Talk about awesome. Talk about vertigo. I’m at the side of a dirt road in Iowa, looking straight up. And what I see is weathered spider steel on the right and massive concrete superstructure on the left. Engineering wonders, a century apart. Either one...

I don’t harbor much hope that our $13 billion commitment to high speed rail ($8 billion now and $1 billion each of the next five years) will be spent rationally. The Federal Railroad Administration is analyzing applications for more than $50 billion in...

Imagine that you’re the VP-operations for a big U.S. railroad. One day your office door opens and standing there is the person you least like to see, the VP-law. He or she sits down uninvited, right in front of your face, and says, shape up, Bunky, or...

In Part 1, you read the challenge put to the Lexington Group in Transportation History: Name the men who really got it right in railroading the past half century. In Part 2, you read the picks of the moderators of this discussion, David DeBoer and Jim...

In the first installment, I told you about the question posed to the Lexington Group in Transportation History by Jim McClellan and David DeBoer. They described the challenges facing railroad leaders in the past half century, grouping those challenges...

Who indeed? At the recent meeting of the Lexington Group in Transportation History, Jim McClellan and David DeBoer grabbed this braintwister and wrestled it to the ground. They each recited their own list of winners (they agreed on five names and...

Almost buried in a tiny corner of Amtrak.com is a treasure trove of financial and operations information about our passenger train railroad. Do this: Go to the bottom of Amtrak’s home page and click on Inside Amtrak, then Other Reports, and finally Monthly...

Vesuvius is the mountain in Italy that popped its top in 79 AD and buried Pompeii in volcanic ash. There’s a Vesuvius in Virginia, too, nestled in the Shenandoah Valley, and it had an eruption as well. The second eruption of Vesuvius occurred at a B&B...

Buried deep within the language of the Passenger Rail Investment & Improvement Act of 2008, passed by Congress and signed by President Bush 11 months ago, is some startling language that could affect Amtrak service four years from now. It boils...