Since Amtrack wrecked the track, should the owner pick up the tab? If a freight train, weighing a couple of orders of magnitude more than a passenger train doesn't wreck the track and the Amtrack train does, who's fault is it?
And again, who owns the tracks?
It _can_ be that long, especially if there are multiple locomotives. Why not limit the length of a train into what a single locomotive can comfortably handle, including steep hills. ? It will require an extra engineer in each locomotive, compared to a multi-locomotive train with a single engineer.
With advanced security systems, these shorter trains could run every few minute. Also assembling and disassembling shorter trains will increase throughput.
Due to the useless of the US rail system, no wonder that much of the fast parcel service run on trucks.
That effectively limit the rail system to huge bulk transfers, such as oil and coal, while some rethinking would allow also other kind of services.
Of course it doesn't, my point was that there has always been the expectation that it would, while the same standard is definitely not applied to airlines or the interstate highway system.
You mean _the_ Ronald Reagan, the greatest champion of big-spendy big-big-big government that there ever was?
In FYI 2012 the federal government paid for 12% of Amtrak's operating costs. That hardly sounds like "hopelessly in the red" to me.
You could fund Amtrak for a decade for the cost of a couple F-35 strike fighters. I asked the Air Force though and they said unfortunately they're gonna need all of 'em for the shooty-war with China that
It would be easy enough to turn Amtrak into a self-sufficient profitable company, as I said, all you gotta do is axe the long distance trains that serve rural populations in "red states." It's not big surprise that while liberals and conservatives alike don't much enjoy paying taxes, when push comes to shove we don't much like giving up the perks that government provides along with them (though we definitely place different value on different things.)
Hey, sorry Kansas, Missouri, and Indiana, you said you wanted smaller government. Okay, well here ya go.
It would also drop the capacity of the track in half (or more). The number of trains that can use a section of track, per unit time, is more or less a constant, independent of the number of cars in the train.
Nope. There isn't enough safety margin.
Oh, good grief. You haven't a clue.
You haven't a clue what you're talking about.
Is that what they're teaching kids in schools these days? All the more reason to terminate that.
As a plain fact, Amtrak mostly exists to benefit white pseudo-liberals. And as a plain fact, class warfare is a Marxist concept meant to incite revolution. It's a lot to do with community organizing, and nothing to do with not subsidizing things.
People who'd lecture others on race really ought to study the horrendous history of the parties they support and their devastating impact over time. Or just look at Harlem, Chicago, Detroit, Compton, Oakland, Baltimore, LA, New Orleans, or Washington D.C. All of those used to be safe, even up-scale.
Pretty much any hellhole you can think of -- all spout the same slogans and the same solutions, but for 60 years, they only ever sink deeper. And always will, as has happened since the beginning of time when people model their societies on those principles.
Cheers, James Arthur
A myth. But I invite you to quote Reagan advocating for more government spending.
The sole exception I remember was funding to beat the Soviet Union in an arms-race and thereby *avoid* a third world war, which worked out to be quite a bargain in blood and treasure both, AFAICT.
Cheers, James Arthur ~~~~~~~~ "The trouble with our Liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so." --Ronald Reagan
Yeah the one time I took the train from Buffalo to NYC it was horrible. (delays just sitting on a siding waiting for the freight train to clear the line.) And now the Governor is giving the city of Buffalo ~$1M to study putting in a new train station. There's no bleeping traffic, why do we need a new station?
George H.
You learn fast!
You have no idea what you are talking about. Do you really think the railroads can figure out what they can and can't do realistically? They want to make money. What you are suggesting will cost them money with no return for them.
A couple of posts back you said it yourself, coal and iron ore don't need to get someplace in 3 days instead of 5. No one uses JIT methods for power generation or steel making. There are too many uncontrolled factors that can cause shutdowns. So they have many days of raaw materials to allow them to keep running.
I think relatively little oil goes by rail, but I could be wrong. I expect pipelines are much more economical.
Bulk freight works well with rail. It is cheap as long as you don't have worries with tight schedules. Other freight is not a good match. Even if you get a quoted delivery date, extra time is required to load and unload at each end. Using trucks the goods would already be there. Neither railroads nor users are stupid. The sort of freight you are talking about would be *much* more expensive and make the railroads much harder to manage. There are so many aspects of the railroads you don't understand.
-- Rick C
Other than the Cuban missile crisis in the 60s, when were we even close to a world war with the Soviets? The spending by Reagan may have helped us win the cold war, but there wan't much blood involved. The cold war was more economic than militaristic anyway. We both could build state of the art militaries and kick ass anywhere in the world. But we could do it with the least impact on our economy. That's why we won. The Reagan era may have sped up the collapse of the Soviet Union, but it was inevitable.
-- Rick C
Welcome to the twenty-first century. We can make safe automobiles that drive themselves in freeway traffic. Simpler hardware would do wonders for rail transport systemic costs. The traditional safety margins are NOT immutable.
