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Here is a better plan: 1.  Discontinue long distance trains. 2.  Open the routes where passenger trains could be commercially viable to competitive bidding and award contracts to the lowest effective cost bidder.   3.  Establish performance standards with appropriate incentive payments.  Contracts run for five years; renewable for another five years if performance standards are met. 4. Require contractors to have effective organization, management, technology and employee (labor) practices.  Keep most Amtrak employees, but make it clear that the game in Dodge has changed. 5. Implement effective customer service training for contract employees.  Implement performance based compensation system for all employees. 6. Sell Amtrak's infrastructure to an independent operator that will allow any operator who meets the standards to run trains on it. Infrastructure rents set to capture cost of infrastructure operations and maintenance.  6. Provide federal subsidies for a reasonable transition period, i.e. five years. 7. Phase out small federal subsidies for other modes of transport and encourage the states to do the same. Each of these steps would need to be fleshed out in a white paper.  Moreover, I have just jotted them down off the top of my head.  I am sure there are some more features that should be built into the model. The key to improved performance is competition. Without it there is little incentive to do things better, faster, cheaper, with the operative word being better. Amtrak has tried most of the things that have been suggested in our forums.  None of them have worked very well.   Australia, where I lived for five years, went from being one of the most heavily regulated and statist economies in the OECD to one of the most competitive economies in less than 15 years.  What has been the result?  Today it is one of the shinning stars in the OECD. It is outperforming the United States and most European countries on the key economic indicators, i.e. unemployment, exports, currency valuation, GDP and GNP growth, etc.    What is the probability that we will allow market forces to drive passenger train service in the United States? None!  But's its fun to thing about what could have been the outcome if Volpe's plan (Amtrak) to saving the dying intercity passenger trains had been shot down.  Which it should have been!
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