When people say Amtrak was designed to fail they usually mean that it was designed to kill passenger service. Failing doesn't necessarily mean disappear It could simply mean that Amtrak was designed to be run poorly. If designed to fail is actually designed to run poorly than Amtrak is full fulling that goal incredibly well. If Amtrak is being run poor than politicians can say "see passenger rail doesn't work". You create something that can't work so that improvements will never come.
Railroad to Freedom
But it was both politicians and railroad managements who didn't want rail passenger service to succeed...Politicians didn't want nationalized or socialized passenger rail services and freight railroads didn't want any passenger services.
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While Amtrak's inception was certainly confused those who argue it was "designed to fail" also argue it was intended to make a profit. It is hard for me to understand how the same person can make both arguments at the same time but people do.
Knowing and believing that passenger service was a losing proposition Congress demanded it be a profit maker assuring that it would fail.
John WR While Amtrak's inception was certainly confused those who argue it was "designed to fail" also argue it was intended to make a profit. It is hard for me to understand how the same person can make both arguments at the same time but people do.
C&NW, CA&E, MILW, CGW and IC fan
Schlimm,
Please do not post to me again. Ever. I find your attitude offensive in the extreme. I have nothing to say to you.
John
John: I was not intending to offend you. I was simply restating the facts, :
henry6 Knowing and believing that passenger service was a losing proposition Congress demanded it be a profit maker assuring that it would fail.
I am not sure the politics were that subtle. It's a bit like the old argument in public-administration class that Johnson set up the welfare program to keep certain ethnic groups 'down' because it engineered for single-female-parent families with multiple children and purposely limited income.
Politically, taking over all those known-to-be-money-holes, increasingly-irrelevant-in-the-Sixties passenger services would be a nonstarter without some 'weasel words' (to use Mr. Carter's phrase... Hodding, not Jimmy) that said the Government's out-of--pocket subsidies would be limited.
Likewise, don't go saying the Government is 'taking over' the passenger trains, as in Europe, because you'll get a whole bunch of additional flack from multiple sides. Say instead it's a 'quasi-public company' (to bring up the adjective used at the time) and further hint that prosperity will come at some point... or the services can quietly be truncated or even cut back to what can pay its way.
Politicians can be funny about subsidies. Anyone remember the Parkersburg Turbo -- and how much more worthwhile the train would have been in the service, and on track, suitable for it? On the other hand, as mentioned so often here, Amtrak is a very soft target for the tax-cut group, whether or not they actually believe that 'free enterprise' trains can make it without capital assistance or subsidy. (It's refreshing to me to see the Government actively requiring the states to pony up some meaningful percentage of the operations that benefit them, for instance.)
I do not remember Amtrak ever using Menkian/Biagginian tactics for making service intentionally miserable to get the whole idea of passenger rail to fail. I look at the 'profitability' requirement about the same way I looked at the Space Shuttle as a 'reusable' transatmospheric vehicle. Makes good rhetoric, and allows good campaign collateral at election time. Also keeps Amtrak personnel on their toes all the time regarding operations on the lowest possible budget, which our government has always found to be a salutary, if inefficient and often unachieved, method of improving bang for its bucks. But if it were a hard requirement, Amtrak would have been either dramatically pruned or 'privatized' (meaning largely eliminated as a network) long before now.
There needs to be more evidence of collusion and/or specific malicious intent before I'd agree with the 'engineered to fail' hypothesis.
It wasn't that Amtrak ever intentionally made things bad...they had no choice but to run a scheduled train with whatever equipment, whatever crew, they had on whatever schedule any given railroad would give them and if the railroad allowed them to actually follow the schedule. I don't know how old your are, Overmod, but those of us who were there when it happened can vouch for what I said was the impression we got based on the statements of railroaders, railroads, and Amtrak in frustration and the complaints of passengers.
Of course, I don't have any inside information, but my impression of the attitude toward Amtrak when it was started was not so much "We are going to make it fail" but "It's going to die anyway, so we'll take the responsibilitiy off of the railroads and let it die peacefully."
Sometimes I wonder if the increasingly strident demands to kill Amtrak lately are triggered by the ridership increases in recent years.
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"A stranger's just a friend you ain't met yet." --- Dave Gardner
I still have the button I got on the official day Railpax got its ugly and unimaginative 'official' name. Sometimes I remember that when the discussion on 'what is Acela supposed to mean' comes up...
(In those days, amtracs were those large amphibious things they used in Viet Nam...)
I was thankful then that someone or something had stepped in to keep dying passenger service afloat. I am NOT old enough to have seen more than a smidgin of the glory that was passenger railroading in its heyday, but I can clearly remember being shocked and astounded to read in Trains Magazine that the 20th Century Limited was being taken off... that was a bit like announcing the end of the world! -- and I also remember watching the references to operating RPOs and postmarks dwindle away...
