An interesting article in the August issue of Pat Buchanan's rag, The American Conservative about passenger rail in the US.

A Nation Derailed

Passenger trains were once sustainable and civilized. Highway socialism changed that.

Rail once unified the nation, and a revived rail infrastructure might again restore the patchwork of particularity that made the country great in the first place.

~Lewis McCrary

The article references a couple newish books, Railroaded & Getting There. It's online but you have to pay for it right now. It might be free later. A good magazine store should have it.

http://www.amconmag.com/

It is good to know that there are some good resources for those of us here who are on the right who also support public transportation.  I think that makes me and......  Well, they're nice resources to have (to battle the Kasichs of the world.)

 

http://www.amconmag.com/cpt/

 

“The opposition of some conservatives to public transportation and passenger rail stems from three misconceptions. They are:

1. The current automobile dominance is a free-market outcome;

2. Trains and transit are subsidized while highways pay for themselves; and

3. Where public transportation is necessary, buses are always better than trains.

 

In fact, the dominance of automobiles is a product of almost a century of government at all levels subsidizing highways while taxing privately-owned electric railways (streetcars and interurbans) and the railroad companies that ran passenger trains.."

 

One of the old-school "movement conservative" operatives, Richard Viguerie, was a big supporter...or at least a fan...of passenger rail and interubans.  Some of his amateur photography is even online at one of those railpix sites.

Someone needs to send this to COAST and anti-rail Republicans (especially in Cincinnati).

I'm curious to know, how did the old rail companies of yore such as Penn Rail and New York Central build their passenger lines, and why can't today's rail companies build rail lines?  I think I read somewhere that part of Penn Rail's money was a government subsidy, but I don't know if all those tracks were indeed bankrolled by gov't money and not private capital.

 

If the old rail lines were built with private capital, what has changed that makes building a long-distance rail line more challenging now than then?  It is the rise in cost of wages, even when accounting for inflation?  Have certain elements of rail construction risen more in prices than other forms of construction - for instance, is HSR inherently more expensive than traditional rail?  Or do modern day companies have the finances, but lack the interest to do so?

 

Or was it all government money given to corporations to build these rail lines and now we just lack the political will to make these new HSR rail lines possible?

 

So many questions to understand why building the infrastructure was possible then but so difficult now...  :wtf:

^ Building passenger railroads used to be profitable, so companies would bankroll them. Nowadays they have to compete with roads and airlines which are afforded many more subsidies than rail. If airlines and roads were funded by user fees, passenger rail would be more competitive and you would likely see private companies building lines.

 

Another issue is that the government has the power of eminent domain (hence how new highways get built). Were a private entity to want to build a railroad, they'd have to acquire all necessary land without the advantage of being able to take it by force.

its my understanding that passenger lines were not "built" but rather piggy-backed on freight lines.  The major rail lines didn't own the passenger aspect.  The passenger network was operated by the Pullman Company.  They built the cars, provided the service and the staffing and essentially sold the product to the rail lines who, in turn, sold the tickets.

Before 1971, the privately owned and operated freight railroads ran most of the nation's intercity rail passenger service. That system began to unravel after 1950, due to a variety of factors, the most significant of which was huge support of air and highway modes by all levels of government. No private enterprise could hope to compete with the deep pockets of the government, so the service began a slow decline that accelerated with the coming of the Interstate Highway system, beginning in 1955. Even so, we had a base level of service that was fairly stable, until the government again, in the form of the Postal Service, now run by a former airline exec, took the first class mail off the trains and put it on the airlines in 1967. That eliminated $700 million in yearly revenue which supported the trains. After that, trains were discontinued rapidly, leading directly to the creation of Amtrak in 1971.

 

I might add that in addition to heavily subsidizing the railroads' competition and taking mail revenue away, the government stifled railroads' ability to compete and innovate with suffocating regulation by the Interstate Commerce Commission. The ICC, created in the days of the railroads' robber barons, had long since outlived its usefulness by the middle of the 20th century. Railroads monopoly days had long since passed. Indeed, their very survival was in question, but they would not be deregulated until 1980. The freight railroads, freed from their regulatory shackles, made an amazing recovery, but it was too late for the passenger train.

 

The railroads ran their own service over tracks shared with freight trains, operating such legendary trains as the 20th Century Limited, Broadway Limited, Capitol Limited, and the Super Chief as well as mundane locals. They invested billions to run trains, including such colossi as Grand Central terminal and Pennsylvania Station in New York. Pullman operated sleeping cars that were operated as a part of regularly scheduled trains run by the railroads. Pullman did indeed build and operate sleeping cars, but an antitrust lawsuit after WW II ended that and split Pullman into separate operating and carbuilding companies. Up to that point competing cabuilders, such as Budd, were shut out of the sleeping car business. We had the greatest rail passenger system in the world after WW II. Trains routinely hit 100 mph in many sections of the country and there were many thousands of them.

