Passenger Rail

Hope?

2012-01-21T08:31:00.000-07:00

I don't have much hope for Amtrak.

Before you all get in my face about not supporting Passenger Rail, let me add this: I never had much hope for Amtrak.

So things haven't changed. The fact that Amtrak has managed to struggle into its fifth decade proves that I am just a little bit wrong, and also a little bit right. For any government-created entity to struggle that long while coping with the daily - and I do mean daily - political battles is a massively high-scoring achievement. Then there are the idiots that run Amtrak.

No, I'm not talking about Amtrak's board, or its management! I'm talking about Congress and We The People. Come on folks! Is this how you'd run a business if it was all your own to run?

There have been times when my hope for Amtrak flickers brighter than now. And there have been times when I thought it was doomsday for sure. The Reagan administration was one of the latter. While I admire Reagan conservatism, I deplore the tendency of conservatives to look at every government subsidy as anathema. Reagan scared me as far as Passenger Rail was concerned. He had the guts and the wherewithal and the character to accomplish whatever he wanted. Subsidizing Amtrak wasn't one of those "whatevers."

But I have never felt so hopeless as today, when it appears that the lip-service to HSR has all been paid out and the next Congress will most certainly cut Amtrak money again, and when there's (sometimes reasoned sometimes not) argument that Amtrak should be broken up and the profitable parts kept and sold to the highest bidder. (Read "profitable" as not losing as much money as the other parts.)

Don't get me wrong, because I do realize I'm all over the map here. It would have made a lot more sense to break up Amtrak during boom times rather than on the (very slow) recovery side - and I'm not convinced of that yet - of a major economic recession.

But it's not all gloom. No matter how dark the days, Amtrak always seems to survive. And as long as there are tracks, there will be other - I hope better - Passenger Rail projects out there. If I had the money, (I don't - the recession has crapped on my finances) I would invest in Passenger Rail, but probably not in any part of Amtrak as it exists today.

So I guess I should have opened with: I have hope, but not much for Amtrak.

©2012 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

The Devil Is In The Details

2011-12-15T15:55:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest problems with any kind of changes (whether upgrades, downgrades, or innovations) in our Passenger Rail system - we're talking North America here - is the complexity of our system. I'm not talking about the rail network, nor am I talking about engineering. I'm talking about all of the ways that we go about financing and managing passenger rail.

For most of you who are interested in this subject, it's not necessary to go through a comprehensive list. Let me just list a few.
1. Private enterprise and private enterprise with public funding. Example: ARR
2. Public funding, public oversight, private operators. Narrow gauge in the west, NM Railrunner
3. Public funding, public oversight, public operators. Chicago Metra
4. Public funding, state ownership, private operator. California
The list goes on.

The point that I'm getting around to making is that entrenched complexity is hard to overcome. There is an inertia to it.

Now, life must go on, and it would be a disaster to shut down, say, a commuter railroad, even for a week, to reorganize it. So how do we get from where we are to where we need to be?

One idea is a reset button. It's not as far fetched as you think, and it's been proposed for more than just passenger rail. A reset button law could solve a mortgage crisis, for instance. A reset button law could erase the political establishment that some blame for the decline of America. A reset button law could erase years of bad law and the results of unnecessary litigation that imposes costs on everything we do.

The trouble is, first we have to decide on what the default state of things should be. Now, in government in The United State of America, we have The Constitution. That's the default state, and everything else in government is window dressing.

Back to Passenger Rail. Default state could be defined as X number of routes serving Y number of population centers with a total population of Z, a defined train frequency, and defined services. What does it take to have that, and would any private enterprise be willing to run it? On a specific date, press the reset button and Amtrak goes away. There's more to it than that, of course, but you get the idea.

This is not a new idea. In the Judeo-Christian Bible, Deuteronomy prescribes the seven-year cycle of forgiveness and even the "default state" in which the debtor is to begin the next cycle.

Just thinking, but the devil is in the details.

©2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Serious Business - Proposition 5

2011-11-25T11:07:00.001-07:00

The longer we wait, the longer it will take to get things right. Am I talking about Passenger Rail? You bet!

As I write this, Amtrak is probably going to finish the year with its first reduction in ridership in a long time. That is in part due to the weather. No joke, it's not the fault of a politician or bureaucrat. It's also in part because Amtrak, like other railroads, has to take time out to upgrade and maintain. Upgrades will help in the long run, but not in the short. The reason is that there simply are no alternate routes for Amtrak trains. Some have to be shut down, others converted to bus routes until the trackwork or storm cleanup is done.

The United States no longer has enough alternate rail routes to just re-route a passenger train without having serious impact on freight deliveries. Those spare routes that are out there are just too unsafe to run an Amtrak train. For the first time in history, freight rail is challenging the laws that established Amtrak and Amtrak's right to use their private rail systems. I don't know if they will succeed, because many politicians with demagogue it and point to the fat-cat railroads as just bad public-private partners.

I dislike this description of how government wants to involve private enterprise in something it can't get right on its own. I have used the term, but it's like the term privatize. It's a bad way to characterize a situation where the credit goes to the government and anything bad is the fault of the private part of the equation. When you come down to it, all industry is a public-private partnership. But the public part of the partnership should only have three jobs: 1. Provide protection of individual property rights though a stable system of government and national defense where business can be assured that it's ownership of property will not be challenged or usurped by the government or challenged by an enemy. 2. Provide a stable economy and monetary system where commerce can proceed without fear that the government will, by caprice, devalue investments made by private parties who expect a reasonable return on their investments. 3. Where an industry is deemed a necessity to maintaining the other two situations, provide the monetary means to assure that the private side will not have to take all the risk to keep the government stable.

So we need more passenger route miles, and we need them right away, or Amtrak will just erode more. If these route miles come from private investment, then, as in 3. above, the government should be willing to step in and provide some capital. However, as I have said before, it shouldn't be off the table to just dissolve Amtrak and structure something else - something better. Amtrak, after all, has pissed off enough commuter agencies that is is losing their contracts to private enterprise. That is good, because the competitors for those operating contracts are private enterprise.

Where is the money for that federal funding going to come from? From all of us. But there are other ways than through taxes. Deregulation of industry could raise almost as much tax money as would significant increases in taxes on high income entities. Deregulation of freight rail has turned it into an industrial powerhouse.

Again, I ask the question. Do we have the political will?

©2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Serious Business - Proposition 4

2011-10-23T14:00:00.001-06:00

This is the fourth in a series of blog posts about how America might go about getting private enterprise back in the Passenger Rail business.

Proposition 4 is that bankers and venture capitalists are going to have to be willing to take more risk with less guarantee that government will back them up.

Hold on, you say? This is supposed to be a blog about Passenger Rail and not about the sorry state of the banking system. Well, the two overlap.

Proposition 4 probably applies to a lot of businesses, particularly heavy industries and heavily capitalized ones. Railroading is both. America has gotten itself bunged up in an economic situation that has no way out without risk. And this risk is going to have to be on the part of private enterprise and government both. As a country, we have to be willing to believe that government bailouts of businesses -particularly financial ones - simply postpones the inevitable, and that the term "too big to fail" should not be a part of our vocabulary.

Now, from my point of view, government regulation and public policy drove the financial industry to ruin when institutions were forced to lend money to home buyers who had no hope of paying it back. This house of cards had to fall. No, I don't care who's to blame, but I do care who's to blame for our current situation. Now we have a situation where the lending institutions are gun shy, and the government has just slapped on more regulations. This is probably good for the single-family home market. It will keep home prices reasonable for years. But it's not good for the business community, and not for heavy industry. Heavy industry runs on capital. If the capital is not out there, heavy industry does nothing but stagnate.

I think Passenger Rail could return to the private sector if lending institutions were willing to forgo the promise of government bailout along with the regulations that come with it. I think that, as time goes on, institutions with money to lend will see the upturn in demand for Passenger Rail, the astute management of the rail industry in general, and with God's grace the lifting of onerous regulation, and then see in Passenger Rail an opportunity to make a lot of money. This will do a lot for the country and a lot to lift Passenger Rail out of the doldrums of Amtrak.

The only question is: Do we have the political will to accomplish this?

By next time, I'll decide if there is a Proposition 5.

© 2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Serious Business - Proposition 3

2011-10-09T18:13:00.003-06:00

So far, I have suggested two propositions regarding a new direction for intercity Passenger Rail in America.

The first was that the freight railroads could absorb some of the losses it may take to get passenger service re-integrated with the rail system in general. I think this is true, but only under certain conditions.

The second was that freight railroads do not have handling passengers in their business plans, which, I think, is false for the reasons stated. (Go back and read!)

Proposition 3 is that freight rail will want some serious concessions from government in order to re-assume the burden of moving passengers in any form greater than their lackadaisical handling of Amtrak. I think this is true, but I don't think these concessions will have to be as costly as one might think.

Go back to the airport/airway model again. Making railroads copy this model wholesale is just not a good idea. The railroad business has too much capital tied up in land, track, and other infrastructure. This wouldn't be a concession to a profitable private enterprise, but a wholesale nationalization. But I think freight railroads, the profitable ones that have experience in leveraging real estate to their advantage, would listen if government was ready to provide the land and pave the way for new kinds of passenger terminals.

Didn't railroads used to lose money on terminal operations before? Why would they want to go back there? These questions do not jive with historical perspective. Railroads lost money on passenger services for many reasons, the chief among them being loss of revenue to cheaper and faster modes of transportation. But hear me out.

I don't have a crystal ball, but I don't see anyone saying that air travel is going to get cheaper or easier. I don't see anyone saying that highway congestion is going to go away, or that trucks are going to stop using the Interstates altogether. I don't see any competition on the horizon for moderately fast, comfortable and efficient Passenger Rail. Terminal services, from large stations to small, could be where the already well established sales departments of freight railroads could shine. I'm not talking about service from the 1930s to the 1960s, but the kind of amenities that could be provided today. Luxury hotels, amusement, shopping, short-term layover facilities, casinos, tours, and things that haven't been created yet, all integrated to a much greater degree than possible before our digitally connected era.

I think there are freight rail companies that would be willing to get things like this going for passenger rail, and make them profitable, given just the minor subsidy of real estate to build on, and the minor guarantee from government that the tax structure and regulations for this form of transport would remain predictable and stable for the better part of a half century. Railroads aren't the staid old corporations run by grandfatherly old men that many people think of when they think of railroads. In the new era, the average railroad executive is going to be just as connected as the rest of us. And maybe just as creative.

Next time, Proposition 4.

©2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Some Serious Business - Proposition 2

2011-09-25T14:24:00.002-06:00

Proposition 2: The business plans for the freight railroads do not include Passenger Rail.

If we are talking about the major players, I think this is a fallacy. Sure there are some railroads, probably mostly short lines, where you could say there will never be a scheduled passenger train. And you'd be right.

If I were running a major railroad, however, I would want to have a business plan in place that includes contingencies for carrying passengers. Even for carrying a lot of them. Given the current world political and economic climate, I can imagine many scenarios where Passenger Rail could become very strategically important, both economically and militarily.

So I cannot believe that the people running the major, Class One railroads, are not smarter than I am.

So the next question becomes this: Would operation of passenger services by modern freight railroads make Passenger Rail better, or worse?

Does anyone see where I'm going with this?

Next time: Proposition 3.

©2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Some Serious Business

2011-09-17T14:52:00.000-06:00

Starting with this post, I want to try to shed some of the politics and get back to the roots of this blog. I started it because I like trains, and I like passenger trains even more. While I find freight trains and their infrastructure fascinating, and while passenger trains never would have existed as they did in the United States during the golden age - between about 1939 and 1959 - without freight rail, I still find nothing more pleasing than the thought of riding, dining, and sleeping aboard a passenger train.

So, I've been thinking. What could we actually do in America to get back to those thrilling trains of yesteryear, with just enough of the modern and innovative thrown in to make everybody happy.

The first thing I thought about was not so-called high-speed rail. The first thing I thought about is a reverse Amtrak. What does that look like, you ask? Well, it may take several blogs to lay it out for you.

The thought arises from the fact that railroad deregulation via the Staggers Act did not take place until after Amtrak was formed. But we've never deregulated Amtrak. The freight railroads have thrived under deregulation, and, unless the heavy-handed progressives get their way in congress, will thrive even more in an economic recovery. Much of freight rail did not even lose money during the recession and is not losing it now - even if whether or not the recession has ended can be debated. Could the same have happened for passenger rail in an era of deregulation?

Proposition One: The profitable freight railroads could probably absorb short-term losses on passenger rail, still make a profit,and possibly turn passenger rail around for the better. All of the innovations that make freight rail profitable today did not come about because of government regulation, but because of the profit incentive and competition for routes. (Government please listen: Your only function should be to make sure there is a level playing field for private enterprise, and then get out of the way.)

Next time: Proposition Two.

©2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

What Happens When All The Yapping Stops?

2011-07-30T18:19:00.000-06:00

Most of the traditional media has tried its level best to keep the country focused on the debt ceiling "crisis" - aka budget crisis, aka Republican hostage situation, aka etc. ad infinitum. But what can we, who love trains and train travel, learn from all of this?

