I hope it happens but given the tenor of the times, I wouldn’t bet the house or even doghouse on it.
Electrification won’t take place without considerable ‘grant’ financing by governmental body - local, state or federal. It took depression era Federal governmental financing to string the wires that the PRR did.
The PRR had electrified most of the New York to Wilmington route on its dime, which was probably borrowed money. In 1938 or thereabouts, it received a $70 million dollar federal loan to string the wire from Wilmington to DC. I understand that it did not repay the loan.
I don’t own any of the scholarly references describing the PRR Gibbs & Hill electrification, but the extensive part of the Government enablement was under the RFC (same as the J3a order over on NYC) and was circa 1935. It was basically what a Government grant to electrify ‘ought to be’ – a guarantee that the work would be carried through to completion with proper capitalization, to be repaid out of the iincreased efficiency and capacity once complete. My understanding is that the RFC loans WERE repaid, but what didn’t happen was continuation of the loans for the electrification west of Harrisburg – which was really the part of the railroad that would have most benefited. I do not know the extent to which the 1943 electrification scheme mirrored what was planned for 1938, but from the locomotive specifications there would have been considerable overlap with the design details incorporated in the DD2, but at interesting scale (pushers with D-D powered axles with 428A twin motors, etc.) and with tunnels that, like those for the Sam Rea line, could not have been effectively worked with steam.
A substantial amount of the PRR cost would not apply to dual-mode-lite operation, particularly with battery-hybrid power for switching and local trackage ‘uneconomical to electrify’. The system encourages state entities interested in mandating zero-carbon to produce their own incentives or mandates, while not (necessarily) compromising operation of trains with self-contained power on the adjacent general system.
I’ve said it before; I’ll say it again: the key is to capitalize and formalize the equipment to provide and maintain the electrification, not do a bunch of disconnected little design-builds each with its own little consultancies. The Chinese have reduced the equipment needed to a done science – even if we chose not to purchase and adapt their machinery, we could easily duplicate the approaches that work just as we did 150 years ago.
I think I was not clear in my post. The remote working I referred to was in the private sector obviously not requiring Congressional approval. A month into the new regime and it’s already pretty clear that the constitutional requirement for Congressional approval of cuts, etc. has been largely bypassed by the executive branch. What remains to be determined is outcome in the courts all the way up to the Supremes.
Oh well that is clearer but it is also incorrect.
I don’t know how this pertains to Passenger trains but I work for the Federal Government as a contractor. I can tell you what I hear and see. No Congressional authority has been bypassed as far as people being let go. Nothing has happened that has been illegal yet.
Back to the topic of trains. So far the IRA Clawbacks proposed have not transpired, in fact the current political administration reversed themselves on the current attempts to claw back the IRA funding to an extent. Seems they are learning as they go. What they can and cannot do. So Amtraks future is a little brighter.
You are half right but mostly wrong about US AID.
Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act on September 4, 1961, which reorganized U.S. foreign assistance programs and mandated the creation of an agency to administer economic aid. The goal of this agency was to counter Soviet influence. USAID was subsequently established by the executive order of President John F. Kennedy, to unite several existing foreign assistance organizations and programs under one agency under the umbrella of the State Department.
Later, Congress passed the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act of 1998, which established USAID as an “independent establishment” outside of the U.S. Department of State.
The constitutionality of the current regime’s actions in cutting funding, personnel and existence of various departments, programs and agencies will be determined in the courts. Whether this regime will abide by those decisions remains to be seen, and this will likely also include Amtrak. I’m not sure why you are so sanguine/optmistic about the latter.
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USAID still exists, he just put the employees on administrative leave. Amtrak’s orders for new equipment have not been cancelled and are still funded under IRA.
It’s an empty shell at the moment with zero staff and funds frozen.
They even went so far as to yank the letters off the facade.
Rich
Not sure the connection between USAID and Amtrak.
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They cancelled the Federal Office Leases for a number of agencies via GSA.
And some of those Federal Office Leases were for Amtrak? Were those Federal Office Leases financed by USAID?
Smartie! Eliminating USAID is just the low hanging fruit. Other agencies, departments will follow. Since Amtrak is a quasi, it will be more resistant. The big prize would be Medicaid, and then nursing homes will close in large numbers.
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Smartie? You ought to hear what my wife calls me.
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Well if
Actually, I should not laugh at this because I am not a Federal Employee but only a contractor. Also not living paycheck to paycheck and can retire now if I wanted. So hopefully I do not offend anyone here with my comments. This is not my intent. .
DOGE issued the Return to Office order first, then the employee buyout offer, then they cancelled a number of building leases via GSA across several agencies with no input or participation by anyone other then DOGE. This is why you saw USAID being removed from the building, the lease was cancelled and the owner of the building wants to lease it out. Federal Employees are having multiple W-T-H moments the last few weeks. Lots of confusion surrounding all of the above because they were not well thought out or coordinated. Legal questions raised. Government work unions have negotiated agreements that conflict with DOGE directives, etc. This is why Musk states repeatedly “we might make mistakes along the way”. It is a CYA statement. He is making a lot of mistakes along the way.
