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Living in Switzerland, but visiting the USA at frequent intervals, I expect to find decent, reasonable, functioning passenger trains, and have been delighted to use AMTRAK trains for business and leisure on many occasions. I've ridden the Corridor many times (land at Newark, NJ, 30 minutes later be at the station booking the next train to Baltimore and Washington) , taken sleepers to Jacksonville, Chicago to New Orleans, west to Oakland, ridden the Pacific coast trains, and had many memorable rail trips. They were regrettably not all comfortable, well organised or punctual! The automobile is not the answer to mobility needs. Individual vehicle mobility is demonstrating everywhere its power to destroy even the biggest reserves of highway space, and much of the Eastern USA has no more highway space. Unpredictable journey times, disruption through weather, congestion and accidents, and the appalling realisation that accidents increasingly happen to people like us (and not just the anonoymous others), are with time changing our civilization away from the individual automobile. But at the same time, many in the USA are still thinking in terms which increase the reliance on the automobile: commuter housing outside the beltways are a classic example, where the owners then resent paying taxes to provide commuter trains... Global warming is society's next threshold. So all ways round, the USA needs a soundly based, well managed, market and sytem-based passenger train network and must be prepared to facilitate it . But that facilitation, over the existing freight network, which is only provided by its owners to handle, with rigorous singlemindedness, their own freight traffic, and where capacity additions cannot justify capital even today, is a puzzle which needs the very best of you to solve it. And who manages the trains? Is AMTRAK the only way to organize it? European experience would suggest that a mixture of local entrepreneurs and efficient public authority might be the best way to start searching.... Bryan
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