For one thing, we should start to learn not to place so much faith in our elected politicians in matters of establishing wise policy. I saw a bumper sticker this afternoon that pretty much sums it up. "GOVERNMENT DOES NOT SOLVE PROBLEMS, GOVERNMENT SUBSIDIZES THEM." Just because government - I don't care if it is federal, state or local - puts money into a project or policy, that doesn't mean it is a wise policy.

Making good transportation policy is one of the most important things that government can do for the people of these United States. I will say that a different way: Making GOOD transportation policy is, etc., etc., etc.
If making war is one of the biggest "rackets" out there, then we've got to figure out a way to turn transportation, and that includes railroads, into a "racket." Because we've sure learned to do a good job of making war in the process. We have not, as a nation, learned much about good transportation policy.

Another thing to learn as it relates to transportation is that there will never be an unlimited well of money springing from the federal government. Although many people would like this to be a falsehood, I don't see how it can happen. As such, we should design our transportation projects to get the maximum ton-mile or passenger-mile per dollar. And that means railroading. Despite its anachronisms, railroading is still the cheapest way to move many tons and many passengers from point A to point B.

A third thing, related to the second thing, is that we need to get over the idea of letting the government help us out by sucking money out of our pockets first and then paying for some service we need at a later date. We've got to learn to know the real cost of getting from point A to point B and be ready to pay it. If I knew the real cost to me and to taxpaying society - which has been shrinking, by the way - when I decide whether to fly, drive or take the train, even if the train loses in the comparison, it's the only way I'm going to make an informed decision. Consequently, it's the only way that a truly free society can develop the modes of transport that will move it forward with a robust economy.

What should we do? I don't think this so-called crisis gives us any pointers, other than to never let things get so bad that the only choices we have are all bad ones. But maybe there are choices out there. I will get to them in another blog.

© 2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Macro - Micro - Whatever

2011-07-17T16:04:00.000-06:00

The worries I have expressed in previous blogs about the financial viability of New Mexico RailRunner Express can be boiled down to this: Can a relatively low-density population state support conventional commuter rail / intercity rail when the terminal points are even lower-density population cities than exist elsewhere in the state?

Unfortunately, I think the answer is "no." At least the answer is "no" in the present economy and for the foreseeable future. Also unfortunately, I see this as a microcosm of the same situation with high-speed rail.

I hear you saying that RailRunner doesn't even come close to high-speed rail. Well, neither did many, if not most, of the projects that got funded under Mr. Obama's first round of funding.

Like RailRunner Express, the projects shouldn't be funded just because there is some interest and the money is there. The transit board that is responsible for RailRunner is finding out that nobody knew where the fares were going to come from, who was going to ride, where they were going to start their trips, where they were going to end them, and how much they were willing to pay to avoid the hassle of driving the same trips. (For high-speed rail, this should be read as the hassle of flying.)

Only one of RailRunner's two terminals is in a city of reasonable population density. (Santa Fe to Belen, NM)To draw a comparison, but with contrastingly higher population densities, this would be like building a high-speed rail line from Springfield, IL, to St. Louis, MO, but making the south terminus at Rolla, MO. The losses from the extension to Rolla would probably more than cancel any imaginable black ink to be had from the northern leg.

If we're going to fund high-speed rail, let's not just try to build something because the money is there.

© 2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

The Real Stats - From The Horse's Mouth

2011-07-10T15:40:00.000-06:00

If you are concerned that I've gone all barnyard with my last two titles, think again. Animals have always been a good analogy for railroading of all kinds. After all, it is an iron horse.

Anyway, I thought I'd pass along the real cost of operating my state's commuter railroad, Railrunner Express. My source is an Op-Ed piece submitted by Larry Abraham and published by the Albuquerque Journal. Mr. Abraham is the Vice-Chairman of the Rio Metro Regional Transit District board, and also happens to be the mayor of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque. Mr. Abraham is concerned that NM taxpayers will be paying for the train for a long, long time and there will be new and still-hidden costs to keeping it in operation.

The most disturbing part of all this is that the capitalization of Railrunner appears to have been done in the darkness of political subterfuge. It is easy for any of my readers to say that it is impossible that the public didn't know what was going on. All I can tell you is that the details were kept so complicated and changed so often that eventually everybody just accepted Gov. Bill Richardson's mantra. "Don't worry. Be happy. We're getting a train!"

So to the details - and I am paraphrasing Mr. Abraham. The state spent a half billion on RailRunner. NM issued highway revenue bonds to pay for it. This mean that with principal and interest the state will have to pay $850 million over the next 16 years or $18 million a year with two balloon payments (in 2025 and 2027) of $230 million each. On the revenue side, the train will take in about $60 million, and it is unclear whether that is all farebox or some creative accounting is adding federal grant money, etc.

More recently than the date of publication of Mr. Abraham's editorial, we have learned that the track needs $25 million in maintenance that is not budgeted, and there is an undetermined cost over the next decade to meet federal requirments for Positive Train Control.

If you want to make ugly comparisons, this money could have purchased every current rider a new car for every year until the bonds are paid off, or could have paid for a leased car and hired a chauffer for the trip. That's efficiency in the use of tax dollers!

I don't think shutting down the train is an option. We pay for it anyway, whether it is running or not. What I do think needs to be done is for it to be stopped in the short term until we can develop a business plan where fares come far closer to covering fixed costs. It's not so unreasonable, for example, to note that a round trip to Santa Fe from Albuquerque in you car is going to use about half a tank of gas. That's going to be near $30 at today's gas prices. So why not bring fares closer to this? Will we lose riders? Maybe some. But as long as the attraction is "not driving" and the cost is somewhat less, the riders will be there. We can lower the fares when the volume of riders goes up.

Some wags have said we should do it the other way around. Lower fares almost to nothing and watch the volume soar. Then adjust the fares upward when people get used to using the train. I don't think we can afford to spend the extra money in this economy when we are already spending more than enough for this little train.

I love trains. I love passenger trains. But bad examples of bad planning using somebody else's money aren't going to make people any more train-friendly than they already are.

©2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

The Chickens Come Home to Roost

2011-06-19T18:37:00.000-06:00

None of us with any knowledge of the business of Passenger Rail think that it is a walk in the park. Start a passenger train, let alone a full schedule of trains, from scratch requires capital, hard work, luck and a loyal customer base. Preferably that base is a broad one, drawn from a variety of demographics. If you are running a train, you should also hope that both ends of your line originate traffic.

Readers of this blog will recall my skepticism and incredulity when then New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson went out of his way to fund rail passenger service for the Mid-Region Council of Governments, AKA MRCOG. This service, one of Gov. Bill's "legacies", from Belen, NM, through Albuquerque, to Santa Fe, is now known as New Mexico Rail Runner Express. Look on my second page to see some photos.

I wrote at the time that the route was too costly and that the whole project would eventually cost the taxpayers of New Mexico many millions of dollars in subsidies. Albuquerque just isn't the kind of metro area that you find in places like Seattle or Dallas. If done at all, the service could have used existing tracks instead of new ones, used DMUs instead of full-fledged communter rail equipment, and grown with demand rather than taking a "build it and they will come" approach. Even now, with heavy rail tracks built all the way into Santa Fe, the equipment could be owned and operate by another entity under subsidy. And New Mexico will now have the dubious distinction of trying to make BNSF Railway run the Lamy to Raton portion of the original Santa Fe Raton Pass line in order to keep just one long distance train, Amtrak's Southwest Chief, running.

In the future, if you hear someone ask, "Who killed the Chief?" the answer will be either New Mexico or Railrunner Express.

The Albuquerque Journal of Sunday, June 19, 2011, reports that the service averages "about" 4,500 passenger boardings on weekdays. That's not a lot. It's why the beginning of the whine has started, as the Rio Metro Regional Transit District board decided to cut weekends from the schedule. Passenger boardings on weekend days of only 1,000 make this seem logical, but the politicians on the board see it as a way to speak to current Gov. Susana Martinez. "Whine! We need more taxpayer money. Whine! The businesses who depend on weekend recreational travelers will lose money. Whine!"

Frankly, as a taxpaying NMer, I don't see why I should have to subsidize riders to the tune of an (estimated) $40 to $80 a boarding just so they don't lose the profit from that latte. I don't think we should let them eat cake, but let them adjust their business practices to take advantage of the business that remains. Or learn a lesson, which is: Don't depend on the taxpayer to keep you in business.

But the better lesson is this. When you're local politician starts to talk about his or her legacy, hide your wallet and your kid's wallet and your grandkid's wallet. The state will be picking their pocket for the legacy forever.

©2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com
Also posted on A Bit Off New Mexico.

Political Extremes

2011-06-05T12:02:00.055-06:00

For a good while, I have been just flabergasted - check my spelling here - at the political extremes that have been reached in playing with the Passenger Rail football. This is one reason I haven't had much to say of late. At the one extreme is the high speed rail initiative begun by the Obama administration and perpetuated by those government agencies that recognize they have a whole pot o' money to get power over if they somehow hitch their train to the high-speed bandwagon.

At the other political extreme are conservatives who can't recognize a good deal when they see one. And, as most of you know, I am a political conservative, but, by God's grace, not as stupid as some, I hope. And in the middle stands Amtrak, which has proven time and again that it can play at both games, but would be better off if the game didn't change every year or two. I think this constant game change is one reason that Amtrak didn't pick up the ball and run faster with it, taking upwards of two years to decide what kinds of new engines and cars to order, and now it looks like it is too late.

I now agree with most pundits: America has no high speed rail at this point in time, and is unlikely to have any true high speed rail at any time in the reasonable future. So the administration's push for high speed rail is really a political subsidy for "higher" speed rail, which translates into the following: If you have a political entity (such as a transit district) that runs passenger trains or is going to run passenger trains sometime in the future, even if you are only in the "study" phase, you can get high speed rail money as long as your trains will run faster in the future that they do now. For the study-phase districts, that could be 1 mph.

While we push ourselves to opposite poles of the political globe, we fail to realize that there is a real place in America for Passenger Rail, if not for high speed rail in particular. Americans have been speaking about this to Amtrak with their pocketbooks for several years now. So have millions of commuters who use Passenger Rail to get to work every day. Yes, this involves a subsidy, but the conservatives among us should see that as an opportunity to start up a business and move the whole shootin' match onto the private, for-profit stage. That is no less likely a scenario than having a true high speed line (125 mph or more average speed) running between two major cities by 2021.

A good long vacation - the first in several years - has given me a bit of new energy, and I will be trying to post on this site more often than recently. The vacation gave me a chance to start my next novel. Will it have trains in it? You betcha!

© 2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

'Nother Way

2011-03-05T17:20:00.000-07:00

The ongoing, highly politicized "Battle For Wisconsin" has got me thinking about other ways to fund Passenger Rail.

The train of thought - now leaving from Track 5 - goes as follows: The whole Wisconsin thing involves public sector unions. Any unionized Amtrak employee is effectively in the public sector. Why can't ours be a totally privatized but subsidized passenger rail system. Unions welcome, but no longer public sector unions. Private enterprise can't give away the store without losing out on the profit.

Why can't our government - we, as taxpaying citizens, recognizing that Passenger Rail is part of a balanced national security and national transportation policy - decide how much it wants to spend on passenger rail. Let's say for the next 10 years to make it a stable system. And then why can't we put it up for bid. The company that wants to show some gonads and take a shot at making a profit above and beyond covering the tax money gets to bid its own X number of dollars for the privelege. Define adequate progress for 3 years right there in the bid documents. The hard part would be defining progress realistically - not by having Congress say it has to turn a bottom line every year or else.

The prize: Getting to make a profit. As big a profit as you want if you manage it all correctly.

The penalty: If no adequate progress in 3 years the whole thing goes up for bids, including the subsidy and the investment of the original proprietor. The whole subsidy goes back to the taxpayers out of the proceeds and everything starts over except for the infrastructure already in place.

I don't know if the USA has enough political will to try to accomplish something like this. But I do know that, given the capital, I'd be one of the bidders.

©2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

No Rail Projects - But Don't Touch Those Unions!

2011-02-21T11:08:00.000-07:00

As we have been talking of late about the rare chance to fund HSR and other new Passenger Rail projects, and of the need to hold our collective taxpayer bladder and keep from pissing it away, I thought a comment or two about Wisconsin, the power of the people, and the power of labor unions would be in order.

First, I applaud Wisconsin Gov. Walker for taking a stand on spending money the state doesn't have on rail projects. They've waited this long and they can wait a little longer. A compromise wherein the state perhaps spends some money on planning - including a detailed study of costs and maybe even a 20-year projection as to ridership - wouldn't be out of the question.

Notice how Gov. Walker has enough political power to do this. Passenger Rail protesters haven't packed the state capitol or called the governor a fascist. The people of Wisconsin elected Gov. Walker and the Republicans in the statehouse to do a job, and they are trying their damndest to do it. EVEN THOUGH railroads are typically unionized, I didn't see organized labor on the capitol steps either.

But let the same Republican take a step that looks like union busting, and all hell breaks loose.

So a lesson, if you will. Make that A LESSON!!!

Political power that comes from the ballot box is how this country was set up. But political power that comes from money and influence is always there. As The People, we can do one of three things with that, none of which will make everyone happy all of the time.