I have little doubt that at some points, or on some trains or services, things were intentionally made bad. I do remember, how that you mention it, being furious at Roger Lewis when he said in my hearing something to the essence of 'we're just stringing passenger service along until it can die a natural death'. I did not get the sense, though, that there was an organized cabal in Congress pulling strings to ensure that outcome.
There are certainly anecdotal reports about surly crews, unrepaired air conditioning or plumbing, reduction or elimination of real food, and the like, which I believe even though I did not see them firsthand or know the victims. I traveled quite a bit to Philadelphia (from New York) in the early '70s, and one of my chief delights was one of those Am and Cheese sandwiches, which was always fresh and 'worth the money'. and a can of Coke with its big cup of shaved ice, eaten in one of those decrepit parlor cars with the little 'real' chairs, pulled so I could watch the views -- nearly heaven. On the other hand, I wish I had a nickel for each time I started the air conditioning on an overheated Clocker car... I innocently thought the 'staff' had just forgotten to turn them on!
The only truly unpleasant train-service person I ever came across was a conductor on an Erie-Lackawanna commuter train. I cannot remember ever having met an Amtrak person, in any capacity (other than Roger Lewis) who intentionally behaved poorly to passengers -- although I have seen several people ejected from the train for various reasons!
Paul of Covington Of course, I don't have any inside information, but my impression of the attitude toward Amtrak when it was started was not so much "We are going to make it fail" but "It's going to die anyway, so we'll take the responsibilitiy off of the railroads and let it die peacefully." Sometimes I wonder if the increasingly strident demands to kill Amtrak lately are triggered by the ridership increases in recent years.
Excellent synopses, Paul, capturing the emotions and feelings at the time. Today, however, there are those who still are back in the Cold War era of thinking believing that the automobile guzzling gas from foreign petroleum and zooming on publicly funded highways was the fullest expression of American freedom. And that the era of good feelings and cheap gas would never end. This, of course, was swallowed by those who also believed, that people were meant to fly cross country through the air not glide along steel rails while the government had your back with air traffic controllers to direct air traffic. Some, too many, still live back in those times not acknowledging the realities of today being different than then. In the Nixon era there were those opposed to Amtrak because it would give an enemy like Russia a way to move troops around the country and that Beach Grove Shops would become a factory for Russian made tanks...so to thwart Amtrak was truly the patriotic thing to do. I know my father was close to that belief as a member of the Army Reserve intelligence forces who came home one day from a seminar with Admiral Hyman Rickover on Governors Island stating the most important thing to come out of the meeting was that Rock and Roll music was a Communist plot to take over the mind's of American teens. I think he like to believe that but really didn't. Anyway, that was the way those opposed to the concept of the Federal government running passenger trains thought back then...and so some still hold to it today. If it was bad then, then it has to be bad today.. And if the Federal government has a budget line for it, it has to stop. Ridership means nothing, paying out for something means a lot.
henry6 Today, however, there are those who still are back in the Cold War era of thinking believing that the automobile guzzling gas from foreign petroleum and zooming on publicly funded highways was the fullest expression of American freedom. And that the era of good feelings and cheap gas would never end.
Today, however, there are those who still are back in the Cold War era of thinking believing that the automobile guzzling gas from foreign petroleum and zooming on publicly funded highways was the fullest expression of American freedom. And that the era of good feelings and cheap gas would never end.
A perfect expression of the sentiment that trains can solve our transportation problems.
Expressing one's feelings is fine, but what is the plan?
How much do you propose to spend on Amtrak, how much will that increase the current level of service of 1 part in 1000 of automobile passenger miles, funded at the rate of a 1.5 billion dollar yearly appropriation, and how much oil will that save in relation to automobile use?
As oil gets expensive, what impact does that have on Amtrak, which derives roughly half of its motive power from oil, the remainder from electricity (the half of Amtrak passenger miles that is on the NEC) that is generated from a variety of sources that include various forms of fossil fuel?
If GM "killed the electric car", what am I doing standing next to an EV-1, a half a block from the WSOR tracks?
Good questions, Paul, as usual...my point was about how and why people think and react why they do. I do believe rail passenger service is an answer but not necessarily the answer for all transportation....no way. Real thought, planning, designing, and economic allocation. To me your questions are rhetoric on one hand because I can't answer them but they are the real questions our government and businesses must address.
henry6I do believe rail passenger service is an answer but not necessarily the answer for all transportation....no way.
Henry,
It is not very likely that anyone serious about the question will see rail passenger service as "the answer for all transportation."
But do any of us believe that today's transportation system is the ideal? If it is not then we need to improve on it. And, frankly, if we are looking to improve it than passenger rail service is not exactly over represented at the present time.
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