Funding and The Great Lie

We intend to write about the great resurgence and demise of passenger railroads and passenger railroading in the United States.

If you are a liberal and making the connection between President Dubya and words in the title - forget it! The Great Lie in passenger railroading was told and continues to be told by a great many other politicians than George W. Bush. In fact, it has its roots in what passenger railroading was and had become as early as the 1950s. We only think it bears a dialogue now as another conservative president (Reagan was another) tries to zero out Amtrak funding.

If you are a conservative and starting to get a bee in your bonnet that this writer must be a railfan or some kind of "foamer" and that the only reason our slant appears to be in favor of Passenger Rail is to force the average taxpayer to pay for us to ride our silly trains, then you may be on to something. But trains aren't silly. They are a vital part of the enconomic fabric of this country, for both freight and passengers, and therin is another part of The Great Lie.

By the way, the slant of this blog is towards the right of the political blogosphere and heavily towards the preservation of passenger rail. But we hope to make our arguments persuasive; and pray most fervently (Oh, horrors! Virginia, we are also believers in the Christian God) that our reasoning will be heard by our elected representatives and elsewhere such that our nation does not turn The Great Lie into The Great Mistake.

But there is also some urgency, and we can't tell how much time we will have to post to this blog, so we are going to start at the ending. Our next post will tell you about The Great Mistake.

We invite you to email the writer at mistertrains@gmail.com. For your homework, pick up a copy of Trains Magazine or Railway Age Magazine. Then read it. ©2005 mistertrains@gmail.com