First, we can let it take over, as Gov. Walker is determined not to do in Wisconsin, but as it has done in the federal Executive Branch. This is either bad, or - at best - so-so for everyone. Bad for the general populace, the vast majority of whom are not union members, and so-so for union members. Why so-so? Anyone who has ever been a union member will tell you that the rank and file many times gets treated just as badly by the union leadership as it does by management.

Second, we can fight it. This is a so-so result for all. Collective bargaining and the labor movement have done a lot of good things in this country, and they can do a lot more in the right settings. I am thinking that public-sector labor is not one of those settings. When a public-sector laborer - I'm not talking first responders - gets paid more than a private-sector laborer in the same job, things "jest ain't right."

Third, and this may be anathema to some conservatives, we can live with it. Just like we didn't vote for Mr. Obama to take advantage of a crisis and change the face of America, we didn't vote for conservatives to do the same. If Gov. Walker needs to flex some muscle to get the Dems back to the bargaining table, so be it. But please don't ram through conservative changes that are just as radical as the changes that Mr. Obama has tried to make to the American political landscape.

What does this mean for Passenger Rail? I didn't agree with the last Bush any more than I agree with the Last Obama. You can't completely cut off a mode of transportation from government support any more than you can cut off a proven method of keeping wages and working conditions fair for some workers. And yet, you can't just throw away money on either. Let's hope Gov. Walker has the intelligence to see that where both labor strife and rail funding are concerned.

Can I have an Amen?

© 2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

What's Supposed to Happen

2011-02-13T16:03:00.000-07:00

That's not a question.

Many pundits are reporting the demise of High Speed Rail (HSR). The reasons given are many, but the most prominent are the fact that Republicans are now in control of the House and of many state governments, and the related fact that most, if not all states, are going to take a hard, second look at what is going to be spent for HSR, both by the states and by the federal government.

I'd like to add a third main reason, and then go out on a limb. The third main reason is the way that the Obama administration threw the funding helter skelter at so many different and disconnected HSR projects.

The limb, which I am now sawing off from the trunk side, is my belief that this did not kill HSR. The facts just slowed it down a bit; and that is a GOOD THING.

Although some of the projects already well into or past the planning stage appear to be well thought out, from an engineering standpoint, no good thing can come of the fact that they are not designed to mesh, or in most cases even to connect. Railroading learned its lesson in the 19th century, when the lack of a standard gauge and standard time became an obvious hindrance to the growth of business. It's only because Private Enterprise Railroading has little to no say in these projects that they are so disconnected, or so I hope. In any case, most freight railroads have taken a dim view of these projects, for now; and that, too, is thanks to Uncle Sam.

We have many visionary leaders in the railroad industry today. I would like to see them come forward with plans for HSR that are national in scope and standardized from an engineering standpoint. If we are going to use existing right of way, then the plans should say how this will hold up 20 or 30 years from now. If we are going to pay the way for new rights of way, then we should commit to an engineering design that is so forward looking that there will be no reason to worry about how it will fit with the current system. Maybe it will be railroading, but not railroading, something new and unique that derives from railroading only in the way that a covered hopper derives from a covered wagon.

Yes, it'll cost money. Our NOW, NOW, NOW mentality suggests that we would rather throw billions at it now than spend millions a year for, say, 60 years, and get something really great. But the former would be a pity and the latter a blessing. The push for HSR initiatives and funding NOW, in Congress and elsewhere, will be a pity. Let's think on it, design for the future, and when the economy is back on its feet, we will be ready to build something we'll all be proud of.

©2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Let Me Be Perfectly Clear

2011-02-06T14:37:00.000-07:00

Like a good glass of fine gin.

Compared to some bloggers, I don't get many comments. HEY OUT THERE! (Hands waving followed by one or two flares for effect.) So pardon me if I take one to task for not listening.

In my last post, I compared Pres. Obama deciding we needed HSR to Pres. Lincoln deciding we needed a transcontinantal railroad. First the historical perspective, which I should never forget doesn't exist for most of you out there. . . (loss of readers) . . . Lincoln saw the need to establish a transcon as a security issue. A century and a half ago, security meant keeping the Union whole, and that meant keeping more states tied to the north. I'm not sure that Obama knows what a security issue looks like. I think that it is more likely he picked up HSR as a potential way to create jobs over a long period of time, kind of like the Eisenhower and the Interstates, although that was a security issue at the time as well.

But transportation is a security issue. As a security issue, it is one of the few things that conservatives, even fiscal conservatives, should see as worth spending taxpayer money on. We need a balanced transportation program, and it should not just be so that somebody with enought money or enough power can travel from here to there in luxury, but it should be so that the business of the country can be carried out no matter what the internal or external circumstances; i.e., war, peace, recession, prosperity, a plague of Democrats or an infestation of Republicans.

A balanced program would include both low- and high-speed ways for passengers, freight, and military materiel to get from point A to point B within the domestic confines of America and our closest neighbors. Low-speed ways exist in abundance, and are currently heavily subsidized by the government. The primary low-speed modes are highway (auto, bus, truck), rail, and internal waterway (boat, barge). All have been heavily subsidized by government, rail the least. While highways and waterways continue to be, there is proof that government could turn some of our highways and waterways over to private enterprise (sell them), and that private enterprise would make a profit. Yes, the government will never recoup all its years of investment in the sale, but the taxes collected over the future years of private ownership can be shown to be more than adequate to justify the initial investments. The government more rapidly turned over the railways to private enterprise, and realized a prosperous nation from sea to shining sea as the reward for all of the land grants that made the transcontinental routes possible.

(The proof is in the Illinois Tollway system, which, had government not decided to keep hold of the cash cow, would have paid off its bondholders. It continues to pay for its upkeep and expansion without assistance from government subsidy except for the laws and government that allow it to function in its current form.)

The only high-speed mode we have today is air, and boy is it subsidized. I think it could be argued that the government (read taxpayer) will never recoup its investment in airways, airports and the infrastructure that includes high-tech navigation equipment. But I think it could also be argued that the feds could sell the airway system to private enterprise and that, by tackling efficiencies and future capital investment in the spotlight of profit, private enterprise could make a go of it and no future subsidies (perhaps except for government mandated upgrades) would be needed.

So we get back to HSR. It is not pie-in-the-sky, because the technology exists and is proven to work. We need HSR because the cost to invest in high-speed highways (never mind waterways) is ludicrously higher and there is no proven tech. We need HSR for security reasons, because there will be no high-speed mode of transportation for passengers, freight or materiel if the air fleet gets grounded by any of a number of plausible threat scenarios. We need HSR because we can engineer security measures into new infrastructure that has had to be after-the-horse-left-the-barn engineered into our existing modes.

Bottom line: It may take another 150 years for HSR to give us the return on our investment as a nation that the transcons are giving us and the owning shareholders today. And I am not saying that America shouldn't expect something in return. But I, for one, am tired of my country having the short view. There has to be a way that we, as taxpayers, can support this and realize some return, if only in the long term.

And who says HSR has to be just for passengers?

© C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

HSR Swings Like A Pendulum Do

2011-01-30T15:08:00.000-07:00

Although I'm politically conservative, as most of my readers know, I'm also pro-subsidy when it comes to Passenger Rail. I have speculated on a few occasions on how we can get more private money into Passenger Rail, but the bottom line is that there is just too tiny of a liklihood of turning a profit on passengers.

I don't necessarily think it's impossible any more. I'm convinced that many governmental agencies that now run Passenger Rail of all kinds are rife with waste and could be substantially closer to profitability if that waste was curtailed. But as a practical matter . . .

Here's the kicker. For once, I agree with Mr. Obama. While I don't see it as one of his Sputnik moments, I do see the opportunity to evolve Passenger Rail into a premiere form of transportation for America as a moment similer to Lincoln deciding to support the transcontinental railroads. There are just certain challenges that are too large and too risky in the short term to be funded solely by private funds. But they can be funded to a greater degree by private funds if public money is there to make the investors see the - pardon the pun - light at the end of the tunnel. I would be much more likely to invest a billion of my own dollars in HSR, if I could see that I would be able to start getting a return in the short term, while the longer term returns are still out in the realm of dreams.

Here's the other kicker. I disagree that any HSR money should be put into the hands of existing or even new government agencies. I think that the money should be set up so that private enterprise can start the projects just as though Uncle Sam were simply another investor. With proper oversight and with private money added, business can get its feet wet - see where the efficiencies are and see where there's money to be made - in what is essentially a new way of doing things for rail. The absolute last thing we should do is give money to Amtrak for HSR.

There are a lot of places we should not be spending public money - healthcare for instance - but we should not lose sight of the importance of transportation for economic stability and defense strategy, and simply for the welfare of the general populace.

©2011 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

At Least Some Objections Don't Hold Water - Or Freight

2010-12-18T17:17:00.000-07:00

A good many of the objections to spending money on Passenger Rail and/or High Speed Rail (HSR), now that Republicans will take over the House of Representatives, are grounded only in "don't spend money", and not in any sound logic. The most illogical one is this: Spend the money on improving freight rail, and the highways will get better because the trucks will be off of them.

Yes, Virginia, it is true that getting trucks off the Interstates is a noble goal, both from the standpoint of congestion, and from a Green perspective. But spending government money on the freight railroads isn't going to get us there. For one thing, the freight railroads are still in competition with the truckers, last time I looked. And there is a lot of money in the trucking lobby that says trucking will continue to get largesse from the gov't. for years to come.

For another thing, the freight railroads still haven't figured out the formula to compete for short-haul freight. And whether we like it or not, short-haul is what is going to continue to cause congestion in urban areas.

The gov't. could do two things that would not cost the taxpayer any money, and accomplish what there is to accomplish as far as getting trucks off the Interstates. #1. Stop allowing increase in truck size and weight (hopefully decrese weights) on the highways. Any federal or local legislation that does this should also include a short rider that prohibits multiple trailers with 100 miles of an urban area of 75,000 people or more.

#2. Take half of what is already being spent on highway maintenance for 2 years and turn it over to Amtrak and/or short-haul commuter rail agencies like Caltran or urban transit districts. Yes, there would be 2 years of deferred maintenance on some roadways. If we didn't have to apply political correctness to everything, we could apply brain power instead and pick and choose which highways simply could not make it for another two years. Spend the remaining half on them. I bet there will still be some of the remaining half left over.

Before I started writing this post, Ohio had already opted out of the high-speed rail money form the Obama admin - okay, I'll stop calling it a regime, because that angers some folks. That will go elsewhere, but it shouldn't be spent on freight railroads. Not if we know what's good for us.

Before I completed this post, Mr. Obama had signed the tax bill that will give us two years to see if a continuation of the current income tax rates will stimulate the economy. I bet it will. Sadly for Passenger Rail, there will probably not be as much money offered to HSR projects for a long, very long, very very long time. Happily, some people will now have a chance to think of better places to put the HSR money that remains in the hopper.

©2010 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Passenger Rail Project Funding In Jeopardy

2010-11-13T16:43:00.000-07:00

Damn those Republicans! Damn those Tea Party radicals!

Some of you will think I say this seriously, and others - those who know me better - will know I say this with tongue firmly implanted in cheek. Yes, Republicans in control of the House and in control of more state governments will put Passenger Rail funding (read: stimulus money) in jeopardy. For example, Wisconsin will suspend work on the high-speed rail project between Milwaukee and Madison until it is determined that it won't cost the state too much money. And it will. Ohio appears to be opting out of high-speed rail funding, too. And for the same reason.

Another example is right here in my (adopted) home state of New Mexico. Bill (never met a project I wouldn't fund as long as they put my name on it) Richardson will be out as governor as of January 1, 2011, and his longtime lieutenant gov Diane Den-eeesh (as Mr. Obama pronounces it) will not be taking over. Instead, the intelligent electorate has chosen a conservative, Susana Martinez, to be the state's first elected female governor, and first female Latina governor in the nation. She hasn't specifically targeted Railrunner Express and other rail projects, but you can bet she'll think long and hard before throwing in with those of us who would like to see the Denver (or Cheyenne) to El Paso rail corridor go forward.

That Passenger Rail projects are in jeopardy may be a good thing. I said may be, because I’m not sure it is. Building on what I have said in a previous blog, for which I was criticized as actually being anti-Passenger Rail, let me state a reason.

I don’t think anyone can disagree that funds for rail projects are limited. The conservative victories just shake us into this reality from the euphoria of finally having a national rail passenger system that didn’t have to beg for funds. Okay, it will always have to beg, but you know what I mean.

Given the reality that funds for rail projects will always be limited, and will have to be shared with freight railroads, a step back is what we need so that funds are not wasted on projects that cannot possibly succeed in the way we all dream they should.

The freight railroads, by the way, have a better handle on reality than Amtrak or than states that are simply taking money to do studies for high-speed rail because it’s there and coming to their states. How so? First, freight railroads have long resisted public money, then embraced it when it became inevitable. They are spending a lot of their own money on improvements, and it is unlikely they are going to take funds just for the hell of it. The funding they get will go to real improvements that are going to net them real bottom-line numbers. Freight railroads are not going to take money that makes them beholden to government unless they see a real upside.

Not so with Amtrak, which took the money long before it had any real idea what to do with it. Not so with state and local transportation departments and agencies, who are so used to taking money when it’s offered that they have ready-dug pie-in-the-sky holes they can throw it in, depending on the size of the check.

