It's a good idea; as a private enterprise Amtrak can finally close down all those money-losing routes through the Midwest and South, and focus on improving high-speed rail service on the Boston-Washington and Los Angeles - San Francisco - Sacramento corridors.
Hmm, looks like they turned a public company funded mostly by the government into a set of privately-held for-profit companies funded mostly by the government.
It was much better idea before cars got to be popular, and is always a good idea when cities get too big - more than about 200,000 people - for cars and buses running on roads to provided adequate transport for commuters.
If you want less cars on the roads exploit the - existing - rail tracks more enthusiastically. Adding a few inter-city trains onto your commuter services doesn't cost much.
Train transport isn't appreciably cheaper than self-drive cars, but it kills many fewer people per passenger-mile.
They certainly don't work as well, and more and more people are bitching about the private companies sufficiently that re-nationalisation is not completely inconceivable.
I'm reluctant to attribute derailments etc to privatisation per se. The particular way in which the privatisation was done is more plausible, since it was so dunderheaded and politically correct.
By all means close the routes and rip up the rails, but don't f*ck up any potential revival by selling the land. Learn from the mistakes made in the UK.
In New England there's actually a company (re) opening the first privately-held passenger rail service venture in 50 years or so in the US, on the old Providence-Worcester main line.
Their prospectus says they'd need an average of ~750 weekday round-trip riders spread across two northbound and two southbound trains per day to turn a profit in the first three years of operation, which doesn't seem at all like an unreasonable figure.
We're running into that problem in the Boston area with the "South Coast" rail expansion from Boston to Fall River/New Bedford; there are lots of former routes that go that way but the lines were closed in the late 1950s, and in the meantime the right of way has been all built up by developers. I don't know that anyone has built right on top of the former trackway as much of that is probably still owned by the state, but you've got subdivisions and jutting up right against it and people's yards are six inches away from the old tracks.
It's been in "development hell" for years, and millions of dollars have been spent surveying and pondering this route or that route.
In the US probably the best option for high-speed rail that keeps one out of eminent-domain conflicts as much as possible and avoids too many grades and curves is to follow highway right of way whenever you can; unfortunately that would also likely mean using elevated tracks like China has done in some areas, which is extremely expensive.
One of the problems with the existing tracks in the Midwest and South is that unlike many places in the northeast US, where the right of way is well-protected, there are thousands of level grade crossings which cause a perpetual danger both to people and equipment. Amtrak sometimes has had equipment shortages because some idiot rolls a tractor trailer onto a crossing and the train smashes into it at 50mph; even if nobody is killed or seriously injured you often end up with a smashed-up locomotive and six coaches banged up that are out for repairs for months.
Amtrak's currently involved in a lawsuit against a feed lot in Kansas where some workmen accidentally knocked the rails on the main line nearby out of alignment and neglected to notify anyone, derailing six coaches.
It's an even bigger bummer when a sleeping car is damaged; on the routes in the East that don't have double-decker service there only ~50 Viewliner sleepers that Amtrak has a ton of money sunk into, they're something like 4 million bucks per unit and when a couple get knocked out of service it's a big hassle.
Our Spanish friends have been having trouble meeting production schedule on new units:
That's great, as long as they're not being subsidized.
Good for them. I have no probelm with rail, just the absurd subsidies that commonly occur. Rail is great for freight but not so great for people, except in some specific circumstances.
Much of the NE land the rail lines were/are on is not owned by the state but by B&M/Pan Am Railways. Basically, if you want do do anything with rail lines in the Northeast, you have to make them happy.
Interestingly, one of the problems is regulation! They have to run heavyweight trains for the moment because the FRA regulations are much stricter than in Europe and only one US company manufacturers railcars that meet FRA standards.
Ideally on low-traffic routes you wouldn't need to run a full heavyweight set of coaches, you could run a diesel railcar much like the ones they have in Europe currently or like the Budd cars some railroads operated in the 1950s. Basically a bus on rails powered by an automotive diesel engine mechanically coupled to the driving wheels as opposed to a diesel-electric.
The regulations are something the freight railroads lobbied heavily to retain and the Obama administration has worked to reverse:
Explain to me why divesting of passenger service is a *good* thing... The trick is finding a way to make them profitable. Why should rail only be available to a select few?
Passenger service on rail is problematic. Rails carry freight. Freight moves slowly and is easy to disrupt passenger service. My father was a dispatcher for the railroad and he would hold a freight train two hours ahead of a passenger train just to be certain the passenger train was no delayed. If the rails carry passenger trains more frequently, the tracks become nearly useless for freight.
Rather than shutting down passenger service in less used areas, new rail could be laid, but that has it's own problems. Traditionally trains ran to the center of a city. That would be expensive and hard to do now interfering with roads and utilities. Passenger service could be run to stations around the suburbs, but that means a lot of homes and neighborhoods would be disrupted.
Rail can work if people want to use it. DC has commuter service from two directions that I know of. There is likely also commuter service along the northern corridor as well. None of this is high speed though. I have driven along highways in sight of the trains and the cars are moving faster. The people who use it seem to like it a lot. And each one is a car off the highway.
Not a well written article. Your statements appear to be saying the Obama administration is blocking the use of DMUs and the article seems to be saying the opposite, that the administration is make a rule change to allow DMU use. What do I have wrong?
Lol! In Frederick, a rail line runs straight up the middle of East St even though it is only a two lane street. It has been since I was a small child that a train ran on that line. But the city is not allowed to pave over the rail. They did manage to get permission to pave right up to the top of the rail so it at least is not a hazard to suspensions anymore.
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