Edit post

Edit your reply below.

Post Body
Enter your post below.
[quote user="dakotafred"] I'm bound to wonder, as NKPGuy did months ago, what people like Schlimm and Sam1 are even doing on here. They're opposed to what Amtrak was chartered to do ... run LD trains. Nobody, including Congress, has revoked that charter. All the rest of which they are enamoured --  the high-density, short-distance stuff, which depends on state funding, and so probably going away soon -- is incidental to the original business. They have basically nothing constructive to say about Amtrak as it was constituted 40 years ago and is supposed to be today ... with (horrors!) diners (not dinners, Sam1) and sleepers. Yeah, it loses a little money, which it has in common with every other operation of government. However, unlike so many other operations of government, it actually delivers a product that does not end up in the cemetery or the wastewater treatment plant. Amtrak is the kind of product, like highways and space exploration -- which also seem beyond us now -- that is the hallmark of a civilization that aims, or used to aim, at being a world leader. [/quote] You found a mistake in one of my postings, i.e. dinners instead of diners. Wow!  If you are focused on finding spelling errors, you probably have missed  most of what I have argued for years on these forums.       "Amtrak was initially created as a for-profit enterprise with common stock issued only to railroads, though only four chose to become stockholders. The law also charged the federal transportation secretary with choosing the metropolitan areas that would constitute the basic system of service. The initial plan was for lines radiating out from Chicago and New York, with routes chosen based on a set of clear criteria including cost effectiveness. However, once the plan was released for comment, “political resource allocation abounded through the system” and additional routes were added."  A New Alignment: Strengthening America's Commitment to Passenger Rail by Robert Puentes, Adie Tomer, and Joseph Kane, Background, Page 2, Brookings Institution, March 2013. As per the above referenced paragraph, there is nothing in the National Rail Passenger Service Act of 1970 that requires Amtrak to run long distance trains. They were and remain the outcome of Congressional politics. At no time in Amtrak's history have the long distance trains come close to meeting the cost effectiveness criteria.   Amtrak would have covered its operating costs in FY12 and made a significant contribution to the fixed costs if it had not been for the losses racked-up by the long distance trains. Those losses, which were acerbated by the food and beverage loses, wiped out all the operating profits and contributed to more than half of Amtrak's annual loss of $1.3 billion.  This for a service line that carries approximately 15 per cent of Amtrak's system passengers. If you believe that the hallmark of a great nation is to operate money losing long distance trains, which are used by less than one per cent of the nation's intercity travelers, that is your choice. That's a poor commercial decision. And Amtrak is supposedly a commercial operation. One of the hallmarks of a great nation, however, is to allow different points of view to be presented in the public square. This is a public square of sorts, and I will continue to express my views irrespective of what you or anyone else thinks.  I have been participating in these forums for more than five years. My views, if nothing else, have been consistent.  Passenger rail makes sense in relatively short, high density corridors where the cost to expand the highways and airways is prohibitive.  I have seen nothing to cause me to change my mind.
Tags (Optional)
Tags are keywords that get attached to your post. They are used to categorize your submission and make it easier to search for. To add tags to your post type a tag into the box below and click the "Add Tag" button.
Add Tag