I swear, I can’t make this stuff up if I tried.

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One of the things about Amtrak’s lack of success is that it has some really bad routes. For example, look at their Cardinal / Hoosier State route.  Why the hell are they still operating that route?  Who really wants to go from New York to Chicago via Charleston, WV and Cincinnati, OH?  That has to be a really low density train. However, I could see the need for the Cincinnati-Indianapolis-Chicago run being like another Acela in the northeast with frequent high-speed trains.  In theory, this sounds good, right?

The suggestion of stopping any service to the residents of West Virginia will bring Senator Byrd yelling and screaming threats of hell, fire, damnation that the good lord himself couldn’t muster.

And THAT, my friends is the real problem with Amtrak. Everyone complains about how much of a fiscal black hole it is, but when it comes time to eliminate routes that are part of a powerful senator’s state, it’s a politcal third rail, and nobody would ever dare suggest that Amtrak stop running it’s Cardinal train through the great state of West Virginia.

A lot of people don’t like to take Amtrak because it’s slow and the trains are always late. Unless you live on the northeast corridor (Boston to Washington) or the California coastline (LA to Sacramento), that’s about right. When Amtrak was founded in the early 1970s, congress made a few mistakes. First, they mandated that Amtrak serve certain cities. Worse yet, they didn’t fund Amtrak’s infrastructure. So in many cases, Amtrak runs on the same lines as the freight railroads. That means that they can’t go at higher speeds and worse yet, freight gets higher priority than passenger traffic.

This problem is incredibly similar to the problems that Boston’s MBTA is facing right now on it’s Worcester line. The on-time performance is abysmal. Most of the time the problem is because CSX, who owns that line, gives priority to its own traffic, and rightfully so. The MBTA needs to spend the money to run their own tracks from Framingham to Worcester to eliminate that problem.

Every year, the federal government gives billions of dollars to our highway infrastructure. And every year, the federal government gives billions of dollars to our airports. None of this is expected to be paid back.  At the same time, President Bush expects Amtrak to survive without a penny of government funding while improving service and performance. That can’t happen unless we fund Amtrak’s infrastructure. If Amtrak owned its own rails, you would see some serious increases in speed, on-time performance, and customer satisfaction.

When you think of modern rail, the first country to come to mind is Germany or perhaps France. Most of their rail is not only government subsidised, but usually government operated as well. While I’m not usually an advocate of another federal government program, I really think this one is worth while. There is no reason why we couldn’t do a high speed rail link between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia that made the trip in less than three hours.  This won’t be cheap. But when we consider how expensive gas is getting, rail starts looking more and more attractive.