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[quote user="John WR"] What jumps out at me in looking at Amtrak and any freight railroad is that Amtrak is unique in our history. It is an attempt at a cooperative venture between our government which operates a national passenger railroad and a whole bunch of private for profit companies, the freight railroads.  As Amtrak reminded us on its 40th anniversary, so far it has worked......     There are people who call for us to abandon Amtrak   Some argue that we should let the private sector run our passenger railroads; that argument is ridiculous.  If the private sector wanted to run passenger railroads private companies would still be doing that.  No company was forced to join Amtrak...... [/quote] It has worked only because of the largest per passenger and per passenger mile federal and state subsidies of any form of commercial transportation. Through the end of FY11 Amtrak had accumulated loses of $28 billion. Outside of the NEC, Amtrak is a skeleton passenger rail system, augmented by state supported corridors, that is used by less than one per cent of intercity travelers. This is not my definition of "it has worked".  Amtrak is a broken business model. However, those of us who are calling for a different model are not saying that passenger rail does not have a place in America. The question is whether there are better alternatives to the Nation Railroad Passenger Corporation. Clearly, I believe there are.  Moreover, just because a person has a different view than your does not mean that it is ridiculous.  It is different.  There are heaps of legitimate, differing views on most subjects.  Hopefully the private funded efforts in Florida, Texas, and Italy will be successful. I suspect that they will require some subsidies, but I would be surprised if they cannot offer a better outcome than what we are getting or likely to get from a government run monopoly.  For years people in the utility businesses (telecommunications, gas, electric, etc.) said that regulated, monopolistic utilities were the only model that would work. They were wrong. Deregulating the utilities gave use much better outcomes. Those who cling to failed business models are likely to have sub-optimum outcomes.  Those who are willing to experiment and compete are likely to produce better outcomes.
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