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In the first place, even though the transportation system that is more energy-efficient than steel wheels on steel rails has yet to be invented, transporting passengers by rail has rarely been a profitable enterprise, anywhere in the world, at any time in history. There are, of course, exceptions. Japan's passenger trains, I'm told, are exceptionally profitable, and those in some European countries are marginally so. But Japan has a far higher population density than most of the U.S., and for the most part, its rail corridors and its population centers coincide. So if passenger trains lose money, why did the railroads not only provide it, but compete with each other to see who could provide the fastest, most luxurious trains for the lowest fares? Two words. Freight revenue. The passenger trains were directly subsidized by express and mail that ran in them, and indirectly subsidized by the fact that they were the railroads' principal means of selling freight service. What changed? Scheduled airlines and interstate trucking. Suddenly, the railroads weren't competing so much with each other as with other forms of long-distance transportation that didn't have to bear the full cost of owning, building and maintaining their own right-of-way. In the second place, from what I've heard, the long-distance routes are better-off financially than the shorter ones, but it's the shorter ones that are the sacred cows with Congress. Moreover, breaking long-distance routes into shorter-distance ones is a fool's pastime: long-distance trains can stop wherever it's convenient to build a station (staffed or otherwise), and many do a certain amount of enroute switching. So in effect, every long-distance train already IS the series of short-distance trains it could be broken down into. Could Amtrak ever achieve a financial break-even? Maybe. Someday. Given better management, a completely healthy infrastructure, and less subsidies for air and highway transporation. But a self-sufficient Amtrak was never the goal of the Amtrak Deform Council. So how would I reform Amtrak? I'd recognize just how much federal subsidy goes into airlines and interstate trucking, and base any definitions of "self sufficiency" on that. I'd renegotiate agreements for use of railroad-owned trackage, to create strong financial incentives for the railroads to send Amtrak trains through without unnecessary delay. And I'd take a long, hard look at short-distance routes that appear to exist purely for the gratification of certain members of Congress, and either extend them so they have connections at both ends, or get rid of them. As to people using railroads as their principal means of long-distance travel, I do. As far as I'm concerned, "vacationing by automobile" is an oxymoron; I vacation FROM my automobile. And unless I simply don't have the time to take the train, AND there'd actually be a time savings from flying (which now requires a somewhat longer distance than it did before the atrocities of last September), I really don't care to fly: the seats are tiny; the windows are tinier, the security checkpoints are a pain in the fundament, and the food barely qualifies as food, let alone coming close to what even the worst dining cars serve. -- James H. H. Lampert Professional Dilettante
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