That's Just Peachy!

That’s just peachy.  See this article.

The Amtrak board of Bush sycophants has fired David Gunn, and thereby has decapitated the dying patient in the presumed interest of saving the organs.  That’s all that will be left when they get done, the organs will be sold to the highest bidder or apportioned among those states that may still want a remnant of intercity passenger rail.

Poor Mr. Gunn.  In this writer’s humble opinion, though possibly sometimes the most infuriating president that Amtrak has ever had, he is the single most experienced and capable president Amtrak has ever had.  And he “slowed the pace of change,” the stated reason for his dismissal, because he recognized that it was the only way to accomplish what needed to be done in terms of preserving any realistic system.  

Mr. Gunn had Amtrak on the road to financial stability.  This infuriated the Bush Administration and Amtrak’s so-called board, because they wanted him to fail at this task.  They saw him as the last of the breed and the highly-experienced scapegoat for the agency’s ultimate collapse.  Instead he became—what appeared to most of us interested in intercity passenger rail—a savior.  

Perhaps the board will hire New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who is doing a bang-up job of getting New Mexico back on passenger rail by letting us all watch the equipment stand idle near the abandoned Santa Fe shops in Albuquerque.  If he decides to park the equipment from the Southwest Chief there, I, for one, won’t watch it.  

Write your representative.  Write your Senators.  Legislation is the only thing that is going to stop this slide into oblivion that will make the United States the only major industrialized nation that does not have nationwide intercity rail passenger service.  

© 2005 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com