This is it! This is exactly what I'm talking about! We are now in the midst of a disaster of national proportions, and passenger rail could not be there to help.
I got so p----- o-- at Amtrak management, that I figured I would never use this blog again. Just quietly let the server strike it from the records whenever it got around to noticing that I wasn't active.
But now is the time to speak. Being a compassionate conservative, I cannot help but point out that if national passenger rail had been funded to a level adequate for national interest, there would have been a pool of passenger railroad equipment that could have been rolled into New Orleans and/or the rest of the expected strike area for Katrina and the inherent efficiencies of rail would have gotten a lot of people out of the area faster, cleaner, and at less cost than any other form of transportation for evacuation.
Heck, we moved hundreds of thousands of soldiers by rail during WWII and did it fast! And there is no reason we couldn't do the same for civilian evacuations. That is, unless it is because passenger rail in this country has been truncated to the point of being useless by a simple minded Congress and a President that fails to see the value of a truly national system over a state-by-state piecemeal system.
Sure railroads want to get their equipment out of the storm's way, but we had a lot of warning with this one. So write and tell the President and his ineffective Secretary of Transportation that they should get in line to take some of the blame through this channel, too.
©2005 by C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com
No comments:
Post a Comment