On 4/17/2025 at 6:06 PM, Foraker said:

 

Slashing program funding and claiming savings, proclaim improved services provided by the program, rinse and repeat. 

 

Just imagine how much better the federal highway system would be if we slashed government funding to $0... (when?) 

Yes, following this logic, all highways would be privatized and your car would trip an electronic reader to begin the billing process every time you back out of your driveway. That would go over like a lead balloon!

What Amtrak Privatization Advocates Miss:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2025/04/29/op-ed-what-amtrak-privatization-advocates-miss

Edited May 2May 2 by gildone

31 minutes ago, gildone said:

What Amtrak Privatization Advocates Miss:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2025/04/29/op-ed-what-amtrak-privatization-advocates-miss

If it's going to happen, it will happen under private ownership.

What government ownership advocates miss is that while government can do a decent job with closed end projects that have hard measurable deadlines and external competition (including foreign), without those constraints things get bureausclerotic.

Wars, building the interstates, Apollo: yes. Defense spending and highway maintenance, not so much. The space program needed private involvement to kick into gear.

28 minutes ago, E Rocc said:

If it's going to happen, it will happen under private ownership.

What government ownership advocates miss is that while government can do a decent job with closed end projects that have hard measurable deadlines and external competition (including foreign), without those constraints things get bureausclerotic.

Wars, building the interstates, Apollo: yes. Defense spending and highway maintenance, not so much. The space program needed private involvement to kick into gear.

As I understand private industry has proven to be a hindrance on effective rail for years (e.g. auto lobbying, freight rail not wanting to play nice on sharing ROW, etc.). Not sure about this take.

27 minutes ago, E Rocc said:

If it's going to happen, it will happen under private ownership.

What government ownership advocates miss is that while government can do a decent job with closed end projects that have hard measurable deadlines and external competition (including foreign), without those constraints things get bureausclerotic.

Wars, building the interstates, Apollo: yes. Defense spending and highway maintenance, not so much. The space program needed private involvement to kick into gear.

You either didn't read the OpEd or you missed the full context which is: Privatizing Amtrak without federal policy reform won't work.

What frustrates me is the double-standard -- "Why can't we have great trains like other countries, or like our highway and aviation system?? But just keep the government out of it!"

Railroads didn't lose out to cars and planes. They lost out to highways and aviation infrastructure. Without the infrastructure, cars are still stuck in the mud and planes are taking off from grassy fields. That is something the railroads could compete with while owned and operated by the private-sector from soil to signals.

If you want great trains, equalize the policy treatment among all modes. Unfortunately, too many railroad executives are too narrow-minded. They just want to be left alone and die if their 19th-century Laissez-faire, public-be-damned approach to business cannot compete with 20th century New Deal-era infrastructure policies.

@KJP Thanks. Exactly the point. Good to see someone understands the full context.

Edited April 29Apr 29 by gildone

Exactly. Gotta have a robust rail infrastructure that is effective at delivering people to places fast. Europe has all sorts of private rail operators... on publicly-owned rail infrastructure that they spent "interstate highway money" on.

1 hour ago, E Rocc said:

If it's going to happen, it will happen under private ownership.

What government ownership advocates miss is that while government can do a decent job with closed end projects that have hard measurable deadlines and external competition (including foreign), without those constraints things get bureausclerotic.

Wars, building the interstates, Apollo: yes. Defense spending and highway maintenance, not so much. The space program needed private involvement to kick into gear.

What you miss is that the development pf every mode is the result of massive public investment. That's right, PUBLIC investment. In fact, noted conservative Paul Weyrich said it best: "Today's transportation system is not a free market outcome. Rather, it's the result of massive intervention by all levels of government on behalf of the auto and airplane". My point is: why should rail be any different?

Cause and effect: We built the Interstates on the public dime and that made it impossible for privately operated railroads to make a profit carrying passengers, so the trains went away.

Rail is the only public infrastructure that we seem to be allergic to improving. Roads, airports, and even the locks and dams that make our rivers navigable are all owned and operated by government entities, but we can't build rail because that's "woke" or some such nonsense.

12 minutes ago, JaceTheAce41 said:

Rail is the only public infrastructure that we seem to be allergic to improving. Roads, airports, and even the locks and dams that make our rivers navigable are all owned and operated by government entities, but we can't build rail because that's "woke" or some such nonsense.

I think that goes back to the fact that rail infrastructure was privately owned, so public officials didn't have to think about it much. Ditto the public. Fast forward and it's still a leap for some to think we need to invest in railroads, even now.

22 minutes ago, neony said:

I think that goes back to the fact that rail infrastructure was privately owned, so public officials didn't have to think about it much. Ditto the public. Fast forward and it's still a leap for some to think we need to invest in railroads, even now.

