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[quote]QUOTE: Originally posted by artmark Many times over the years I've heard people on the train say, "Never again!" In 33 years, train by train, the medium has been able to turn off almost everyone in the nation to train travel. To say the least of what foreign visitors must think of the country as a whole. I remember a quote that goes something like this, "You can tell the quality of a modern industrial nation by the way it runs its trains." [/quote] I've often wondered the same thing. How backward this country might look, in terms of providing modern transportation. Why then isn't this nation comitted to providing a modern rail travel system? You get what you pay for. And in this case, giving Amtrak crumbs for over 30 years is squarely the fault of the people who send their elected representatives to DC. The Big Dig in Boston costs at least $30 billion - about the same amount of money Amtrak has gotten over 30 years. Yet politicans don't fail to slam Amtrak but never go against highway and air funding. If you were told you had to run a certain business and only given a fourth of what it requires to run it, then even that funding was cut - and then given to your competitors - how successful do you think your operatoin would be? It's also very intersting how Amtrak gets all the blame when the trains run late, when it's often - but not all cases - the not the fault of the freight RR. I've been in terminals such as PGH and seen the disappointment customers have when they hear the train is a couple of hours late. Amtrak ticket counter people ought to start saying something such as "because of trackwork delays, or CSX delaying the train on a siding for an hour.... the train is late." Rail travel has so much potential, yet private freight RRs, lawmakers, loud-mouth ill-informed "think tanks" and even some railfans go out of their way to squash it.
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