Since everyone is on the subject of how poor off Amtrak is (and has been, for many years), I was wondering why this is so. Is it true that Pres. Nixon and many railroad executives intentionally designed Amtrak simply for the demise of the passenger rail business in the U.S.?
See all that has been written in these forums about Amtrak...General Discussion, Passenger forums have several hundred pages and thousands of thoughts.
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Yes, you could wade through the hundreds of threads and thousands of posts on Amtrak and probably not get your question answered.
It's impossible to know what Nixon was thinking when he approved Amtrak, but it's likely he thought it would fail, even if he didn't actively want or plan for it to fail. He was caught between the desires of most (though not all) railroads to kill their passenger service and the public (read voters) who didn't want to lose a transportation option.
You could certainly make the case that Amtrak was designed to fail, and many have made that case. That it has survived numerous attempts to kill it is a testament to the fact that Americans want transportation options, and are willing to let their representatives in Congress know it.
I had the opportunity in 2003 to interview David Gunn, then president of Amtrak. On the day I interviewed him, Lou Dobbs had just conducted an informal poll among his CNN viewers, asking them if they thought Amtrak should get bigger subsidies, smaller subsidies, or be killed off altogether. Despite Dobbs' conservative-leaning viewership, more than 80 percent favored higher subsidies for Amtrak. Gunn was not surprised. "The public is way ahead of the politicians on this," he told me. "They spend their time stuck in traffic. They know the value of those two ribbons of steel running through the weeds."
Now that we have an Amtrak-friendly administration in the White House, and with the push for energy independence and efficient travel options, I'm more optimistic than I've ever been that Amtrak will finally get the funding it needs.
It should be noted that not all railroads wanted to kill passenger service in the late 1960s. Seaboard Coast Line, in particular, was still doing brisk business providing a means for travelers to get from the frozen climes of New York and Chicago to sunny Florida. I was only 10 years old when Amtrak came into being. I wish I'd had the chance to ride SCL's South Wind or City of Miami out of Ocala when I was young. Now I just hope Ocala gets its Amtrak service back, and that the Sunset Limited returns to Florida!
Bill Hirschi
Me ttoo, Bill! And I did not ride the trains you mentioned out of Ocala, but did out of Orlando and Winter Park, and Stamford. The City of Miami was great, the Southwind awful when I rode it, although it had been a great train earlier. And I did ride the Crescent and the Peadmont Limited and the Southener and both Champions, and the Silver Meteor and Star and Comet, and that is what I like about the South, and with the one exception, they were all terrific.
A factor re Amtrak's creation was not just the voters, but the House and Senate Nixon had to work with not wanting to see passenger service for their constituents go away. For example, the "North Coast Hiawatha" was created was to cover NP's lines in Montana while the Empire Builder covered the GN areas of the state. Montana at that time had one of the most important Senators and he made sure his state got good service!!
Once the Post Office took mail off the rail in the mid-sixties, many passenger trains that had been making money (or at least breaking even) began to show losses, so the railroads turned to the federal government, saying in effect "you caused this mess, you need to fix it".
In 1959 when David P. Morgan wrote Who Shot The Passenger Train, passenger trains were already on borrowed time. The few truly pro passenger railroads like Burlington, Seaboard, ACL, and Santa Fe tried to run creditable trains,but 1959 saw American Airlines begin domestic jet service on January 25th and a lot of states opened their first stretches of interstates. The nation seemed to care less about passenger trains unless the airlines went out on strike like they did in 1966. The public thought that planes and roads would take care of their transportation needs forever.What the politicans who created Amtrak really wanted to do is anyone's guess.We have lived in a fantasy world that transportation is a for profit business. Taxpayers built the interstates and paid subsidies to local sevice airlines to fly DC-3s to small communities all across the USA in the 1950's and 1960's; nothing to the railroads. I find it ironic that today the only public transportation system that serves Havre Montana is Amtrak's Empire Builder. Havre and other small towns across the country have lost both air and bus service. I really don't know whether or not America can save Amtrak. We did lose something when we lost the intercity passenger train. I am a graybeard who remembers just how wonderful it was to ride Burlington's Morning Zephyr along the Mississippi in a dome or having lunch in the diner eating the best food on rails. Amtrak will be around 40 years in 2011; it should have been created in 1959 when it might have had a chance for sucess.
What is clear to me is that Amtrak was not created to save the passenger train but to bail out the (freight) railroad industry by weaning the American public off the trains and onto the highways. Freight railroads needed the albatross off theire respective backs so they could concentrate on moving long distant trains and the commercial highway lobby wanted to sell automobiles, automobile parts, insurance, gasoline, etc. Supposedly it was a win/win situation for American industry and the public! Back then.
henry6 What is clear to me is that Amtrak was not created to save the passenger train but to bail out the (freight) railroad industry by weaning the American public off the trains and onto the highways. Freight railroads needed the albatross off theire respective backs so they could concentrate on moving long distant trains and the commercial highway lobby wanted to sell automobiles, automobile parts, insurance, gasoline, etc. Supposedly it was a win/win situation for American industry and the public! Back then.
I agree with your statement about the freight railroads but I would point out that by the time that Amtrak was conceived and created the "Automobilization" of the US transportation system was already a done deal so I don't really think that one can say that the automotive industry was "part of the plot" so to speak. Not to mention the fact that EMD was a very important and profitable division for GM back then...
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