An Amtrak Success Story

So as most people know, I support the idea of reintegrating passenger rail service into the national transportation system. For all their other problems California is showing that it can be done successfully.

Now granted, even in California, they have many of the same problems as Amtrak does everywhere else. The freight railroads don't uphold their end of the agreements and often there isn't enough money to do the things that would be necessary to attract more ridership. So while the routes are a success, they still haven't made a real dent in the congestion on the local highways.

If the freight railroads would ever start upholding their end of the bargain, and if Amtrak every started to run a real frequency on some of these "corridor" routes there might be a real possibility of rail transportation supplementing the existing system and doing so with a minimum of public funding.

Those are two big ifs, but the fact that we can even talk in terms of ifs is an improvement. For too many years Amtrak has been a money pit into which millions upon millions of dollars were sunk without there ever being a corresponding level of service. Before now, Amtrak has never really had to be business conscious.

But now that they are, they're finding ways to make their services useful and relatively cost efficient.

The government, both federal and at the state level, needs to find ways to spread this new model for Amtrak. Start rebuilding the passenger transportation system.

As long as it doesn't get too expensive (there's the challenge) we can't end up worse off for trying.