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With tax subsidies on par with those spent on interstate highways, railroads could be given incentives to upgrade their lines, perhaps even to the point of re-emergence of private passenger rail service. Japanese and European passenger services flourish because of public spending, which enables them to maintain a higher quality of infrastructure, which is necessary for high-speed service. <br /> <br />Imagine this scenario: Amtrak gets a big budget boost in the form of a right-of-way allowance, which it then uses to lease the mainlines that it uses from the owning railroads, stipulating that all maintenance of that line will be performed by Amtrak, to a level that meets or exceeds current standards. This way, Amtrak gets to do its own quality-control and thus avoid derailments (and Jay Leno jokes), as well as deploy faster-running trainsets. The private railroads get in influx of cash from their leased lines as well as the benefit of well-maintained mainlines on which to run, and they can thus invest in other means of service, whether that means more TOFC/Container loading areas to keep up with the trucks or more industrial spurs to WalMart distribution centers. <br /> <br />The only thing I dont like, due to my particular political stripe, is my observation about how Federal moneys come with strings attached, and how this would almost surely result in new regulations of the private railroads, along the lines of "if you're gonna lease this line to Amtrak, then you're gonna do x and y..." I'm not sure how you prevent that kind of thing.
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