[MuddyAxles]

Originally Posted by blizzard07

Freight railroading is dangerous enough without these fragile passenger trains zipping around. There is simply not enough trackage for the volume of freight and it is projected to get much heavier. In the long run Amtrak is going to have to get it's own trackage or go away.
Blizz

Amtrak can't go away. Obviously, Congress starved it for decades, barely alloting enough money to continue the status quo. The railroads abused it for just as long, and guess what? Summbidge, ridership just keeps going up...with old equipment in most places, full trains on some routes, lousy schedules, less and less food service, just keeps growing, especially since gas prices went up and airline security measures become more and more invasive.

Some of the other "oldtimers" may have to correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the only reason the gov't allowed the railroads to end passenger service was if they permitted passenger trains to use their tracks (everywhere that Amtrak does not own the tracks). Railroad are considered common carriers which brings with it a bunch of responsibilities along with the government sanctioned franchise to operate.


Recently I read that, included in the original "agreement", if that's what they called it, there were rules established protecting passenger train priority over freight trains and I believe there were fines laid out.

Regardless, I remember reading that during the summer maintenance blitzes that everyone was running...I think in summer of '07...there was some meeting of high-muckety-muck railroad and government officials and the representatives from CSX and UP (the two worst culprits) were reportedly taken aside and told to either "fix" the problem or official measures would have to be taken, which could include fines and sanctions, as the article said. And things got better for a while.


Like everything these guys do, there's a huge knee-jerk reaction, heads are rolling and there's hell to pay...for about six and one-half minutes...then they're off on some tangent or other...or playing golf somewhere. Amtrak did start showing better on-time arrival stats for a while and here we are with problems again.

I do agree that there is little room today for passenger trains on "our" tracks; but not because they should go away. Our employers have forgotten what it takes to accommodate trains that must meet strict schedules for acceptable success. If schedules cannot be met, any passenger system is doomed to failure.


Also, freight trains are longer and heavier than in the days of mixed service ROW's. Higher speed passenger trains need a different track structure than freight...high-seed turnouts and super-elevated curves and cab signals.

This has been a pet subject of mine for a long time. The passenger business has changed. People don't particularly need to go "downtown" anymore. Stations need lots of vehicular parking space. Convenient availability of other modes of transportation is extremely important for many passengers.

Different modes of transportation need to cooperate, blend schedules, offer ticketing and route advice/planning for each other, and share facilities. These are transportation services that have been available for decades in other countries. We lag far behind here in the U.S.

Another area we suffer in is speed. Speed for surface transportation relates directly to competitiveness. Many travelers making intermediate length trips would actually arrive at their final destination earlier by rail than by air if our average train speeds simply doubled.

To double average speed (cut trip length in half) would require ROW separation from freight trains, imho. I just don't see how 130-150 mph trains could run side-by-side with us even if all the track and signaling problems were magically solved.

Even though there are numerous abandoned ROW's around, there would still be thousands of NIMBYs and environmentalists working to kill any kind of aggressive plans to build a national passenger rail system which is goofy because those people moved by rail would consume a fraction of the energy and produce a fraction of the pollution...something environmentalists should want, but they'd still fight it).

None of the above assumes funding could be found to build the thing and run it for even the first year. Oh, and in case you are wondering, there is not a single passenger system in the world that completely pays for itself from ticket revenues.

The only way the railroads afforded to run passenger service years ago: there was little competition from airlines and automobiles and they moved ALL the domestic mail for the Post Office (there was some air mail later on) and express freight, as in the Railway Express Agency...the business taken over by UPS and others.

Summary: We'll piss around with a little of this and a little of that, there never will be a national system & just as much money will be spent on a bunch of failures, imho.