Yeah, the Soviet Union was on the verge of taking over the world in the late 1970s and early 1980s, except for the fact that their allies in Southeast Asia, Africa, and the Middle East were getting the crap kicked out of them routinely around that time and the SU could hardly do a thing to stop it.
Case in point:
The Reagan administration did manage to blow a lot of dough on military projects of dubious usefulness, like re-activating the Iowa-class battleships, the MX and Pershing II missiles, and "Star Wars."
in 1986 Gorbachev put near total nuclear disarmament on the table aside from IIRC a small token force, if Reagan would simply mandate that SDI research remain confined to the laboratory. Reagan wasn't having it.
So instead of a toothless, much reduced Soviet Union, what we got was a Cold War that dragged on for another half a decade, then collapsed leading to thousands of deaths as all the former republics broke away in chaos, and for that our "reward" was about a fifteen year reprieve.
Now we've got an aggressive, fascist, ascendant Russia with a big fraction of the nuclear arsenal we left them with, and we've just expelled their diplomatic team like it's 1983 or something, nearly every bit as nasty a state as the Soviet Union ever was. Wow, what a bargain.
Trump seems to think he's either gonna play buddy-buddy with these guys, or lay down the law hard, depending on his mood. He doesn't understand what he's dealing with.
Oh, he _advocated_ for less government spending, sure. Rather like Trump, Reagan had a pithy quote for every occasion and loved to bloviate all day on all sorts of topics of interest.
The substance of the administration's fiscal policy was quite a different story, however.
If only his actions aligned with his words, we might indeed have ended up with less government spending at the end of his terms, rather than a federal deficit that ballooned three or four times what it was when Carter left office.
But he was simply not congruent.
I will admit though that as compared to Trump, Reagan gave the impression of being a generally more intelligent, thoughtful, and empathetic person, regardless of his inconsistency.
I'm sure The Donald's administration is going to make even me yearn for it to be 1985 again. I'm going to close my eyes, put on my Rock Me Amadeus LP and hope it happens.
Missed my point entirely; my point was that given that Amtrak makes the majority of its profits in the Northeast and California, it is those "white pseudo-liberals" who are _themselves_ subsidizing the riders on the money-losing long-distance lines in "flyover country." Pack that stuff in and Amtrak becomes a profitable private enterprise immediately, and it doesn't matter one bit the demographics of the ridership as the only color that matters is green.
Where we differ is that I don't mind at all chipping in on it.
And I frankly don't give a toss what Marx said about anything or how Marx or his followers defined their terms. "Class warfare" is not an exclusively Marxist term. AFAIK the Communist Party of the USA doesn't own it as a trademark.
Have you actually _been_ to Harlem at any point in the past 30 years or so? It's not 1981 anymore dude, all the places you mention are or are headed to be gentrified as f*ck. You're way more likely to be robbed by your tattooed hipster bartender serving you a $14 martini as you are to be robbed on the street in most places in modern Harlem.
"Urban" Americans mostly live in suburbs now, where the crime rate has always been low and continues to decline as it has been year over year for 40 years now.
And the modern Democratic party bears little resemblance to the Democratic party of the early 20th century - the "Dixiecrats" all became Goldwater Republicans.
These places only really exist in your imagination.
Isn't that cute. He believes commodoty software is human-safe. The history isn't so great.
need more drivers.
-- This email has not been checked by half-arsed antivirus software
That depends on your definition of "very little". There is quite a bit of oil shipped from the upper midwest to the gulf, since Obama has blocked the pipelines.
You haven't a clue. Have you ever seen an intermodal container? They go from ship, to rail, to a more local delivery, being loaded and unloaded once. The days of box cars ended forty years ago.
There is a rail line about 2mi from my house that has a 100+ car freight train pass every hour or so (24 hours a day). There is some chemical transport but it's almost all containers or car carriers. Yes, cars are loaded onto rail cars at the assembly plant, sent all over the country via rail, and only put on trucks for the last few miles. Trains are *far* cheaper than trucks for freight.
And, of course, you're again, wrong. There are very few passenger trains in "flyover" country. No one wants them. They're only there to satisy the limosine liberals who don't even know (or care) that no one rides them. No one would miss them if they went away.
Why woud you force something on people who don't want it?
Of course you don't. You agree with him, without even knowing what he wrote.
Uh, oh! TomG is going to get mad at you!
Now take a look at Chicago or Detroit (or any other large inner city).
You're wrong. They just hide their racism better. So well that you can't see your own.
Have you ever been to Detroit or South Chicago? I didn't think so.
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It was a bit more complicated than that. The USSR was intimidated into spen ding more on it's defense forces than it could really afford, and the short fall in quality of life became glaring enough to drive widespread dissatisf action, which eventually lead to regime change.
The parallel with the US is striking. In the US the 1% have essentially poc keted all the benefits of economic growth for the last decade or two, and t he consequent dissatisfaction has given you Trump. Sadly, he's no Mikhail G orbachev.
One of the more ironic Reagan quotes. Nancy had what brains there were in t hat couple, and she was into astrology.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
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