Conservatives putting the brakes on projects, wanting to get more for the money or be sure the projects aren’t really pre-dug black holes, may just be a good thing to let us step back and make sure the funding is directed to projects that, in the near term – say a decade – have a chance of success.

©2010 – C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Inspiration

2010-10-17T16:24:00.000-06:00

It's amazing how a single development - make that a singular development - can change a lot of things and undo a lot of damage. The feature article in the October 2010 issue of Trains, is about how the Staggers Act - deregulation - transformed railroading. It is inspiring to know that, no matter how much damage an intrusive government has already done to a free enterpries, that the simple act of freeing that enterprise to compete in a free marketplace can turn almost certain disaster into good news. Those among you who follow politics know what I'm talking about.

What does this have to do with Passenger Rail? A sidebar to the article speculates on what railroading would be like if regulation had never been lifted. Long before deregulation, government got into both passenger and freight rail where it deemed either or both too important to fail. (See "bailout.") Other than guaranteeing that there would still be private railroads with some reasonably good track on which to run Amtrak trains, deregulation didn't help Passenger Rail much. There are still laws that limit what freight railroads can do, among which are the Amtrak reauthorizations that still require them to carry Amtrak trains.

Government will never get out of the railroad business completely. As I have noted before in this blog, government has always had a stake, no matter how indirect. But what would happen if government pulled out of Passenger Rail today?

Your first reaction is: There would be no passenger trains! But are you sure? Are we so bereft of innovation and revolution in this country today that we couldn't figure out some way to make the trains stay, or even get better? I have repeatedly said that Passenger Rail will never make a profit. But I'm not so sure that this isn't just feeding on a defeatist attitude that permeates lots of our thinking today.

So I'd like you to think about it. And comment please, or send me an email. Let's see if we can come up with some ideas to sent to some private capitalists who may think differently, too.

©2010 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Shameless Self-Promotion

2010-10-03T13:42:00.001-06:00

What good is a blog if you can’t do a bit of shameless self-promotion. And, in that vein, I would like to announce that I have published my second novel as an Ebook.

A Tunnel Too Far is not about railroads or railroading per se. Its setting, however, is Chicago of the early Depression Era, and the famous and sometimes infamous tunnel system that underlies the central part of the great city. The story has plenty of tunnel train action, and railroad, streetcar, and Chicago ‘L’ background.

The title above and the Important Link at right link to a web page for the book. Or you can go directly to the Amazon Kindle Store, to download it to your Kindle eReader.

I also have the Ebook formatted for other eReaders, such as Nook (Barnes & Noble), Sony, and Microsoft Reader, but I have yet to set up a store for those versions. If any reader of this blog is interested in getting a copy in a format other than Kindle, please email me (a comment also works) with your return email address and I will correspond with you about getting you a copy.

As an amateur historian and collector of railroad books, I can’t see that eReaders will ever supplant the printed and bound page. But I really can see the attraction, and Ebooks are taking off like lightning in the bookselling marketplace. In addition, I know that Kindle, Nook and MS Reader have versions that run on desktop or laptop computers.

Here’s the link to Passenger Rail: If you ride a train or commute, you may be tired of standing in line to buy a newspaper on the way every day, or of carrying a book to read that weighs more than the sandwich in the pocket of your overcoat. If so, an eReader is just right for you! It’s the “ride home” entertainment of the 21st century.

And if you read my book and enjoy it, please recommend it to others.

Thank you to my readers and followers.

Getting Too Conservative

2010-09-28T18:30:00.001-06:00

From the very start of this blog, I have taken the position that U.S. Passenger Rail is one of the few exceptions to the conservative free enterprise rule.

Rail is a mode of transportation that has always been too important to the economy and general well being of Americans to allow it solely to free enterprise. Witness the years that the feds have spent regulating railroads, first with antitrust action, next with the ICC, and now through the STB. Well, some things are also too important to leave Free Enterprise alone in the same room with. Passenger Rail is one of those things.

Unfortunately, instead of alone with Free Enterprise, via Amtrak, we have left Passenger Rail alone in the same room with Government Excess.

Why are there no compromise positions any more?

For two reasons: 1. Both the right and the left have decided that politics is no longer a system of compromise. 2. Under the banner of political principle, the voting populace has gone along with them.

Where are the people who can see the Constitution as one giant compromise of many different political points of view? It is a compromise that worked and that is still working. A similar compromise for Passenger Rail would require free enterprise to invest in Passenger Rail just as much as it would require government to give free enterprise a helping hand. The way I see it now, too much of the funding for Passenger Rail goes to government entities to spend. What is spent on private enterprise – and there appears to be a lot of it vying for the right to build new HSR infrastructure – is spent on government connected companies working under government specifications. This stifles innovation.

I am no more demanding that the government stop using tax money for transportation subsidies any more than I am asking private enterprise to fund new rail routes without tax money subsidies. I am hoping for that grand comprise – embodied by our Constitution – that will get us there in new and innovative ways. Without the political radicalism.

Soup

2010-09-12T15:37:00.000-06:00

I've recently been reading two books that have everything to do with Passenger Rail but nothing to do with Passenger Rail in the 21st century. The first of these is a book called Super by Jim Lehrer. Yeah, the same Lehrer who is a news commentator. It's a novel that takes place aboard the Super Chief and environs in the 1950s. I got an opportunity to board this train in Chicago a couple of times, and the book brings back the memories of the old low-level consists, before the high-level era and the addition chair cars to it.

What does this have to do with soup? Let me tell you about the other book first.

The second book is Appetite for America by Stephen Fried. It's a history of the Fred Harvey restaurant chain and how Mr. Harvey built the first "not fast food but good food fast" establishments in America - with the help of the Santa Fe. Now to the soup.

Soup is made good or bad by what you throw into it. But soup is never ever made with just one ingredient. It's not even one main ingredient with a little spice, but many main ingredients worked in and cooked until the soup is just right.

Soup in something the Santa Fe had right. Witness how the high-level concept became an Amtrak standard where the system could handle it. Witness its ability to put together luxury trains that treated the passenger well and fed them better. Fred Harvey was the food standard on the Santa Fe.

In the 21st century, our ingredients for Passenger Rail soup are (in no particular order): stimulus money (lots), antique equipment, plans for bit and pieces of a national high-speed rail system, plans to upgrade existing tracks to "higher speeds," performance contracts the the freight railroads are choking on, and a soupcon of new regular-speed long-distance routes. Does anyone like paper soup? Hope so, because 90% of our soup for the 21st century is paper. Some of it stimulus money that hasn't been printed yet. The dash of spice (the new routes) isn't going to help.

Are we going to choke on our soup like the freight railroads?

©2010 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

High Speed Rail – Boom or Bust

2010-06-19T13:46:00.001-06:00

The bloom is on the rose for HSR. A lot of money is available to be spent on HSR projects, and still more is likely to come our way. True or false?

There is no doubt that President Obama’s domestic policy includes favorable conditions for HSR projects. Many communities are interested in HSR, and many private enterprises are prepared to offer their products and services to help build a high-speed system. The element that seems on the fence is whether the most important private enterprise – the railroads themselves – are prepared to offer their products and services to make this happen.

I think it will happen, eventually. And I hope something like a public-private partnership gets it done. Public – so that capital costs that are too high for private enterprise to finance all at once can be borne by the public at large. Private – so that there is always the possibility that somebody with an innovative mind and a new concept can make a go of HSR and make some money at it. Money to be made not just by providing goods and services, but by running trains.

Railroads are big business. And right now, big businesses are afraid of the government. Look at big oil, and big manufacturing (read: the auto industry). One false step and you jump from the gravy train to the shit list, without passing ‘go’ and without collecting $200. Most railroads don’t like the FRA (Federal Railroad Administration) or the federal DOT telling them what they can and can’t agree with. And that’s just what is happening in the process of granting the funds to get these projects moving. There is a draft agreement that was created without private input, and the railroad involved must agree to it. The private partners in the scheme are going to have to play second fiddle to the public (read: federal government).

I predict that most railroads will not want to cross the Obama regime (word used intentionally). They will, therefore, agree to the rules with little change. That may be good for the regime, but it may be bad for business. And to make these partnerships work, the private partner is going to have to stay solvent.

Oh, and even if the regime gets a second term, these projects will all still be only partially underway. Don’t plan on riding a high-speed train next year, or even in 2016. And if the railroads stop being scared and get pissed off? I don’t know what will happen to HSR. Neither true nor false, but wait and see.

Passenger Rail: Everything Old Is New Again

2010-05-02T16:00:00.001-06:00

Is it too unusual to blog my own blog?

Passenger Rail: Everything Old Is New Again gave some of you an idea of where I am coming from in this blog, and gave others the wrong idea.

Bottom line here, there are some areas where government subsidy and/or government intervention is desirable, and even where it is needed, and some places where it is not. From a pragmatic point of view – that’s reality for you simple folk, and you know who you are – government subsidy is needed for Passenger Rail, for the foreseeable future.

Where’s the line to be drawn? Those of us who see the line clearly get frustrated with those who don’t. Those who don’t generally think everything should be subsidized by government, and, in some ways, everything is. The purpose of limited government is to allow the rest of us to function productively in a free society. That small feat costs money. It has always cost money. So in that limited sense, government is subsidizing every free activity of every man, woman and child. Think about it! For example, in order to maintain your freedom of religion, there must be a government system in place that guarantees you will not be persecuted in the practice of that religion, by anyone including the government. That costs money, and the government must tax you to get that money. Do they?

The federal government still has a lot of assets that it has chosen to bank for the people rather than sell. It also includes a hell of a lot of assets that could be freed up to sell for the people, to support it’s primary function: to subsidize freedom. In my state, New Mexico, more than a third of the land is held by the federal government.

Don’t get antsy – I’m on my way to Passenger Rail. Just let’s make a stop at rail in general. Railroads would not be as they exist today in America without huge subsidies. These came in many formats. The largest were the land grants for the pacific roads. More obscure, but still, in a way, subsidies, were the charters or franchises for construction of the earlier railroads, and the powers of eminent domain, sometimes given directly to the railroads, and sometimes exercised by favorable local government. Most town governments wanted railroads to come through, so they didn’t hesitate to give them land, or take somebody else’s in order to accomplish that end.

So back to where I am coming from on the subject of Passenger Rail. We have a choice of how it gets subsidized. Not every choice is good for all situations, but government seems to have settled on a one-size-fits-all solution. The quasi-governmental entity, I think, has seen its better days. The primary reason: When the public is seeking efficiencies, the agency is just seeking more money and ignoring the possibility of efficiencies.

Can we place funds in the hands of private enterprise? “Goldman Sachs” kind of excesses make private enterprise look as bad as, or worse than, government. So what are we to do?

In actual practice, rail transit agencies put money – in the form of operating contracts – into private enterprise all the time. The operators are required by their free-enterprise contracts to perform their jobs efficiently, or lose money. But in most cases, the transit agency still overlies the operator.

Would we save money by eliminating the middle man? What if we just sold the transit agency to private enterprise with a guarantee of a contracted subsidy? If they didn’t do their job efficiently, they’d go out of business. Perhaps if there was the overlying threat of bankruptcy, there would be more efficiency and less waste.

Would this ever get us to so-called “profitable” Passenger Rail. I think not. But we need to try new things and stop whining about who stands for capitalism and who stands for socialism. We are all in this together, and an even mix of all good ideas is probably the solution to a lot of problems, not just for Passenger Rail

Everything Old Is New Again

2010-04-12T20:18:00.003-06:00

There’s a song title there, but that’s not where I’m going with this.

Let me preface my remarks by reminding my blog followers that I am a conservative patriot. I believe that America is exceptional and the last, best hope for freedom in the world. I believe in limited government, free enterprise, and no unnecessary taxation. I am an American optimist, and I believe that The United States of America is and will continue to be a beacon for the world in all aspects of life. That the world watches America closely and criticizes freely is a sign that we are doing something right!

Moving on to a theme I am hearing over and over again these days: America has missed its chance to (fill in the blank here).

I first heard this about NASA and space exploration. It goes something like, “We put a man on the moon over 40 years ago and where are we now? We are scuttling the Space Shuttle, we have no new exploration projects on line, and we couldn’t put a man on the moon today even if we wanted to.”

What does this have to do with Passenger Rail? I’m getting there. But here are a few others before I do:

1. We have let our manufacturing base leave us. We couldn’t forge the steel to build another Sears Tower today, even if we wanted to.
2. We built a magnificent highway system, and we are now letting it rot under the wheels of indifferent truckers.
3. We have the best medical care in the world, but we are letting lawyers sue it into the ground until our only alternative is ObamaCare.
4. We once built the best automobiles, but we have hamstrung the manufacturers with so much safety and environmental bullcrap that there will never be another car like (fill in the blank again).

Well, here’s the one involving Passenger Rail. “We had fast passenger trains on a high-speed network with frequent service and good amenities back in the 1930s, and let it all go with clueless Amtrak, and now we're going to spend billions just to get a few trains over 100 mph again!" That one hurts because it is true.

My point. I criticize the way we are approaching the task of improving our Passenger Rail, but I believe and trust that, when we do it again, it will be so much better than what we had in the 1930s. It will be so much better we will think of our old trains with the same fondness as we will be thinking of the first moon landings as our Mars liner hits the runway at Mars City.

