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Amtrak reform council should be liquidated

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First, neither I nor the ARC are proposing to unbundle ownership. The tracks taht are there now remain there, in the hands of who owns them, the private RRs. The exception to this is the NEC and other pure Amtrak routes. As for bootsing freight off passenger routes, Amtrak allready did that in the NEC almost twenty years ago. However, that is not being rpoposed either. Who says freigth and passenger could not or would not share the same track? They do now, and I beleive they always will, unless we build something so advanced that it becomes impractical, ala TGV. Anyway, do you really beleive taht little, intermediate points will really be missed in todays world? Increasingly centralized business locales make that logic untenable. No one cars if Muncie Indiana is on a freight route excpet Muncie Indiana. It's a cold, cruel, capitalistic world out threre. However, I digress. I do agree there is not enough capacity at this time. However, there was much more capacity once, and the ability to build it out is still there. Routes which went from doulbe to single track with CTC iunstallation can always go back. It's an issue of mone yand time not immovable objects. Host vs Tennant railroad conflicts are historical, but there are alos major excpetions. The joint line in Colorado is one example. The combined joint line from Portland Oregon to Seattle Washington is another example. Dealys will coccur, but this is by no means a fatal flaw. What you say about three diemnsions of air is true. Ifrastucture for the airplanes themselves need not be built, noly terminals. But what about highways? The auto is still the prime mover of passengers, not air. That's fully one half of the transporattion equation you've left out of your rebuttal. The fundemental argument of the ARC is that building a better infrastructure allows trains, all trains, to run faster and more efficiently, and creates an environment in which sustainabaility and even profit will some day be possible. Whatever successor to Amtrak emerges will only have to worry about running the trains well. Most of your arguments, in summary, are regarding open access, and not Amtrak, though many corss over. If that proposal, (Open Access) were the one on the table, I agree, we could be in for major trouble. But we are only discussing that issue in regards to Amtrak owned property, a minorit of the routes served. A more accurate picture would be that the ARC is proposing spending government money to build up private railroads in exchange for passenger access. But others put it better than I can. Read the article Bill Stephens posted on the newswire, titled "Barges, off all things, hold passenger rail solution." This is perhaps the clearest picture of the AARC point of view.
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