AMTRAK is a passenger moving business. My experience with Army logistics involved a lot of planning moving troops and equipment to ports.
Most Army posts do have rail connections, for moving heavy freight. The way it works is that the Army will plan to move a unit- be it an Infantry brigade or a missile battalion- in two parts. The equipment always moves first, and always moves to a port for shipping. (The exception is when Army units go to the National Training Center in California, or the site at Fort Polk, Louisiana. Then the equipment is almost always kept on the same train.)
Moving people is done by the fastest, most convenient way. No one wants to deploy troops who will sit around without equipment at the other end. It’s better to keep them at their home station for as long as possible to let them clear up family problems and get mentally ready to do their job.
When the balloon goes up, troops do a duffle bag drag to a chartered bus, which will take them to the nearest military air base. Sometimes that’s right across the post; sometimes it’s to a civilian airport capable of handling big transports.
BTW, a typical Army division (which is pretty hard to define) will range anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 soldiers. Unlike WWII, most Army divisions are “mechanized”- which means that your typical Infantryman will be working out of a Bradley fighting vehicle, rather than walking into battle. (This is not true of “airborne” paratrooper units or “air assault” units- once they fall out of the airplane, their feet provide their mobility.)
AMTRAK works best at moving passengers short distances at high speeds. Railroads work best at moving bulk freight. For moving people as fast as possible, in coherent unit groups, for long distances over 300 miles, nothing beats an airplane. Cost and efficiency, while important, don’t neccessarily play a role- but time and troop readiness are everything.
…Kevin, are you saying automobiles do not pass passenger trains in Canada…? Surely some do. I agree it shouldn’t be that way but…It probably happens many places around the world.
…I served in the Korean War and was transported from the east to Seattle, Wash. by troop train…and 16 months later I was brought back across the country from Seattle to Ft. Meade, Md…You guessed it, by troop train…and enjoyed every minute of it…after we recovered from sickness the first night on the train probably the different food as we had just gotten off the General Howsie troop ship {after 17 days on it}, shortly before we embarked to the train…for the long trip towards home across the country. I made sure I had a lower berth {with a window}, so I could enjoy the scenes at night…
It’s a no brainer to think that our money should be confiscated so the Army can have a back up plan to use 120 car passenger trains to move troops to sea ports. Why on Earth would they send soldiers to an ocean terminal?
You know what I think this was-- I think this was a serious comment by a left wing bigot who really believes that we conservatives will simply, without thought, fork over money at the mention of the words “national security”. We’re like Pavlov’s Dog, we salivate at the sound of the words.
If Amtrak could just be linked to national security he could have all the money to play train with that he wanted. And President Bush will go along with it because, in the bigot’s opinion, he’s as dumb as we are.
Why we don’t want to spend money like “he knows we should”. That proves we’re dumb and just don’t understand the need to play trains.
I explained one time on a thread that VIA lashes two trains into 1. The two go from Toronto to Kingston and than split up into the two trains; one going to Montreal and the other going to Ottawa. The train I was on looked something like this 1 P-42, 4 LRCs, 1 P-42, 4 LRCs. If they are to move 120 cars, you could break it up in sections like VIA does and then separate the sections to be moved into different platforms / tracks. That was the original theory; for airport or military amphibious landing craft zone-depends on the situation.
It simply takes a whale of a lot more fuel to move a division with its equipment to a port by the present bus plane and truck technique than putting the whole works on a train, equipment and personel. The scenereo that I have been called a no-brainer for suggesting is a possible wartime situation where overseas oil is cut off. Not that I really ever expect it to happen, BUT BEING PREPAIRED FOR IT TO HAPPEN IS PART OF PREVENTING IT FROM EVER HAPPENING! So having the equipment IN USE BY AMTRAK can mean that it is ready for more important uses in an emergency. That is why President Bush should consider a strong Amtrak as a componant of National Defense!
“The Contract with America,” “Partial Birth Abortion,” “The Marriage Tax,” “The Death Tax,” and of course “The War on Terror” were all developed using focus groups with everyone hooked up to a dial which they turned one way or the other based on their reflex response to phrases. Frank Luntz is the master of finding words people salivate to. Any phrase that sparks critical thinking is immediately discarded.
I should mention so people know where I am coming from when I suggest that it be made up into large “120 car troop trains” and not smaller ones. Consider the fact that the class 1s are near capacity. It is easier on them and cheaper to run 1 or 2 huge passenger trains than runs dozens which chew up capacity (cheaper in that not needed to build extra track either on mainline or staging yard leads). I suspect that’s why VIA runs the trains coupled together between Toronto and Kingston so they reduced the already conjested CN Kingston Subdivision.
Well, I have to admit it – keeping Amtrak on standby to run 120 car distriubted power passenger trains filled with troops to ocean ports of embarkation – just in case of the occurance that the US Air Force is out of fuel and can not operate its transports – is the best argument I’ve heard in favor of Amtrak in 33 years.
Seriously, I like trains too. I’d like to see some real justification for operating a passenger service west of Minneapolis to the Pacific. In all these years, I’ve never seen such a justification. Even if the airplanes are subsidized, which I ain’t convinced of yet, it just doesn’t make sense to then have two competing subsidized services. That would be really throwing away money.
Amtrak may make sense in the Northeast and in California. But I don’t see much need for it elsewhere. Trying to grab dollars because of a nonsense national security claim will make other people, besides my ownself, think you are not to be taken seriously.
It is not nonsense. America imports too much of its fuel to really consider itself prepared for a national emergency.
And even more than the airlines, which are definitely subsidized, so is the private automotible. And even more than the automobile, very highly subsidized, is long distance trucking.
Amtrak is subsidized about in the middle on a per/passenger-mile basis, but the subsidies would be less if the capital investment would be made to bring it to a good state of repair, and that is really all the investment I am asking for.