Now is not the time to stifle innovation. Our free enterprises need to be free enough of government intervention to research and develop and invent, but they will always need the government as the last, best source of funding for that great leap into the new frontier. Our government is – after all – the people. And we, the people, will take us there. I criticize, but I have no doubt.

©2010 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

Conservatives Don’t Like Passenger Rail

2010-03-28T18:05:00.001-06:00

Well, not all conservatives, as I consider myself one.

I ran across 'Defining Success: The Case against Rail Transit' by Randal O'Toole - Page 1 of 40 when visiting the Cato Institute on the Web. This site links to a lot of great, politically conservative writing. But this study makes me shudder.

If you like Passenger Rail as a transportation mode, you should read the whole study. It’s a great example of good investigation, science and research. Some of the climate-change people should take it as an example. It doesn’t paint rail transit in a very good light for those of us who would like to see reduced government size and cost.

If you are a railfan, some of the criteria Mr. O’Toole uses for viable rail transit systems are quite laughable. Even if the criteria are not chosen objectively – what a lot of researchers do to slant the outcome – how the transit systems meet these criteria is looked at systematically. You can then throw out criteria that appear ridiculous, and you still get a very bad picture of rail transit’s future.

Okay, so these conservatives have an axe to grind with big government. But I think those of us who advocate expanded railroad passenger systems are a bit guilty of wanting to put trains on ‘whenever and wherever.’

When I criticized the way that tax dollars would be spent on HSR, I got a bad reaction from some of you. Some of the comments – not all shown on this blog – suggested that we should take anything that will bring on more trains. That attitude is dead wrong and will lead to some of the situations that are grist for the conservative mill.

First and foremost, there are some places where we shouldn’t be looking to put on more trains. Not now, at least. New Mexico’s Rail Runner Express was one of these, and now a very, very poor state is burdened with a very, very costly train that could have been done another way. Rah, rah, for the train, but boo to the tax burden. To even suggest that we put on more of these kinds of trains is going to work against us.

Second, we should stop looking at rail only in terms of “dollars of subsidy” per “passenger mile.” Every mode of passenger transport is subsidized. We should also have a “value” per “passenger mile” measure. And we should have a spirited debate about what these values are.

Here are some suggestions: What’s it worth to have the majority of travelers using a very low-polluting, fuel-saving mode? What’s it worth to travelers to be able to look out a window and see where they are? What’s it worth to have fixed guideways that will NEVER bring their noise and disruption to ANY OTHER than their nearest neighbors? Buses don’t do that, you say? Well just take a look at how easily a bus route can be changed!

These are just some of the talking points we could use to argue with Mr. O’Toole.

NM commuter train expects 3 millionth rider - KVIA.com El Paso, Las Cruces - Weather, News, Sports -

2010-03-20T16:59:00.002-06:00

Okay, So It’s More of a Success Than I Expected

NM commuter train expects 3 millionth rider - KVIA.com El Paso, Las Cruces - Weather, News, Sports -

The heavily subsidized commuter line that should have been called “The Bill Richardson Railroad” is a popular way for people to get from Albuquerque to Santa Fe and to a few other points, too. So I will eat crow and admit the following:

First, I didn’t think it would be up and running as quickly as it was. (Thank federal dollars.)

Second, I didn’t like the idea of running it down the middle of I-25, and still don’t. Instead of flattening it out as I thought they would, they built a roller-coaster profile that is a bit ridiculous, and more roller-coaster than the average railroad, but it works. Sorry guys, I go for the more conventional.

Third, I will never figure out how they do these “millionth passenger” things. Who is counting and how do they know that the millionth passenger will board at the Albuquerque station and not at, say, Rio Bravo?

Despite some of the comments I have received, I still think we should sell the thing to Warren Buffet.

New Passenger Rail Company

2010-02-20T19:08:00.002-07:00

APNewsBreak: Icahn Backs Passenger Rail Company.

I’ve recently been accused of being a little too curmudgeonly about the Obama administration’s support of high-speed rail (HSR). (Okay, I’ll use the hyphen.) So it’s time to give credit to the private sector for at least getting on the bandwagon, if not making the bandwagon move any faster.

I take exception to the remark the this is “Obama’s high-speed rail network.” If it comes to fruition, it will be America’s network, and not Obama’s.

America deserves the investment in time and attention to our rail network that, up until now, has always failed to materialize. And I laud Icahn and any non-governmental entity that wants to get invested and make this truly a project of the American free enterprise system.

As readers of this blog know, I am a political conservative, but I have repeatedly talked up the necessity of public subsidy for passenger rail. I am sure that Icahn sees the possibility of turning some of that public subsidy into return for stockholders, and that is the American way. It is the way our rail systems were built, and it is the way they will grow into the twenty-first century.

I give Mr. Obama credit no further than his ability to see the writing on the wall that was writ there by all the rest of us who have been screaming into the deaf ear of political and corporate inertia. The good news is not that Obama is giving away money for Passenger Rail, but that we now have at least two high-profile investors, Carl Icahn and Warren Buffett, who are willing to bet their not inconsiderable fortunes on railroads.

Could Burlington Northern Santa Fe become a test bed for new, non-Amtrak passenger service?

Laughable Funding

2010-01-31T15:30:00.002-07:00

I'm not in the habit of laughing at billions of dollars. I still find it hard to imagine paying over $40 thousand for an automobile. But spreading something like $8 billion for HSR over 31 states - see this link - is very much like trying to buy that $40 thousand automobile by paying $400 a year so that it is paid off in 100 years.

The cosst of any HSR project that is even close to actualization is sbustantially more than the per-state amount of money that each of the 31 states would get - if the money is divided evenly. (See this line from Wired for an idea of what HSR will cost.) So I'm wondering if Mr. Obama thinks we are easily impressed - a billion is still a billion - or just stupid when he characterizes this as a lot of money.

My first reaction is to characterize it as too little too late. Based on the costs in the link above, the feds should be considering 10 times this amount right away, and more later.

The other laughable part of this is the report that this will generate jobs. Again, not right away, especially because most of the states that get these funds are cash-strapped, and not as far along in their HSR aspirations as those represented in the link above. I count only 15 states involved in the projects shown in the Wired link, so where are the other 16? Unless these states come up with a lot more money soon, no immediate jobs are going to result.

After laughing a little, I may cry a lot.

©2010 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Incremental Versus The Whole Hog

2010-01-19T18:44:00.003-07:00

One of the most intriguing (for me, anyway) questions about the future shape of High Speed Rail is: Will HSR grow incrementally from existing rail routes, or will we dedicate new rights of way? Rail going where no rail has gone before.

If this were the 1950s, I could envision HSR as being built something like the way we built the Interstate system. Step One: Decide on a general system design that will assure the interoperability of all elements. For HSR, this means train design, civil engineering, and yes, Virginia, even track gauge.

Step Next: Lay out the routes you want to serve the population centers you want to target.

Then start buying up right of way.

If this were the 1950s, this would work. In post-Obama, neo-litigious America, the interest groups, propery owners, etc., will be all over this. It doesn't matter whether this approach would be good for America, as long as it is not "bad" as defined by any special-interest group. Unfortunately, it doesn't matter whether the group is right, left, or in the middle, either.

But can you not see the great benefits of the Whole Hog approach? In many ways, the benefits would be similar to - but more 21st century than - those we got from the Interstate system. What were those? Foremost, they got a lot of people into, and out of, major population centers fast. Secondarily, they created markets. In the case of HSR, the market will be for surface transportation of people and goods. Yes, Virginia, goods! Express and package freight will find a home with HSR just as it did with the redundant passenger routes of the classic railroad past. Suddenly, rail would be an alternative for LCL freight. Nothing wrong with building HSR baggage-mail cars.

Thirdly, the Interstate system drew development out of the dead middles of small towns. Of necessity, the HSR stops won't be in many of the smallest of towns. But for small and mid-sized cities, HSR stations will be intermodal. The stations will not be where the current Amtrak stations are located. They will be near light rail and/or commuter rail, and if that is concurrent with Amtrak locations, so be it. Other HSR stations and terminals will be at or near airports. In the future, maybe even near spaceports. And, yes, major Interstate junctions. Park and ride to take the bullet train!

Finally, the Interstates spurred huge growth in trucking. Not just carriage, but the manufacture of trucks and equipment for moving the goods. HSR, if done right, should provide thousands of jobs in manufacture of high-speed equipment, technology, and in research and development to keep the huge investment up to date. Even development of new and better sources of the energy that will power the high-speed trains.

In my book, it will be a shame if we go for incremental. There's too much to lose by not going Whole Hog.

©2010 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Small Plans

2010-01-16T10:47:00.002-07:00

This link (Amtrak Ready with Big Plans for 2010) shows up in todays news. It outlines what the author (or maybe the press release) sees as big plans.

First of all: Improvements on the Northeast Corridor. Reaction: What else is new?
Next: HSR incremental improvements. Everything else is still in the planning stage. Reaction: Nothing new here either.
Next: Station improvements. Reaction: Welcome!
Next: New locos and cars. Reaction: Still no plan. What trains get new equipment? Where does equipment go for new routes? Plans are apparently in limbo. This is too little too late.
Next: State partnerships. Reaction: Always good to get new trains off the ground. But can the cash-strapped states handle much of this? We'll see.
Next: PTC and general safety initiatives. Reaction: Safety good. PTC costly but necessary. Return on the PTC investment for Amtrak and rail in general only if it means increased train frequency.
Next and last: Security. Final reaction: Hope the security paranoids don't start up with airline-like security. That will discourage riders and negate the current round of humorous ads. (See previous blog.)

©2010 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Amtrak Has a Sense of Humor

2010-01-15T14:06:00.002-07:00

Showing uncharacteristic guts in using advertising that effectively says travel by Amtrak is less stressful than air travel, the national passenger railroad has targeted air travelers while they are in the middle of security screening. (Amtrak Takes Aim at Air Travel With Comedic O'Hare Ads NBC Chicago) The author of this link suggests that Amtrak needs to clean up its own act before this becomes less comedic and more believeable. As much as I would like to disagree, I can't.

Amtrak currently has no equivalent to the onorous airport security screenings, so there's a plus. We continue to hope it never comes to this. However, the inability of Amtrak to keep its schedules and conquer weather problems makes it no better than air travel as far as uncomfortable delays are concerned. Sitting for hours in a darkened Amtrak coach or sleeper is the equivalent of spending hours in an airport when the air traffic system gets backed up by weather.

Passenger Rail can and should be able to endure bad weather. There will always be some weather problems for all modes of transport. Mother Nature is just to big and strong for any mode to conquer. But Amtrak, as a surface mode, has all the cards when it comes to all-weather operation. It just doesn't have equipment designed well enough, built strong enough, and new enough to make it happen.

I think the advertising is well targeted. There will be a certain component of air travelers who see that ad in the bottom of the bin where they have exposed their belongings for all to see - a component who will say, "To hell with this," and who will try Amtrak next time.

Let's hope Amtrak is up to it when they do.

The first round of new equipment orders will be only the beginning. If Amtrak is to become a true all-weather mode, every current route needs new equipment and then backup equipment before we can even consider putting on new trains. But we have a sea change in federal attitudes toward funding Amtrak, and now is the time to get it done.

©2010 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

After a Long Time

2010-01-12T15:15:00.002-07:00

Bet most of you thought I had given up on this blog.

Not so: I had unfortunately little time the past two months to put any thoughts together. Much as I would like, I do not earn a living from writing, so employment responsibilities took priority.

The I got sick Christmas Eve, and the damn infection nearly did me in.

So here I am recuperating and finally getting to write.

I see that Mr. Boardman has finally got off his duff and decided to order cars and locomotives for Amtrak. The reports that I have seen so far do not carry a lot of specifics, such as: Are there any plans for these cars and locos, or are we just replacing worn out stuff for now? But anything new for Amtrak is good news. As the economy starts chugging - still waiting - Amtrak ridership should pick up. Amtrak should plan to take advantage where and when it can. It will still be a long time before the states will be able to pick up any more tabs.

The situations with the states are getting worse. Those that weren't bankrupt last year are close to it now. There is a lot of reliance on "stimulus" money, a lot of which has not been spent. There's also a study out that says that stumulus money spent on roads does not generate jobs. I would bet this is not true of Passenger Rail.

North America has to make a decision on HSR. Is it going to grow incrementally from existing routes, or are we going to spend the money on entirely new tracks (right of way) that will complement freight rail but not supplement it or interfere with it. Incremental growth seems like the easiest way, and costs less in the short term. Because politicians don't see beyond the next election cycle, I think we will wind up with incremental. Too bad, bacause new right of way is the better choice for the middle to distant future.

Meanwhile, back at the outhouse, things are piling up. Amtrak's dismal performance in what was not the worst winter weather out on the plains (see http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-ap-il-delayedtrain,0,4322065.story ) demonstrates how close the trainsets and the operating personnel are to being just plain worn out. Any plans should include equipment that can scoff at winter weather and become a lifeline when road and air are snowed in.

