Back in 1971 instead of creating Amtrak why didnt the government just give money to the freight railroads to keep certain lines?
Example The government could have gave PennCentral funds to keep the Broadway Limited instead of Creating Amtrak to run that train. It would make sense to me to give money and continue letting the people who had many years in railroading than to create a new corporation.
On June 21, 1970 Penn Central was bankrupt sweeping a number of Northeastern roads with it. The US government would have been fooli***o trust public moneys with a management that forced the railroad into bankruptcy in 867 days.
Most passenger trains were subsidized by US Mail contracts. When the Post Office pulled the mail contracts and sent everything by truck it meant the end of passenger trains on most routes. The Association of American Railroads asked Congress for subsidies and a national pool of equipment. Congress acted and President Nixon signed the enabling legislation to create AMTRAK.
The answer is that Congress could not control the individual railroads through a passenger subsidy to the degree they could control Amtrak. Government money always comes with strings.
Mac
…This subject has been discussed elsewhere on the forum here and perhaps the thought has some interesting points to it…at least to us non railroad professonals. It sounds like providing the additional funding to run the passenger routes instead of creating a dublicate team to do so would have been a more efficient way to accompli***he task. Of course incentives of some kind would have to have been established to support a class of service people would want to use…Some way would have to have been devised to see railroads ran the system to the best of their means before asking Uncle Sam for the hand out…{some incentive},…And then a matter of developing new and good equipment across all the railroads up to a certain standard…and I’m sure more situations would have to have been addressed. It sounds simple on the surface but who knows what might have been developed or how inadequate the process might have been…but it sure does sound interesting looking back in hindsight.
I am not sure which actually would have been better–keeping individual trains which the railroads ran themselves (with government funding) or the creation of Amtrak. I have read stories where the railroads “cooked the books” to make their passenger trains loose money. Why? So they could discontinue passenger service and run freight only . But now we have Amtrak or nothing. I don’t know about you but in my book having something is better than having nothing.
I think David Gunn would do an excellent job if he had the money to do it and if the freight railroads could somehow get the money to increase capacity.
Again, I think such a program is vital for both national defense and for energy independence.
I bet from the first day of Amtrak there wasn’t enough money to keep more than 1/2 of the trains then operating. Then you have the political battle to decide which carrier gets the money. Do you prefer NYC-PRR-B&O to get from Chicago to New York? Then, the L&N had a monopoly in it’s territory, connecting parts of the South. So the only train left on the route was the Floridian. Too bad that you can’t tell what is missing till after it’s gone.
We probably needed a strong state supported system that would have continued service to YOUR TOWN. NARP would have strong state chapters that could work with the elected officials of each state to support rail travel. But the state DOT’s were all busy building interstates, and connecting every county seat to them with a 4 lane highway.
The sad fact is that GM-Ford + the gas + holiday inn convinced America to travel by car to see the country. Speed limits were higher, so you could travel places and stop wherever, with all the comforts of home.
And they (minus Ford which did NOT engage in predatory tactics) raped the public transportation industry and made it seem as if only driving one’s own car was the “American” way to travel and anything else was behaving like foreigners. Also, postponed the compact revolution as long as possible and did not responde in anything like a patriotic manner to the events of 11.09.01. GM had signed an agreement for liscensing Hybrid technology with Toyota in 1999. Western Flyer buses with this GM technology are being serial manufactured for Seattle right now, but try and get it in your GM SUV! Ford is introducing one, but otherwise it seems to be only Japanese!
There is a Chevrolet Silverado for 2005 available with a combination common gas V-8 engine and electric motor designed to work as a hybrid…and…it can be used for a romote power source like for construction people on a job needing power to run small tools and equiipment, etc…
I would like to add one more item to Mark’s excellent summary: in principle, it should be more cost-effective to have one organisation take care of running all passenger trains (Pullman almost pulled it off, after all!): you have one set of standard cars, one set of maintenance headaches, one staffing operation, one passenger station in each town. To some extent this has happened.
And I agree completely and totally with Dave K’s remarks!
Mark -
You hit the nail on the head with a jackhammer!
Congress is still embarassed that Amtrak survives and continues to forment it’s financial demise.
…It’s just a sad fact that Congress HAS continued to underfund the system all these years and hence provide the public with an embarrising rail transportatioin system…hardly any better than not acceptable. Most adminstrations haven’t helped a bit either.
From the what ever its worth department: Former president Bill Clinton did find AMTRACK usefull with promises of super-dupper trains in the future when he ran in 1992. The trouble it is, that nothing happened, any suprise there?[:O][;)]American politics is it a great institution or what?[bow][bow][bow][:-^]