their country, it opened up the world for millions of people to travel far beyond our shores. And for millions of overseas visitors to see this great land of ours.
Deregulation was tough for the legacy airlines that could not adapt to a market environment. That is exactly how the market system is supposed to work. It weeds out the inefficient and ineffective. It remains, for all of its flaws, the best way to allocate limited economic resources.
No one goes into the airlines business to get rich. The returns under the best of circumstances have never been outstanding. On the other hand, the airlines have, for the most part, covered their costs and generated a reasonable return for their shareholders. The record, however, has been spotty. In 2007 the industry (airlines with sales of more than $20 million) earned $4.6 billion. As mig
The normal procedure for dropping a route was filing with the ICC. Prior to 1971, that process had allowed the railroads to already have dropped most services compared with even 1960.
No, Open access would allow you or me to buy an engine and cars or even just a track car and go ride it upon payment of an agreed upon sum on the railroad tracks. Trackage rights requires and acknowledges the foreigh traffic to be an operating railroad or entity. I do wonder if, however, I was a trucking company, bought a handful of locomotives and trailers, if I could contract with a railroad to allow me to drive my train on their tracks in direct competition with their charter|?
Pay that railroad enough $ and - EDIT: if it has enough spare track capacity - comply with their operating, signal, safety, and union rules, etc., and if they’re rational economic beings [ [:-^] ], they’ll then view you as a sub-contractor, licensee, franchisee, etc. - not as a competitor, especially if your market and customers are different from theirs. For that railroad, it’s then almost "Money for nothing . . . " (we’ll ignore the “chicks for free” part here . . . [swg] - see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_for_Nothing_(song) ).
The “charter” obligations were essentially irrelevant long before Amtrak. In most states, any “charter” obligations were superceded (typically early in the 20th century) by state regulatory commissions (sometimes called “little ICC’s”) administering state regulatory statutes. Typically, those statutes would require state regulatory commission approval to discontinue passenger trains, which was very difficult to obtain. The state regulatory schemes also typically superceded any rate controls in the chartrers, in favor of control by the regulatory commission,
These state regulatory schemes could be much more burdensome than the prior charter requirements. For example. charter requirements may have required a railroad to carry passengers,but they typically did not require the railroad to run any particular number of passneger trains, or to get permission before eliminating some trains. Nevertheless, the regulatory system was probably tolerable prior to WWII, when passenger train discontinuances by conventional railroads weren’t as widespread as they became after the war. But this regulatory system became intolerable after WWII with the collapse of the passenger business in the 1950’s. By the late 1950’s the passenger losses being incurred by many railroads was eating up all of of their freight income and then some (the ICC did an interesting study on passenger losses in 1958 which confirmed this). Congress tried to deal with this problem in 1958 by givng the Federal ICC power to approve approve train discontinuances if a state denied them, but this was only a bandage.
The immediate impetus for Amtrak was the Penn Central collapse, a major cause of which was the passenger losses incurred by the merging roads. Penn Central intended to shut tdown its intercity services west of Buffalo and Harrisburg, which would have eliminated any semblence of a national intercity rail network. The regulatory system c
It has taken 30+ years since Staggers was approved for the carriers become relatively healthy financial organizations. As healthy financial organizations they are finally able to deal with their monopolistic customers on a equal footing when it comes to the rates and terms of transportation…and those customers resent that they can’t whip the carriers around like red headed step children any longer.