Finally, federal regulation won't go away. (Edicts from above for passenger car strength and for positive train control in just the past two days.) History tells us that the freight railroads (read private enterprise) vigorously resists regs and spend money to do it, it also says that Amtrak tends to work within the regs. Lets hope that some thought is put into making the new orders for cars and locomotives compliant for not just the near future but for the life of the equipment, and equipment that, for the near term, continues to make the freight railroads happy and willing to forward Amtrak trains over the road in a timely manner.

©2010 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Travel Restrictions

2009-09-27T16:02:00.004-06:00

The most paranoid among us see surface modes of transportation in the same light as air transport when it comes to security. Amtrak has slowly started to roll over for the Homeland Security people, and more and more "exercises" in security are being held on commuter routes - particularly in the East. It seems that we will eventually have to undergo airline-like security checks, at least on Amtrak, if our current terrorism paranoia continues. But is it paranoia? Or is it a necessary response to where our western civilization stands in the world?

Is it logical to need airline-like security measures on Amtrak? The need for air security is grounded, at least in part, on the enormous potential for destruction of property and taking of human life that an airliner in the skies over just about any populated area presents. The airliners themselves are destructive enough, but add chemical, biological, or radiological elements, and the potential is even higher. Good, we've established that this is probably not paranoia, but a real possiblity.

Now let's look at Amtrak. If you could take over a train, you couldn't drive it into any old building. You certainly could do a lot of damage with the train and kill a lot of people, but you probably won't find a building you can bring down. Locomotives don't carry the enormous amounts of combustible fuels that airliners do. In addition, the places where Amtrak routes enter the interior structural elements of massive buildings are few and far between. But they do exist. If you crashed an Amtrak train in there, would you bring down the building? From an engineering standpoint, probably not. As heavy as it is, the total momentum (product of mass times velocity) of an Amtrak train going the fastest it could go without derailing and still get into these places is far lower than the momentum of a flying airliner. (Perhaps a serendipitous side effect of foot-dragging on high speed rail.)

But what if we add biological, chemical, radiologic and/or explosive elements? Again, the potential for spread is greater, but in all cases more confined. The same argument about momentum applies to spread of these elements, and the only other factor for the "large building" scenario is that enough explosives could probably not be physically carried onto Amtrak to do this. Spread of heat and flame would be more retarded in the subterranean confines where most trains enter large buildings. Again, too, there would be destruction and loss of life on board the train.

Some would say that risk is too high to take, so the answer is an unqualified yes. We need airline-style security on Amtrak.

I disagree. Risk must be handled proportionately. For instance, the worse your credit rating, the more interest you pay proportionately for a loan. (Although the current administration may put a stop to this.) If you can stop a ten-pound cannonball with three inches of steel, you don't need three inches of steel to stop a one-pound shell. As Amtrak is proportionately more safe for the public at large, we should be able to be proportionately more free of the restrictions imposed by airline-style security.

That's my opinion.

©2009 C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Where's The Cash?

2009-08-23T14:34:00.003-06:00

Too many advocates of new Passenger Rail projects appear to be hanging their hats on stimulus money alone. And, lo and behold, we are 6 months post stimulus and there are reports that over 80% of the cash remains unspent. At the same time, there is some indication that the economy could be - God Bless Us - in a turnaround.

So what happens to all those dependent on stimulus if we also get a turnaround in government attitude? Not so likely with Progressives at the helm you say? What happens to all those new rail projects that expect to get the money? It's possible that the economy will turn around by itself and the government won't need to print all that money.

Well, old bills work just as well as the one's hot off the presses. We can work a little harder to get the money in place, but the plans should still be made. Passenger Rail is a great public work and should never have been given the short shrift while highway and air got all the bucks.

Just don't hang you hat on getting any stimulus money.

©2009 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Railroads and The Economy

2009-08-09T08:00:00.000-06:00

It's been awhile. I just noticed that my last post was on July 5, and here it is August 9. With the crappy economy, I have less time to write anything, and that includes blog posts. Having to work harder and take less time off to make ends meet (or to keep a job) has kept me away from the keyboard too long.

It got me thinking first about Passenger Rail and the economy. How does it change things?

Economic stimulus has been unleashed for Amtrak, for HSR, and for urban Passenger Rail in general. Is this good? I think so. Capitalizing rail transport in any form is a good idea. It's a job creator that won't go away, because the new rails and routes created won't go away. It's good for economic growth. People able to move from one place to another, economically and without damaging the enviroment, for business or pleasure, can only be good for the economy.

In the short term, with the economy slow, sluggish, or just in the crapper, Amtrak revenue and ridership in most lanes will be down. It's a good time to plan for the future. But people are saving money by using public transportation, and this includes light rail, commuter rail, and rail transit. That should be good in the short term, as heavily subsidized rail in the long term will be needing tax dollars, and more riders will make for more voters willing to open their wallets and purses.

Amtrak is in disarray and needs good leadership right now. I see signs that this is occurring with the Amtrak board, but don't hold your breath. With lots of money to spend, it is going to have to be spent right. The long lead time for new equipment is a bummer, but we have to resist spending it where it won't make a permanent good impression on the rail traveler. And Amtrak has a history of finding more ways to trip over its own rails than the average quasi-government agency. (The Postal Service is next in line.) Finally unfettered by Congress and administrations that had it chained to a post and flogged it every afternoon, Amtrak may just dance around for awhile like the Tin Woodman looking for oil before it finds its balance.

Those of you who have read this blog since the start know that I am a political conservative, but one who believes that there are certain things that government should subsidize. Passenger Rail is one of those things. Let's hope Passenger Rail can come out of this recession looking stronger and better than ever. With the right leadership at all levels, and cooperation from private enterprises that should recognize its importance to a vital economy, it will.

©2009 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

What Did He Say?

2009-07-05T08:00:00.000-06:00

I forget sometimes that words mean different things to different people. Take the last blog on the subject of automation. Note the comment and my return comment.

In my book, and I guess I'm getting too old, automation is anything where a mechanical or electronic system (or a combination of both) intervenes in a process that could be (or once was) done by human hand. We forget that there weren't always signals that detected an occupied block. Those signals that do were invented a century ago and were automation. Now a lot of people think that something is not automated unless it is run by a computer chip.

In the case of the DC Metro wreck, it may be interesting if the final determination is a failure in automation that had nothing to do with computers. But it just makes my point. As automation gets older, it needs maintenance to avoid failure. In most cases, automatic block signals or occupied block detection systems, were designed to fail safe. They did this in a way that assumed that a live engineer (motorman) was operating the train. The operator had certain options (not necessarily only two), in the event of a dark signal. Even those options were supposed to err on the side of safety.

Which brings the question: In the DC wreck, how was the software written to respond to an occupied block (I'm guessing binary zero) or an unoccupied block (binary one), or to the equivalent of a dark signal (maybe neither but probably should also be a zero)? Or did the computer itself have to take the equivalent of a visual position and translate it to digital? Or what?

I'm speculating, because I know nothing about the design of this system - absolutely nothing, binary zero. I do know this: In designing any system of automation, it is better to design the overall system from scratch than to try to wed it to something older, slower, or just not in step with current trends. My point again?

If we are going to spend money to design automated train control systems, especially in the case of dedicated HSR, but also for light rail and transit, we need to go whole hog, or future designers and engineers will be trying to do patches and upgrades that just won't be as safe.

©2009 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Automated Railroading

2009-06-30T20:03:00.002-06:00

The terrible wreck on the DC Metro last week got me thinking about automated railroading in general.

Let me first say that I have ridden the Metro and I have always been very impressed by it. I have never felt any fear at all that the automated systems were unreliable or would result in such a wreck.

Nonetheless, as we move toward further reliance on automatic train stop and other systems for Passenger Rail, I wonder what will happen when the money runs out. Granted, there is more focus on the lack of reinforced car ends and anticlimber engineering for the cars than there is on the automated system that would have had to fail in order for the DC wreck to happen. These cars didn't have the engineering due to lack of cash. And it remains to be seen whether the system failure was also because of deferred spending.

What happens to our automated systems when the money runs out? It will run out, you know. Someday, the pendulum will swing back in the other direction and nobody will want government to subsidize rail again. The question becomes: Do we spend enough now to design fail-safe systems that will be able to age gracefully? And do we spend enough time to retain the necessary skills among our railroaders so that, when and if the systems fail, we can still run trains the old way?

It's interesting to think of what Passenger Rail in the United States will be like in 20 or 30 years. Hope I'm around to see it, whatever it is like.

©2009 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Chicago to Iowa City - I'd Ride It

2009-06-07T08:00:00.000-06:00

If I still lived in the Chicago area.

Getting out to Iowa City used to be one of my favorites. It's a beautiful city with a thriving university campus and sites of historical interest. I used to do it for an overnight or two. Out - overnight - and back.

That's probably how Amtrak service would go. But with a five-hour schedule (one way) it would be possible to spend a 15-hour day and five of those could be for business or shopping in one city or the other.

I'm speaking from the big-city perspective, however. The train would be of even more benefit for Iowans, as they would pick up the brunt of the subsidy, but could look forward to visiting downtown Chicago more often with less headache than driving. If the train is scheduled correctly.

I fear that with a lot of these new proposed startup Amtrak routes, the freight railroads will prevail and the schedules will be adjusted (or crimped by bad or felonious dispatching) into what the host rail wants or needs to get its freight over the road. There will be less incentive as freight traffic (unsubsidized as of today, but bailouts happen) takes it in the shorts from the lousy economy. But if both the economy and the new Amtrak routes come on line at the same time, you know absolutely which will bite the bullet. And it won't be the new route.

But making an overnight isn't so bad in Iowa City or in Chicago - though more expensive in the latter. I'd ride it anyway.

©2009 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Good Ideas and Bad Ones

2009-05-17T13:26:00.001-06:00

The Good: Amtrak is considering the restoration of the Pioneer from Denver to the pacific northwest (see article), and the idea of adding more of the Front Range cities that have some population density is a Good Idea. Amtrak routes need population centers at the ends of routes in order to assure proper utilization of resources throughout the entire route. But it would be damn silly not to add smaller population centers where possible. It’s the no-density towns and marginal cities that need not be served by terminal routes.

The Bad: Congressman Harry of NM wants the Rail Runner, already suffering from marginal density in its Belen terminal, to go to El Paso. (See article.) The reasoning is, and get this, the rest of New Mexico wants commuter options, too. This shows that Mr. Teague has no concept of how to use rail resources and recover revenue. Yes, like my example under “The Good,” El Paso would be a high-density city population, also with potential Mexican passengers (and concomitant border crossing problems like Amtrak’s international trains), but running a train because the other 2/3 of New Mexico has one isn’t a good reason. And the northern end of the route is a marginal terminal (Santa Fe), that even the old namesake railroad didn’t go to.

The Ugly: Not today.

Green Passenger Rail

2009-04-26T08:00:00.000-06:00

With Earth Day/Week just past, I've been thinking about how we might make Passenger Rail more radically green than freight rail already is. Yes, Veronica, the energy saving by moving a ton of freight over rail as opposed to over the road is much, much greater than that saved by moving a ton of passengers by rail as opposed to over the road, even in buses. That's because the amenities associated with long distance passenger rail (and to some extent even commuter rail) often weigh more than the passengers transported. So I've been thinking, what can we do about that?

The energy/fuel advantages of the concept of gensets appears to be widely accepted. Perhaps something similar to that can be incorporated into the next generation of passenger equipment. Was a time when some commuter trains in the Chicago Area carried their own generator cars on some railroads. They didn't have or need the head end power. And the head end power concept in which the prime mover is always running hard enough to light/heat/cool the passengers may be passe.

Would a genset aboard each car be the answer. Perhaps a hybrid technology involving batteries (like heavyweight and early lightweight passenger cars of old) and maybe even solar technologies (there's a lot of roof area on the passenger cars) would be ideal. Has anyone looked into this?

I would think that the fuel saving for a power-on-demand genset over a 220-volt system for the whole train (a little like a small town power coop) would be great. And we could look into powering all of the gensets with biodiesel or with other green fuels like used cooking oil. Maybe we could build something that would pipe the used oil from a dining car right into the gensets.

Also, I still like the idea of making all future new passenger routes, especially HSR and new dedicated rights-of-way, electrified. This again is power on demand. You never have a diesel idling in a station burning up fuel and money.

With all the dollars that will now flow to Passenger Rail, I sure hope we get it right and get it green.

© 2009 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Too Little, Too Late - Hope Not

2009-04-11T14:36:00.002-06:00

A frightening theme runs through much of the current rail-oriented media. (That would be rail mags, news articles, and editorial comment.) It's frightening if you are looking forward to the rebirth of Passenger Rail. Summed up in six words: We may have waited too long.

Even with the public and even the private sector interested in funding new and expanding rail projects, here are the problems from bottom to top.

