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Work ramps up to repair Washington Union Station following earthquake
Robert Sewell claims that prior to Amtrak, the repairs would have been made more quickly and efficiently. That doesn’t jibe with my childhood experience of mid-60s private railroads: stations and trains were often shabby, and I vividly recall that my stay-at-home mom dreaded the task of making reservations for our annual trip from DC to Colorado, because it inevitably involved spending an hour or more on hold waiting for a phone agent. For all its faults, Amtrak actually does some things better than the private railroads did back then.