But in many cases the railroads were built on land given to them by the government. And government subsidized the build-out through tax breaks.

I agree that it's going to be hard lift to change course, but it needs to be done. Government ownership and maintenance of the rails (they can contract out the maintenance if they like, but government oversight of maintenance is important), combined with private ownership of the vehicles traveling on the rails, is working well in Europe. Benefits of a nationally-managed network, better rails for passengers, relieving the freight companies from maintenance responsibilities beyond their yards and from the local/state taxes they paid on the right of way. And yes, local/state governments will fight this "loss of revenue".

NO. That old land grant argument does not wash. Only about five percent of railroads were built with land grants and in exchange, the entire industry was obligated to move mail and troops at vastly discounted rates. The railroads paid back far more than they benefited, to the point where this requirement became a burden and was finally abolished in the late 1930's. I might add that the settlement of the west would have been impossible if railroads weren't offered an incentive to build in what was then a wilderness.

I might add that governments historically snatched from the railroads with one hand and gave generously to their competitors with the other. In one case, a ticket tax was imposed on railroads as WW II emergency measure to discourage unnecessary travel, but this was not abolished until 1962, by which time the passenger train was in serious trouble. In at least a couple of other cases (Toledo OH and Albany NY) The tax bill for train stations suspiciously approximated the subsidy to municipal airports. Air mail was also subsidized. The railroads were also heavily regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission, but competing modes were not and they lost market share because of this.

The last part of your message is correct though. We need real reform.

Edited April 29Apr 29 by neony

I'm taking the Southwest Chief next week from Chicago to LA... I'll be spending 2 nights in coach for the 44 hour trip. I think this is a good example of where improving track conditions even just moderately could speed this trip up enough to become a single overnight.

I also think passenger rail would have a lot to gain if it were more similar to air travel in the sense of publicly-maintained infrastructure with a variety of specialized operators. It seems like the current situation—underbuilt private infrastructure and a quasi-public operator constrained by competing political demands and expectations to perform as a profitable business—is holding back the US, compared to many peers in the developed world.

5 hours ago, neony said:

NO. That old land grant argument does not wash. Only about five percent of railroads were built with land grants and in exchange, the entire industry was obligated to move mail and troops at vastly discounted rates.

Very true. Except it was 7 percent of the maximum railroad route-miles at the industry's peak (1916] was built with land grants. Almost nothing east of the Mississippi River was built with land grants. The railroads bought the land and paid property taxes on it, including to help build local roads for their competition.

17 hours ago, KJP said:

Very true. Except it was 7 percent of the maximum railroad route-miles at the industry's peak (1916] was built with land grants. Almost nothing east of the Mississippi River was built with land grants. The railroads bought the land and paid property taxes on it, including to help build local roads for their competition.

I have since found a source for this information. All railroads were obligated to give the government a 50% discount, which did not end until 1945, or 76 years after the transcontinental railroad was complete. At the time the book (The Story of American Railroads, by Stewart H Holbrook) was written in 1947, it was estimated that lands which granted to the railroads were worth about $127 million, but the loss of revenue resulting from the 50% discount might have amounted to $900 million. Land grant railroads might have profited, but in the end, Uncle Sam drove a hard bargain.

Edited April 30Apr 30 by neony

Remember the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 which gave Amtrak $2.3 billion as a refund of wartime taxes that rail passengers paid from 1942 to 1962 -- continuing 17 years after WWII ended? Amtrak used that refund to buy the Acela Express trains that travel the Northeast Corridor. For the rest of the nation, Amtrak bought boxcars for mail and express shipments that didn't last beyond 2005. But they got most of it right, even though it benefitted only a small geographic part of the nation.

Why not a similar relief act for railroads nationwide that continued to pay the federal shipping discount long after the land grants were repaid to jump start a capital improvement trust fund for railroads? While $773 million may not sound like a lot of money in the grand scheme, what if it was inflation adjusted? According to the BLS inflation calculator, today that $773 million would be equal to $13,887,900,000. By the time a bill would be passed, additional inflation would be added. So let's call it a $14 billion refund owed to America's railroads.

1 hour ago, KJP said:

Why not a similar relief act for railroads nationwide that continued to pay the federal shipping discount long after the land grants were repaid to jump start a capital improvement trust fund for railroads? While $773 million may not sound like a lot of money in the grand scheme, what if it was inflation adjusted? According to the BLS inflation calculator, today that $773 million would be equal to $13,887,900,000. By the time a bill would be passed, additional inflation would be added. So let's call it a $14 billion refund owed to America's railroads.

