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Samantha, first, let me offer my apologies for saying you must be supporting the Iraq war.  I shouldn't make such assumptions. At least we agree on something. But I still think you're too eager to throw out the long distance trains just because your analysis finds no value in them. Plenty of people do find value in them. You dismissed the polls I cited out of hand, which showed fairly strong public support of Amtrak. And while there are exceptions, there are very few members of Congress in either party willing to let Amtrak die on their watch. If Amtrak's national network was as unpopular and irrelevant to joe voter as you suggest, Congress wouldn't be afraid to pull the plug.  We all agree that Amtrak as it is now doesn't work as well as it could. But I prefer to find ways to make the trains work better rather than eliminate the trains whose numbers aren't to your liking. On this we'll have to agree to disagree. Numbers alone aren't enough to sway my position, because I find value in long distance trains, and some of those values can't be quantified economically. As Albert Einstein once said, "Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts." It may not stand up to pure logic, but this would be a pretty dull world if everything was logical. [quote user="Samantha"]If Texans decide, as an example, that they want to invest in passenger rail in the Texas Triangle, why does it have to be managed and operated by Amtrak?  If an Australian company, for example, can do a better job, they should be given a chance to do so.  [/quote]I agree in principle. I think competition could be a healthy thing. But the reality is that no host railroad in this country will allow anyone but Amtrak to operate passenger service on their tracks. There's no legal impediment to a competitor. Anyone with a train is perfectly within their rights to try to negotiate with the Class I railroads, but the railroads are also perfectly within their rights to turn them away without discussion. Whenever competition to Amtrak has been considered by various reform proposals, each and every host railroad has made it very clear they do not want to deal with any passenger operator other than Amtrak. And they understandably don't want to be caught in the middle of two or more competing passenger operators that want the best time slots. In order to have competition to Amtrak, this problem must be solved first. In fact, UP won't even deal with the state of California when it comes to proposals for new routes. They always tell the state to submit their proposal through Amtrak.
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