 

Historically, the railroads were chartered as common carriers, which meant that they had to carry all comers, including passengers, until relieved of that responsibility with the creation of Amtrak in 1971. The railroads did that and established a huge system and as long as they had little real competition, except between themselves, they could foot the bill. It's important to note that while they invested in passenger service, it wasn't as profitable as freight service, a situation not unlike the airlines today. Once government financed highways and airlines entered the picture, passengers were siphoned away, eroding railroad earnings. To be sure, some change was inevitable, but one has to wonder what would have happened if we had equal treatment for all modes instead of blindly building roads.

 

Those who say passenger rail should be privately built and make a profit fail to realize how the transportation marketplace has been skewed by autocentric policies and that it continues to this day. Highway users account for only 51% of the direct costs of highways. The rest comes from general revenues and while Amtrak has cost about $37 billion over its 40 year life, we have spent upwards of $2.6 trillion on roads. So, we now have a 24,000 mile skeletal rail passenger system competing with a fully built out 6,000,000 mile road network. No private enterprise could make a profit in the face of that.

 

Most conservatives turn a blind eye to the causes and results of what has happened over the past 80 years. They fail to realize that it was government policy at the behest of a powerful highway lobby that destroyed a private enterprise. Where is their rage over that? When one complains that roads are subsidized, they reply with a dismissive "everyone drives," without realizing WHY.  A few conservatives get it. The late Paul Weyrich said the current highway dominated system "is not a free market outcome, but is based on massive intervention by the government on behalf of the automobile" (that might not be exact, but it's close).  B&O President Howard Simpson was prophetic when he exclaimed to President Eisenhower: "You just killed the American Passenger train!"  Ike's response was an absent-minded "We'll see."

 

I find it deliciously ironic that the government which did just about everything it could to kill the railroads thru incredibly unfair treatment, was forced to rescue the rotting corpse that rail passenger service became and put it on life support in 1971. Since that time, we, as a nation, have yet to make up our minds on passenger trains. We give Amtrak enough to barely survive (indeed, we cut 2/3 of the trains operating on A-day), but not enough to provide any real travel choices outside the Northeast or a few state-supported corridors. Spending for Amtrak amounts to about one half of one percent of all federal transportation spending, which means that for every $100 spent, Amtrak gets 50 cents. You get what you pay for. Meanwhile, the beat goes on for roads.

 

We're still undecided. Things could go either way. Tea Party types, and Republicans in general, are hostile to rail and Democratic support is far from certain. Hopefully, they'll make the right decision.

^ Building passenger railroads used to be profitable, so companies would bankroll them. Nowadays they have to compete with roads and airlines which are afforded many more subsidies than rail. If airlines and roads were funded by user fees, passenger rail would be more competitive and you would likely see private companies building lines.

 

Another issue is that the government has the power of eminent domain (hence how new highways get built). Were a private entity to want to build a railroad, they'd have to acquire all necessary land without the advantage of being able to take it by force.

 

I believe the railroads DO have the right of eminent domain. I remember back in the early 1980's, a washout on the Conrail (ex-New York-Central) man west of Erie PA forced a detour over NS between that city and Cleveland. They then built a connector track just west of Conneaut to shorten the detour and save access fees charged by NS. They built the bypass on private land...and THEN settled up with the landowner.

Think of who owns, manages, finances and insures each mode of transportation's right of way. Railroads are the only mode of transportation in which the private sector -- and most cases the carrier using that right of way -- is responsible for the ownership, management, maintenance, improvement, security, traffic control, insurance and financing of the right of way.

 

Imagine if Greyhound had to build its own highways to link cities, police them, plow them, dispatch them, finance them, insure them....  How many such highways would have been built?

 

Imagine the same think for Yellow Freight trucking. Or Preston. Or any other big trucking company. What if there was no federal Highway Trust Fund, in which the federal government is the banker for all highway infrastructure? How much would it cost to drive if we had to pay for roads with loans provided by private lending institutions, including their market-rate interest rates and profit margins? What if communities charged motorists for the costs of special traffic control duties, or for safety forces dealing with road and highway crashes (as communities do to railroads when they have to respond to a train crashes), or for roadway insurance (if it was private)? Ever try to sue ODOT or the city for a crash or other liability it caused by a poor road condition? Such indemnity does not apply to the railroads.

 

What if the airlines had to build their own airports? Pay taxes on the bonds used to finance them? Pay for air traffic control out of passenger ticket surcharges rather than by general taxes people pay every April 15th? What if the airlines had to insure their airports? Or pay for security?

 

When all of those types and scale of costs are externalized on to general taxpayers, driving and flying becomes incredibly inexpensive to the point that it can underprice the railroads. So if, you're a banker, would you want to finance a railroad capital improvement project? Of course not. And so the capital flowed out of the rail industry and into aviation and highway modes.

 

And that doesn't even get into the global stuff. As BNSF CEO Matt Rose said recently, "when the price of gas fully reflects the cost of it, including defending the world's oil shipping lanes, the railroads will start carrying passengers again. But not at $3.50 a gallon."

 

Until then, here's one possible solution for getting the private sector back into the passenger rail industry....

http://allaboardohio.org/2011/03/02/federal-report-transportation-free-market-is-side-tracked/