I used to work as a subcontractor for the Treasury Fiscal Services arm which is in the news now as the Treasury Payments system. A group I worked with issued the pandemic payouts using that system (over $1 trillion spent in less than 8 hours with only 25k errors…which is pretty good given those payments went out to millions). The Treasury Payments system backbone was used to distribute those payments using the Fed Wires system in part. The Treasury Payments system (via feeder systems into it) has everyones personal info connected to it that is reading this. Bank account numbers, taxes, tax forms, government contractor payments, contractor invoices, etc. You see Treasury Department has a giant general ledger and every single payment to treasury is tracked and has an invoice as do all the outflows and it is all trackable (despite what Musk stated publicly). I have no clue what access Musk has…maybe it is very limited as he states…maybe not.
The Treasury links all the major banks in this country with the Fed and vice versa because the Fiscal Services Act from Congress delegated most of Treasury IT systems to private banking system as Congress did not want a Public Bank setup that mimics what the Private Banks do already. Hence the US Central Bank is largely privately run (the Fed) very, very little is public.
Treasury has a massive Credits repository Data Warehouse and a massive Debits repository Data Warehouse, they each store all the credits and debits made to the Treasury each day to it’s general ledger. Approx $120-130 Billion in transaction value daily. So the system is not as out of control as Musk suggests, that is a PR campaign. Every day the system has to balance and if the ledger does not balance they have less than 36 hours to fix it so it does balance (I believe that is the SLA). I am sure there are fraudulent payments in it though due to the sheer volume.
As discussed in this Forum over and over again, Musk has a tendency to exaggerate and at times he is a intellectual clod. We saw that with his hyperloop, saw that with his autonomous trains, saw that in several areas and discussed it here. His educational background is in Physics not Engineering (strange for CEO of a car company). At any rate, I don’t believe anything Musk states because he has bent the truth so much even while standing behind POTUS in the Oval Office. Same with POTUS, who I suspect is too clueless to ask hard pointed questions of Musk. That is how I see things currently. I could be wrong of course. Just my interpretation based on what I observe. Musk has stated he is working with agency heads under Supervision to accomplish these goals. That could be correct as well. I do not know.
Not to get too far off on a tangent but yes this is all rolled up on a giant ball and it does impact Amtrak because Amtrak is quasi-governmental and so has the exact same IRA grants as do other parts or agencies of the Federal Government so what happens at one agency with an IRA grant will probably happen to Amtrak as well. Right now with the IRA grants again…DOGE has issued contradictory statements. Retracted some but put forward others. Right now the status of IRA is complete chaos and confusion so much so they have tabled IRA clawbacks it seems. They have two parts to IRA. IRA funds that are committed or spent (usually to the end of FY 2025) and IRA funds not committed or spent yet. They tried a clawback of the former but quickly learned that contract cancellation penalties would balloon the clawback costs. Then they tried clawback of the uncommitted funds and ran into some serious legal issues and backed off of that. So no real idea on IRA funds but seems safe for now. So I think Amtrak is not all that endangered. They are trying to stay as much as possible within legal frameworks believe it or not.
That is the state of things as of the last few weeks. It is comical to watch as an observer but please realize that it is not funny for Federal Employees that are living from rumor to rumor as I write this and under a lot of stress.
The end game here is for DOGE to get Palantir, Open AI and other IT firms use AI to administer some of these systems with tighter controls. Former executive of Palantir appointed CIO of OMB I believe and other IT executives getting other CIO posts, they were all hanging around Trump prior to the inaguration. So that is the bigger picture here. How far they will get is anyones guess. I hope they are successful at making the government more efficient. Honestly I do. It is pretty messy now though.
DOGE is properly pronounced ‘doggy’
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The accryonm comes from a crypto currency that Musk likes called DOGE coin. I think your correct on the pronounciation but the Media says Dooge or somthing to that effect.
Continuing the discussion from Speeding up LD Amtrak Passenger trains cheaply (two questions):
Thanks for such an illuminating post!! Musk’s actions over the recent weeks seems like a sometimes dangerous cluster ###k. Some of his minions have little experience, and one is a teen. Firing 1000s of probationary hires at FAA when they are short staffed could endanger lives. Part of that includes special radars near Hawaii that are defense-related.
Immigrant Musk got a bachelor’s degree in physics and economics [I’m not clear if two degrees or a double major] from Penn. He started grad school at Stanford but dropped out after only two days. So no background in engineering, finance or IT. So he is really an investor in various enterprises largely started by others.
When he took over Twitter, he enacted a wholesale purge and changed it to X of course. That mess cleared up but it was no great loss or danger if it had never functioned again.
I have doubts that the goal is efficiency. More likely finding $ to cut to finance another tax cut mostly for the 1%.