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.