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[quote user="henry6"] Oltmannd, what you've got to remember is that Volpe was Nixon's appointment and therefore had to state the party line.  Amtrak, in effect, was not created to save the passenger train but to save big business railroads from having to endure the cost of operating them.  It was actually hoped that by creating Amtrak, passenger trains would totally disappear, that passenger cars and jet airplanes where what the public would embrace 100%.  [/quote] Amtrak was created to save the intercity passenger train.  The railroads, which are in business to earn a profit, were shedding their money bleeding passenger trains as fast as the regulators would allow them to do so.  Had Amtrak not been created, the railroads eventually would have been successful in getting out of the passenger train business.  They would have had to go through the courts, and it would have cost their shareholders millions in legal and consulting fees; witness American Airlines current struggles, but I have no doubt that they would have been successful.   Heaps of businesses run loss leaders as long as they can make up the losses with profitable product lines. In the case of the investor owned railroads, however, they had their backs to the wall for a variety of regulatory, technical, and competitive reasons.  They simply could no longer afford the loss leader. In retrospect, given the political pressure to maintain a skeleton inter city passenger rail system in the United States, the government probably would have been better off paying subsidies to the investor owned railroads to continue operating those trains that had some economic and social use. This is what they do in Australia for the major national trains, i.e. the Indian Pacific, The Ghan, etc.
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