I'm not eager to just give the railroads $14B. First, we need to figure out how to better enforce the rules on sharing the rails with passenger trains, because that doesn't seem to be working under the current system. And we need to make sure that that money goes to maintaining the existing infrastructure, building additional track (particularly sidings for passing trains and infrastructure investments to clear bottlenecks in the system) instead of stock buybacks or executive bonuses.

Frankly, I have zero confidence that the freight railroads have any incentive whatsoever to maintain the rails in such a way that we can have great passenger rail -- there's a cost and no economic incentive to do so.

(I'd prefer to give the railroads $14B in exchange for meaningful federal control over the maintenance and construction.)

It was just a very broad brush of an idea by someone with zero power or influence. I would guess that, in the unlikely event the idea goes anywhere, it would be like most other publicly held transportation trust funds -- a pot of money from which improvements by eligible applicants could competitively apply to achieve private AND public benefit goals.

9 hours ago, Foraker said:

I'm not eager to just give the railroads $14B. First, we need to figure out how to better enforce the rules on sharing the rails with passenger trains, because that doesn't seem to be working under the current system. And we need to make sure that that money goes to maintaining the existing infrastructure, building additional track (particularly sidings for passing trains and infrastructure investments to clear bottlenecks in the system) instead of stock buybacks or executive bonuses.

Frankly, I have zero confidence that the freight railroads have any incentive whatsoever to maintain the rails in such a way that we can have great passenger rail -- there's a cost and no economic incentive to do so.

(I'd prefer to give the railroads $14B in exchange for meaningful federal control over the maintenance and construction.)

Ah, but you could dedicate the money to passenger projects which also benefit the freight railroads, i.e. build the Porter IN-Chicago IL south of the lake bypass to get passenger trains on their own tracks and free capacity for NS freight traffic. Make it a win-win.

Edited May 1May 1 by neony

I wish Amtrak had more money and political power to buy up rights of way. Just thinking about the 3C line and in the past a lot of tracks between major cities were double and triple tracked. Why can't Amtrak just get the funding to build a dedicated RoW adjacent to freight tracks? Maybe throw some more subsidies towards the freight railroads to get them to play ball.

21 minutes ago, JaceTheAce41 said:

I wish Amtrak had more money and political power to buy up rights of way. Just thinking about the 3C line and in the past a lot of tracks between major cities were double and triple tracked. Why can't Amtrak just get the funding to build a dedicated RoW adjacent to freight tracks? Maybe throw some more subsidies towards the freight railroads to get them to play ball.

Amtrak does have eminent domain power to acquire rights of way. It actually condemned a freight railroad right of way in Vermont once to get action on the freight company's poor track maintenance. It took a long time but the state of Vermont, Amtrak, Central of Vermont RR, and the FRA partnered on rebuilding the tracks north of Springfield, MA up to Burlington, VT, providing a smooth, much faster route for Amtrak's Vermonter service. The tracks are now owned by a Genesee & Wyoming subsidiary.

Some background for those interested:

https://www.justice.gov/osg/media/231961/dl?inline

https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/503/407/case.pdf

37 minutes ago, KJP said:

Amtrak does have eminent domain power to acquire rights of way.

I think the law actually gives Amtrak a lot of power to ensure that the freight industry doesn't impede passenger trains. If we actually had pro-passenger-rail officials in the right positions that would be a big help.

1 hour ago, JaceTheAce41 said:

I wish Amtrak had more money and political power to buy up rights of way. Just thinking about the 3C line and in the past a lot of tracks between major cities were double and triple tracked. Why can't Amtrak just get the funding to build a dedicated RoW adjacent to freight tracks? Maybe throw some more subsidies towards the freight railroads to get them to play ball.

I think the most likely version of this would be the states buying up the main Rights of Way. Obviously Michigan did that with the Obama-era stimulus funds but Virginia recently did that with the Manassas line. This is mostly to make commuter rail better for the state but Amtrak runs on it as well. So that makes it easier for the state to pay for upgrade to the infrastructure, but I think more importantly, in the future, that is going to give them direct control over dispatching.

42 minutes ago, Dev said:

I think the most likely version of this would be the states buying up the main Rights of Way. Obviously Michigan did that with the Obama-era stimulus funds but Virginia recently did that with the Manassas line. This is mostly to make commuter rail better for the state but Amtrak runs on it as well. So that makes it easier for the state to pay for upgrade to the infrastructure, but I think more importantly, in the future, that is going to give them direct control over dispatching.

Virginia and North Carolina have purchased portions of a ripped-up former freight rail line, known as the S-Line, with the goal of upgrading it to 110 mph, dedicated for passenger rail service between Raleigh, NC and Richmond, VA. This follows the aforementioned CSX ROW acquisition between Richmond and Washington (only a portion of which is used for commuter rail). And it follows the state of NC's longtime ownership of the ROW between Charlotte, Raleigh and on to Morehead City.

