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[quote user="oltmannd"]   <blockquote> <div><img src="/TRCCS/Themes/trc/images/icon-quote.gif" /> Sam1:</div> <div>   "The Company does not want any public subsidies", said EVP Husein Cumber.  This as well as the start-up of private passenger rail in Italy is music to this free marketer's ears. Go baby go! Hopefully they will be successful. And hoping further the politicians will get the word. Scrap Amtrak and foster privately funded and privately operated passenger rail services where they make sense.  Some government support may be necessary to create the required infrastructure, but eventually the users should pay for the services and return a profit to the investors. And the government should get its money back.  The government? I mean we the people. It is our money. <div style="clear:both;"></div>   </div> </blockquote>   I don't quite get the FEC proposal.  If you ballpark the revenues against the capital required, it just doesn't work.   Assuming 12 round trips a day with 200 passengers (5 coaches, 50% load factor) per trip travelling 200 miles each at 30 cents per mile, you get revenues of about $100M per year.  Even if you applied all of this to the $1B debt, that's quite a long simple payback period.   I can only guess they will come after some public capital and then hope to make money on operations. [/quote] I have not looked at the proposal in depth. My information came from the Miami Herald.  As I understand, they will be essentially renting space on the FEC.  Undoubtedly, they may get some indirect infrastructure and tax breaks. I suspect that they will get significant tax breaks, i.e. enterprise zone breaks, etc.  They may also get some help from equipment and infrastructure manufacturers.  The annual payment on $1 billion spread over thirty years at the U.S. Treasury long bond rate would be $49.5 million.  The promotors will probably qualify for tax free financing, in which case they may be able to get a better rate than the long bond rate. The devil is in the details.  They may be hard pressed to make a go of it. But I hope that they can pull it off. As I have said in previous posts, I don't want the government to run any commercial enterprise, i.e. postal services, air traffic control, railroads, etc., that can be operated by a properly regulated, competitive commercial enterprise. Side by side a for profit operation will trump a government operated enterprise any day of the week.
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