1. The rebirth of rail hasn't discouraged the NIMBYs and the environmentalists. This will mean that acquisition of land (right of way) for any rail project will be more costly and take longer than ever before in United States history. In fact, I recently read an editorial reply where the environmentalist writer, in arguing against a new line, suggested that light rail is no more fuel efficient than the private auto. As the global warming people like to say: The facts are in and the science is settled. Both arguments are wrong, but that won't stop this guy. I would rather live next to a busy railroad than to a freeway or airport, but perhaps that's just me.
2. For reasons of safety regulations, general risk, materials, labor, and advancing technology, the tracks that go on those rights of way are more costly than ever before. Many miles of old track will have to be replaced, many miles have already been torn out, and freight rail is scrambling in some parts just to get a second main back where there once were three or four main line tracks. Demand will drive up cost, or cause shortages in materials.
3. Speaking of materials, the domestic steel industry is in shambles. Yes it still exists, but nowhere is there the capacity to turn out the steel needed for a major expansion. Not just rails are needed, but steel for bridges, retaining walls, scaffolding, cranes, earthmovers, re-bar, and etc. on and on. We are already buying enough from our overseas suppliers.
4. We have two North American locomotive builders but no passenger car builders. Some, like Siemens and Bombardier (both not domestic companies) can and have come on line in short order to assemble cars. With freight car orders down, now would be the time to shift some of those manufacturers to the passenger cars of our future.
5. Signal systems, which even in their basic state increase line capacity and reduce risk and thereby cost, are also in a shambles. Amtrak alone operates on whatever signal and communications systems the host railroad has in place. Once relatively cheap electro- pneumatic or mechanical devices have become high-tech GPS-based systems with increasing incremental costs as well. Letting the old systems go to pot in many areas has not given us a step up in getting to the high-tech.
6. Reservations systems are operating on decades old software that has been modified and updated but is still based on concepts that came to us with the birth of the personal computer. They will continue to get integrated into the newer technology of cell phones and hand-held devices, but they will still be the old systems. New would be better, but is it too late to revamp the whole thing?
7. With the degradation of our Passenger Rail system has come the degradation of society in general. The acceptable has become the unacceptable and some people just won't know how to ride the modern equivalent of a Pullman sleeper and respect the peace and privacy of other passengers. And the threat of litigation and stepping on somebody's civil rights keeps rail employees from putting a stop to some of the worst abuses. With our airline-driven are-we-there-yet mentality, we just might not be ready, as a society, for the rebirth of Passenger Rail.

Does anyone disagree?

Good News - Can Amtrak Take It?

2009-03-28T08:00:00.001-06:00

AMTRAK to spend $47.5 million in stimulus funds on Chicago projects and CSX willing to help spur high-speed rail on Empire Corridor, Schumer says are just two of the articles of "good news" about Passenger Rail. The questions I have is this: Can Amtrak take all this good news?

For one thing, is Amtrak going to spend every bit of that stimulus money while looking over its shoulder and wondering when it will be taken away? I hope not.

In my humble opinion, the best way to spend the stimulus money, whatever it can get either through direct subsidy or through partnership with the states, is to not listen to Congress or to politicians in general. Argument: It is widely known that the Amtrak Board and much of Amtrak financial management is burned out with trying to keep the whole shebang running on a showstring. It is also widely known that Amtrak employees, from operating personnel on down, are generally more enthusiastic about what Amtrak can and should do. So ask the employees.

There have to be thousands of cheap problem fixes out there; fixes that when all done at the same time will make drastic improvements in service and on-time performance. Some of the corridor fixes highlighted in this month's Trains Magazine are a good example of this. Other things would be station repairs, security upgrades, quick fix amenities like new bedding and pillows in sleepers, and appearance upgrades (paint, soap and water). And I bet you wouldn't even spend half of the money on these.

Dear Amtrak: While you are thinking about making the big plans, solve all the small problems that you can solve right NOW. Thank you.

©2009 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Worthy Effort

2009-03-23T18:54:00.002-06:00

Please consider this link as direction to a worthy effort to save an historic piece of passenger railroading.

R U Stimulated Yet?

2009-03-18T08:00:00.001-06:00

Don't get me wrong. I love the fact that Amtrak and other Passenger Rail projects are getting stimulus money. I also love the fact that the prospect of following that money has gotten state and local governments and their politicians to pay attention. (I doubt they would pay so much attention if it didn't involve gobs of cash.)

Here in the great state of confusion we call New Mexico, our Passenger Rail project is completed for the time being. (See Rail Runner Express.) Any stimulus money that goes to transportation here is likely only to assist in the perpetuation of that franchise rather than starting anything new. Follow my link (in the header) to Passenger Rail news, however, and you will find news on any of a hundred new projects.

But stimulus money, by law, must be spent on - I hate this term - "shovel ready" projects. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that means ready to start a foundation or ready to bury the dead. But few rail projects are going to be shovel ready. Nor will few meet the test of job creation that is attached to the transportation funds. The money being thrown at Amtrak appears to be an exception, and I hope the masters of make-do at Amtrak catch all of it and use it wisely.

I also hope that Amtrak can find a domestic rail car builder before they are all bankrupt, but that's another story.

My point is that much more of the stimulus money is going to wind up in building or repairing more and better roads, some airport runways or terminals, airway infrastructure, and - gasp - bailing out the auto industry, than will ever be put into Passenger Rail. As we sell out more of our grandkids' future, perhaps the trend towards thoughtful, intermodally integrated and environmentally sound transportation policy will change that. Who's going to pay for it? I don't know.

So just sit back and get ready to watch those passengers shovel.

© 2009 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Three Weeks is Too Much Without a Post

2009-03-17T18:00:00.001-06:00

My apologies to those of you who navigate to this blog regularly. The number is growing and I appreciate the traffic. But I haven't been in the mood to blog lately.

There are a number of reasons, but the biggest one is just spending too much time on other things. Among these things, the one that looms largest is working to make a living and keep the job that has become just as precarious as others in these hard times. Maybe a little mental depression goes along with that. Another thing I've been up to is spending a little more time working the Internet to market a completed manuscript.

If you think it's about Passenger Rail, you would be wrong. It is a historical novel about another form of rail tranportation. Although I've kept links to my other interests out of this blog so far, I'm breaking with that policy. You can read a little about my novel at tunneltoofar.blogspot.com, where you will find that its period is the start of the Great Depression and much of it is set in the tunnel system under the streets of Chicago and in and around the railroad infrastructure of that period.

A third reason for not blogging Passenger Rail is the speed at which things are moving. Passenger Rail as a transportation mode has caught on, and even the collective heads of our federal politicians have come out of their butts long enough to realize this. I will write more on what's real and what's not in the speed of this transition as soon as possible. But bottom line: I see so much good planning and prospective new rail projects out there that it's hard to decide on which one to focus my attention.

Write me at my regular email address (mistertrains@gmail.com ) if you check out A Tunnel Too Far and like what you see. I would prefer this to a comment on this blog, but I think I have opened the door to that, haven't I?

©2009 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

How Permanent Is Permanent?

2009-02-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

As a nation of freedom-loving fools currently hellbent on swinging towards the socialist side of the pendulum, we need to be very careful not to squander the stimulus money coming to Passenger Rail. We all have ideas and pet projects, but how many of them will result in permanent jobs? And how permanent is permanent?

How many jobs are still around that were created by FDR's depression-era programs? I can safely tell you that most of the railroad jobs created or kept by those programs have long ago gone away and will not come back. Why? We don't want them to. Therefore, we want to put Passenger Rail's stimulus money into things that will create future jobs.

Bad example: Refurbishing damaged or aging Amtrak cars will create short-term jobs. Putting more Amtrak cars on the rails on current routes will create jobs that have to be funded from year to year. There will have to be a committed source of future funding to make these jobs even semi-permanent.

Good example: Building new HSR routes will create completely new kinds of railroads that will carry on into the future and may yield future jobs we cannot dream of today! Yes, this will probably also need some stable source of future funding, but we won't be funding old ideas.

Is it the only way to go then: To fund only new ideas? Not by a long shot. We simply need to avoid that law of unintended consequences that political types are so fond of falling into. We have to think things through, thoroughly, and with precision.

Hope we do; because this kind of money on the loose might be Passenger Rail's best opportunity long into the future.

© 2009 C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

More Wishes and Dreams

2009-02-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

City Triplets. No, I am not advocating multiple births by urban dwellers. I am talking about groups of cities that would be an excellent starting point for new Passenger Rail routing. Just about every state has a set of city triplets, and I am sure my readers will know of more. Some triplets don't fit into just one state, they are bi-state or tri-state triplets. Let me give two examples and then a list.

My home state of New Mexico now has the beginnings of a triplet routing. We have a true intercity commuter between Albuquerque and Santa Fe. The south end of the line doesn't count. Belen isn't big enough to fit my idea. But Santa Fe - Albuquerque - Las Cruces does. And there is already talk.

Another example, from my former state, would be Chicago - Springfield - St. Louis, which does exist to some extent. Chicago - Peoria - Moline would be another. My point in getting together these triplet is: If we start here, it is a good place to then connect the dots by connecting the triplets. And it gives each state a chance to decide what routes they want and then go for the gold in getting their triplet into the new national network.

Others (mostly where there is no or limited Passenger Rail now):
Boise - Pocatello - Idaho Falls
Tucson - Phoenix - Flagstaff
Pueblo - Colorado Springs - Denver
Grand Island - Lincoln - Omaha
Topeka - Wichita - Oklahoma City
Amarillo - Lubbock - San Angelo
New Orleans - Baton Rouge - Shreveport
Memphis - Nashville - Knoxville
Evansville - Indianapolis - South Bend

I could go on. There's no trick other than finding a triplet that has some population in between towns that would ride the train and stir up some economic activity by doing so. With few exceptions in the one's I've named, this would also take passenger cars off the Interstates.

©2009 C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Wish List 2

2009-01-17T08:00:00.000-07:00

Please, Mr. Obama, while you are printing more money, please fund the following:

1. All-rail passenger service from Chicago to Green Bay.
2. More than one train each day out of Chicago to each and every route end, including the long ones.
3. Buy up enough nearby real estate to increase the capacity of Chicago stations for Amtrak. As fantasies go, this is a big one. It would require one or all of a) increasing the number of available tracks in Union Station; b) spreading out Amtrak among the several stations (only Union Pacific has northbound tracks), which would also require; c) improved light rail (non-CTA) between Randolph, LaSalle, Union Pacific (all Metra) and Union (maybe a light rail circulator on dedicated elevated right of way?).
4. While we're fantasizing feeders, new ones from O'Hare and Midway right to Amtrak! Now there's a transportation concept. As it is right now, you can't do this via rail alone.

More next time

© 2009 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Wish List 1

2009-01-11T08:00:00.000-07:00

Don't get me wrong. I am dead against the way our politicians are hustling every pet project they can think of in order to get them in front of Mr. Obama for a piece of the "economic stimulus" pie.

But I am attracted by the fantasy of having some favorate Passenger Rail-related projects funded, so I am going to start on my wish list.

Dear Mr. Obama:
Please print money for the following projects to stimulate the economy.
1. Passenger Rail service along the front-range corridor from Cheyenne, Wyoming, to El Paso, Texas.
2. At least two daily trains each way on this corridor.
3. Passenger Rail service that would get me from Albuquerque to Phoenix in under 24 hours, without going part way by bus.
4. A short intra-state local running Las Cruces to Las Vegas, NM.
5. Passenger Rail from Albuquerque to Las Vegas, Nevada.

Next time: Wish lists for other areas.

©2009 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Winter and Amtrak

2009-01-04T08:00:00.001-07:00

Now that the early-winter holidays are past, it is worth noting that Winter has been upon much of the country with a vengeance since well before the holidays came and went. And what has Amtrak been able to do about it? Not much.

I have opined on this blog in past winters that Amtrak should focus more on keeping its equipment winter-operable and on getting new equipment that is more weatherproof. Nonetheless, the norm seems to be to shrug when weather sidelines equipment or makes it inoperable enroute, and to make the poor passenger endure the hell that results.

Several winters ago, I experienced what happens to Superliner sleepers when snow and ice get up between the cars and into the high-voltage house power connections. The resulting explosion and showers of sparks are certainly memorable, but sitting for hours on the track while crews use every imaginable spit-and-baling-wire fix to try to get things working again, all the while freezing in a train with no heat or light, is not the makings of a pleasant trip. There should have been spare parts on board. And it wouldn't hurt to have at least one crewmember who is also trained as a car mechanic, at least on paper.

But that winter has been repeated many times this year, according to reports, in lower Michigan and the Northeast. There are horror stories of a four-hour trip taking 16 hours with no available toilet facilities and no adequate communication from Amtrak. The intertia that this represents in Amtrak's approach to such things is staggering.

We, the sheep . . . er, taxpayer . . . shouldn't stand for this kind of management in Our Passenger Rail System! I'm imagining that all Amtrak trains that have a longer than 2-hour run should have a passenger representative appointed by random draw of ticket stubs to be empowered to summarily fire any employee of Amtrak that lets this kind of thing happen. Nice fantasy, but it won't happen. Too many bureaucrats (with really heavy ass inertia) standing in the way.

Amtrak needs to get it's crap together or be modified out of existence into some new form, with a new charter and a new commitment to passenger service. It could happen. Change should be forthcoming. Let's hope it's real.

©2009 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Passenger Rail Is Not Always The Answer

2008-12-28T08:00:00.001-07:00

Much as I would like it to be, Passenger Rail isn't the answer to every transportation question. As I often push for more Passenger Rail in this blog using an argument that it is sound policy from both a conservation and an environmental standpoint, I would like to be careful not to push too much.

