im 26 years old, i cant remember the days with other railroads having there own passenger lines. i ask this when i took a trip from memphis to los angeles last may, it took me 55hrs to get there. and it cost me 1100 for me and my 2 daughters roundtrip. i hate flying! but geez 3 days? U would think taking a train from memphis to chicago would not be on the way to los angeles! and i know theres major traffic and they have to share lines with frieght.
it might dumb topic. but what if it went back to instead of govermant ran passanger service, what if all the railroads from bnsf to wisconsin central had some sort of passanger service? would it work now a days? would competition make for better travel faster! more afordiable to everyone? bring back style and originality and grace back to open rails?
what do u think? is this a dumb thought?
You can fix that you know. Look for the “Edit” button on the top of your post. Add some “yo” to the "u"s while you’re at it… Sorry, just a peeve of mine…
As for the topic at hand… It sounds like a good idea, but the fact that most railroads wanted to dump their passenger service isn’t a very good indicator. Probably the biggest roadblock is today’s litigious society, which places blame for people’s own carelessness and stupidity on whoever owns the land or equipment on which said carelessness or stupidity takes place. Some railroads probably do want to operate passenger service (AHEM… WSOR) but “liability issues” prevent this.
And then there’s the whole Amtrak thing. While the government wants Amtrak to be “self-sufficient”, the way they are going about it is completely backward. Amtrak needs to be set up to be able to achieve self-sufficiency (assuming, of course, that it’s even possible), not just mandated to achieve self-sufficiency. Unfortunately, Amtrak was taking over an already-suffering group of operations, and hasn’t really had the success system-wide that it really should. All the while propping up labor agreements that it probably shouldn’t have had to suffer with in the first place.
Well, that’s just my random jumble of thoughts…
it would be great however to see each railroad show there own uniqe styles of passanger lines