Thus it will soon be possible to ride a passenger train from Charlotte to Boston without riding on a piece of track owned by a freight railroad company.

2 hours ago, Foraker said:

I think the law actually gives Amtrak a lot of power to ensure that the freight industry doesn't impede passenger trains. If we actually had pro-passenger-rail officials in the right positions that would be a big help.

Yeah I saw a video (Wendover Productions?), stating that Amtrak actually is supposed to have priority over freight but it isn't enforced. Also I saw that the freight companies overload their trains which slows down their travel, making it slower for passenger rail.

4 hours ago, Dev said:

I think the most likely version of this would be the states buying up the main Rights of Way. Obviously Michigan did that with the Obama-era stimulus funds but Virginia recently did that with the Manassas line. This is mostly to make commuter rail better for the state but Amtrak runs on it as well. So that makes it easier for the state to pay for upgrade to the infrastructure, but I think more importantly, in the future, that is going to give them direct control over dispatching.

Really this includes all main lines, regardless of passenger service because let's be honest here, the freight companies are not going to ever properly maintain the existing lines and we should want more competition for freight service.

3 hours ago, MyPhoneDead said:

Yeah I saw a video (Wendover Productions?), stating that Amtrak actually is supposed to have priority over freight but it isn't enforced. Also I saw that the freight companies overload their trains which slows down their travel, making it slower for passenger rail.

The freight trains also have gotten longer, but the sidings haven't -- although they're still long enough for passenger trains. Strange....

From the Rail Passengers Association -- this administration is going to kill somebody (maybe a lot of people), if not in the air then on the rails....

There are reports that Amtrak executives fired around 450 employees in response to pressure from the Trump Administration to achieve an operational profit in the next four years.

These personnel cuts will most definitely hinder Amtrak’s ability to efficiently serve America’s passengers and manage the score of major construction project that Congress funded through the Infrastructure Investment in Jobs Act (IIJA).

The Rail Passengers Association is particularly concerned about reports that Amrak has laid off members of its procurement team and capital delivery team, who are playing a vital role in managing billions of dollars worth of investments that will address the railroad’s crippling state-of-good-repair backlog. Your Association is calling on Amtrak to provide a high-level explanation to the public of why these firings were enacted at this particular point in time, which departments will be affected, and how these personnel cuts will impact operations and capital programs. 

If, as is being reported, Amtrak chose to pursue these cuts to achieve an operational profit -- a goal not required in any law passed by Congress, during a period of record taxpayer subsidies to the federal interstate highway system -- Rail Passengers strenuously disagrees with this decision. This move has the potential to undermine billions of dollars worth of long-term recapitalization efforts to save millions in its operating budget. Amtrak only recently announced record levels of ridership and revenue, both nationally and on key State-supported corridors; we believe the American public is best served by a strategy of improving its operating ratio by growing service.

Just last week we saw an air traffic control system meltdown at Newark Liberty International Airport -- yet another symptom of the federal government’s unwillingness to engage in sustained investment in the physical infrastructure, technology, and human resources that undergird the U.S. economy and our American way of life. The IIJA represents a meaningful investment in the renewal of our nation’s rail network. However, if we walk away from that investment less than four years after it was passed into law, we will be destabilizing this critical transportation system for generations to come.

The millions of passengers and communities reliant upon Amtrak for their social and economic success across the country are once again being told by suits in Washington DC that they don’t matter. You matter to the Rail Passengers Association. We are your voice. Help us get loud - Donate today!

With Determination,
Jim Mathews
President & CEO 

its no joke —

Gothamist

Amtrak's East River tunnels are in such bad shape that pa...

To illustrate the major repairs needed in one of Amtrak’s East River tunnels, a top railroad official needed to only brush his hands along a piece of metal.

^ Thanks, mrnyc. I've long felt that the LIRR trains go faster in the tunnels than outside of them; now I know why.

https://www.instagram.com/allaboardohio/#

From All Aboard Ohio Instagram post:

President Trumps budget proposes funding increase for Rail

• $326 million increase in passenger and rail freight funding FY 2026 requested by White House

• Reduced funding for intercity passenger rail by $75M but maintains $7.2 billion in funding from Infrastructure investment and jobs act

The budget includes growing overall support for rail. Overall white house budget recognizes rail as a vital backbone of American economy.

It's not like any governmental body in the United States would give back hundreds of millions of dollars to build a modern, comfortable passenger rail service that would improve our quality of life to try to weaken the national government in power...