As Mr. Obama's presidency nears and we are every day promised dollars for public infrastructure projects, some local politicians are taking their heads out of their arses only long enough to see the dollar signs. Yes, they have heard that trains are sound policy, so if there's anywhere they can put one, they are going to ask for money for it.

So a little education while you guys aren't busy watching your own colons:

1. Light rail only is a good idea only for large cities. I am talking cities the size of Milwaukee or better, not those on the borderline of "medium to small." The economies will just never catch up with the initial cost and the burden of subsidy. Mayors who want this and get it will be ruining their economies unless they have a dedicated line in mind, say from one airport to another.
2. Commuter rail is usually a little less costly for right-of-way and more costly for equipment. It, too, makes no sense for a small city with small ridership. New Mexico Rail Runner Express is not really commuter rail any longer, it is state sponsored intercity (Santa Fe - Albuquerque - Belen) with no help from Amtrak. It will leave a burden of subsidy too large for a low pop state like New Mexico to bear. If it has to go belly up, it will be money down a rathole.
3. Long distance Passenger Rail only makes sense on a more frequent basis than Amtrak can provide at this time. Amtrak has gone into the commuter business to find money, and it does a good job in the northeast, midwest, and California. But there's no local government seeking stimulus money for an Amtrak route, so Amtrak won't benefit from this unless local government seeks infrastructure improvements that will facilitate Amtrak.

Is anybody listening?

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

No Cure From Amtrak

2008-12-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

Something that Amtrak has not been able to cure in all of its three decades plus of existence is the public perception that the days are numbered for the train. I'm talking about any train.

Throughout the decade preceding Amtrak, those of us old enough to remember will recall that news of one or another passenger train's demise came out almost weekly. Unless you were a train nut trying to get mileage that would become unavailable onto your log book, you weren't very enthusiastic about riding a train that you knew wouldn't be there in the very near future. It was a protective reaction, really, because you knew that if you liked it you would be sad not to do it again, and if you didn't like it, it was probably because you waited too long to try it.

The same thing has been going on throughout the Amtrak era. There is always a rumor of a certain train in danger of discontinuance, and the press makes no bones about putting it out there when it's just a rumor. Some of this has got to stop if Passenger Rail is going to grow and if public confidence is going to grow with it. Amtrak should spend some new money on public relations initiatives that will tell the public, not just the train nuts that watch for the info, like me, what is in store for them if things go right. What new trains can we expect? How will this help my life and how will this help the country and the environment?

Today, even the reporting and the editorial slant for potential new trains is in the negative. It's about what might go wrong, how horrendously large is the needed money, or how it's just a "study" that will cost lots and no train is likely to result.

As a society, we are now conditioned to breath a sigh of relief when things don't go too wrong. So we don't expect to hear about what could go right. We rejoice over $2 gas, we turn handsprings when the train schedule doesn't get cut back, we thank God and Southwest Airlines that somebody still gives us peanuts during a long flight. It's ridiculous, and we should all expect more.

Wouldn't it be a lot more fun to rejoice over Amtrak doubling its route structure and its on-board amenities? And somebody at Amtrak needs to get their head out of whatever dark hole its up and start to let the public know how good things could be, not just how bad they could get.

I look forward to it.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Political Momentum

2008-12-14T08:00:00.001-07:00

Big Ideas aren't going to get done with the kind of thinking that exists in our legislative branch today. And they won't get done with the kind of thinking that is scheduled to exist tomorrow.

Political momentum says that Congress will continue to think along the lines of "no new Passenger Rail lines unless states or local governments put in the money." That's not going to work, and that is no longer a Big Idea. It was a good way to keep Amtrak moving when states were flush with cash, but that's not going to happen for the foreseeable future. Call it momentum or call it a head in the sand. Call it what you will, our newest congressmen and senators, as well as the re-elected ones, are going to have to stop thinking like we are going back to a Clintonian White House. The economy is already dictating that the rest of this decade is going to be very different from the 1990s.

As much as Radical Environmentalism - as a movement - is against the free market, neither will it want to see us slide back into a transportation policy where the only way to get somewhere is by passsenger auto or jet-fuel guzzling airlines. And the auto fleet will be aging - therefore less environmentally friendly - if none of us can afford to buy a new one.

As I have said before on this blog, our transportation policies must be coordinated and include a higher proportion of funding for Passenger Rail. This must also occur with any economic stimulus plans. Mr. Obama, please listen: If we are going to put people to work ala 1930s style WPA, it must be on building and repairing rail infrastructure as well as other kinds, and maybe even on building railcars, streetcars, and locomotives, too. (GM should not have sold Electro Motive is a topic for another day.)

+++++

Thank you all for your very astute comments and emails on my Big Ideas title. Now please write to your politicians - all of them - from the local know-nothings on up.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Something Big

2008-11-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

Since the inception of Amtrak, the model for Passenger Rail in this country has been - with few exceptions - one of subsidize and recover. This means subsidize as much of the train operations budget as is politically possible, and recover as much as possible of the costs of train operations from the farebox. The few exceptions are excursion trains, since even commuter rail is handled in the "subsidize and recover" model.

Perhaps we are ready for a new model. A big idea.

Looking at some photographs of New York Central varnish from the 1930s and 1940s got me thinking: We could look at this the same way banks are required to look at deposit insurance. Banks take a percentage of every dollar and put it into the FDIC.

Think about this: Instead of taking money out of transportation taxes and out of other general taxes to fund Passenger Rail, why don't we just require every railroad to pay a percentage of their profits towards passenger service.

You may say that was how railroads got in trouble with passengers to begin with. And I would say you are right. But railroad of the time were trying to serve every community on most routes and were doing it with lots and lots of equipment and heavy schedules. I think that if the current Amtrak route structure were imposed on the host railroads, a percentage of freight revenues would be enough, in our day, to operate most, if not all of Amtrak, maybe even double the routes currently available. I believe that it would not cramp the style of the profitable railroads.

You may also say this is a bad time to start imposing an effective tax on profitable businesses, as the times are telling us that profitable businesses are going to be few. But what better time than when railroads are flush with cash? Should we wait until the whole economy is in shambles?

If it worked, this would be a way to ease railroads back into the habit of operating and funding passenger service, not just grudgingly allowing passenger trains to operate on tracks built in the public interest.

Yes, there are consequences. Shippers would effectively be paying for passenger rail in rates that might be higher. Congress would have to resist the temptation to allow (or worse, mandate) that all costs thus incurred be passed on to the shippers. And initally, reduced service would result on already crowded lines. Benefits would be forthcoming with patience. Business would benefit from increased availability of travel and lower cost. Removing automobiles from roadways would relieve environmental pressures on all businesses. Fuel savings would be great, and all businesses would benefit from a reduced dependence on foreign oil.

I'm sure I haven't thought of all the positives and negatives here. Anyone want to jump in and enlighten me if you think this is a bad idea? Otherwise, maybe we can write some letters to the new Congress and the new president. Maybe there are other new and better ideas out there. But the old model isn't working, hasn't for a long time. Let's start something big.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Turning Point

2008-11-16T08:00:00.000-07:00

Passenger Rail, like a train poised at the switch ready to take one track or the other, will be rolling onto a different track as a result of the events of this month.

First, the pundits say that the administration of President-Elect Obama is likely to be much more pro-Passenger Rail than several of its predecessors. This is based in part on Joe Biden, who is seen as pro-passenger in part based on his voting record, but mostly because he likes to ride the trains himself. It is also based on the undisputable fact that Mr. Obama came up during the campaign as more knowledgeable as to the potential of Passenger Rail in general and HSR in particular.

Today, it appears that Rep. James Oberstar is the likely choice for Secretary of Transportation. Whether this is 'change' or a step forward is arguable. Mr. Oberstar's voting record in the House is to support Amtrak reauthorization, to vote against reductions in funding, but never, as far as my research can find, to take a positive forward move in sponsoring any legislation that would get Amtrak and Passenger Rail over the hump to where it should be in this century.

The next development is the resignation of Alex Kummant as CEO of Amtrak. This writer was thoroughly skeptical about Mr. Kummant when he came on board. I have been pleasantly proven wrong. But he also had the luck of the draw, with Amtrak ridership increasing as a result of high fuel prices, giving him extra revenue to work with. Now that gas prices are falling, will ridership stay at this level?

My guess is that Mr. Kummant has trained his executive team well, and the interim CEO William Crosbie will carry on some of the same policies. Also my guess: President-Elect Obama will likely appoint a new CEO from outside Amtrak.

That's not a bad thing. In the spirit of change that the recent election is supposed to have fostered, I am hoping that whoever it is will agree with Secretary-in-waiting Oberstar and with the new Congress on the direction Amtrak should take. I think we would all have to agree that the only 'change' that would be good for Amtrak and good for the country is increased funding for train frequency, equipment, on-time performance, service, and new routes - without the redundancy of Congress repeating over and over, year after long year, that it thinks Amtrak should make money.

Mr. Oberstar - if you are appointed as expected - and Mr. Obama . . . the train is running on your track now. Please don't derail it at the switch.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

It's Too Bad

2008-10-26T08:00:00.000-06:00

It's too bad that in the current political climate our passenger railroads are not still run by private corporations. Do you see where we're going with this.

If Amtrak were a private corporation, all it would have to do - other than pay its executives scads of money to run it into the ground - would be to whine about how it is too big and important to the United States economy to fail. Bingo. The government would be buying up equity with taxpayer dollars and there would no longer be a question of getting appropriations in Congress.

With Congress ready to pour money into 1. banks; 2. insurance companies; and 3. anything else that moves and has assets to control, the freight railroads are already lining up at the door to the treasury. (We once had an uncle who used to do what Congress does to number 3, but we called it something different.)

It may bode well for rail infrastructure, but again we fall back on the questions: How far can government money go? How is all this going to happen without huge tax increases? If we are all out of a job, how are we going to pay taxes?

Neither candidate for president seems to have these answers.

We spend a lot of time worrying these days.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Two Questions Redux

2008-10-12T08:00:00.000-06:00

With the events of the past two weeks smoldering in our collective brains - or whats left of our brains after the political ads slam them against the wall with every television or radio break - we now know that we should not have asked, "Will there be any money left for Passenger Rail?" What we should have asked was, "Will there be any money left? Period."

Fact One: The current economic crisis and the resulting bailouts are spending taxpayer dollars that have to come from somewhere and that would otherwise have gone elsewhere.

Fact Two: The economic situation will tend to elect Democrats in four weeks.

Fact Three: Democrats have run on the promise of extensive spending programs to right the supposed wrongs of previous administrations.

Fact Four: Democrats have also established the balanced budget idea that says basically that no new spending will occur without taking money away from old projects.

Fact Five: Amtrak and Passenger Rail are not as politically sexy as road, bridges and airport facilities.

There will be huge temptation to take money away from Passenger Rail sooner than from other infrastructure projects. We hope it doesn't put a revived intercity rail system on the back burner just when it was starting to cook.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Waking Up

2008-09-28T08:00:00.001-06:00

It's a good thing that some in this country are waking up. This opinion piece from the Baltimore Sun does a pretty good job of repeating some of the things that we have been saying for years. It is good to see ordinary journalists waking up to the transportation crisis.

First, there is new technology, and many new ideas for new technology, for Passenger Rail and for freight rail. For our political establishment to suddenly mandate any one of the technologies that is still in the testing stage, and do that as a knee-jerk reaction to current events, is idiocy. But that is what Congress specializes in.

We don't think mandating PTC for all Passenger Rail for all lines with a target date somewhere in the future and no specifications for a particular system attached to the mandate is particularly idiotic. PTC in one form or another is certainly a probability. There are no particular hurdles to the engineering of PTC, other than making sure it works as needed and making sure that various systems are compatable. The latter is like getting a DVD player to read all the various types of disks that have been developed. Not a sure thing unless you buy the right player, but certainly not impossible.

What scares the hell out of us is that Congress would mandate a particular system built by a particular bidder and then squeeze the cash out of the deal so that the final system on line would be nothing like what could be developed if Congress would just leave the specs to the open market.

Second, with respect to suddenly upping the ante on train protection when a particularly deadly accident occurs, let's get real. All modes of transportation carry some risk, and the way to minimize that risk is "safety first," not after the accident occurs. There are technologies other than PTC that are either on line or being tested, such as electronic braking, that will make Passenger Rail safer. It will be by a combination of available tech, not by one system of signalling, that Passenger Rail and rail in general will be made safer. Congress probably will never wake up.

That's why Mister Trains urges all voters: Do not vote for the incumbent. Pick the independent, the green, the Naders or the Ron Pauls, but don't pick the incumbents.

But we always welcome it when somebody wakes up and smells the coffee with regards to our failing transportation policy and the value of Passenger Rail in particular.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Two Questions

2008-09-21T08:00:00.000-06:00

Question One: Will there be any money left for Passenger Rail?

There is a need for a comprehensive United States transportation plan. We think this statement is unarguable. We also think that the only way such a plan can be implemented is through focused government subsidy for expanded Passenger Rail. This should move into the realm of public-private partnerships and finally, if successful, one day into the realm of pure private enterprise.

Right now, we are not moving in the direction of private enterprise. It wouldn't surprise us if there were a need - in a very short time - to nationalize the transportation system to keep it from melting down in the same way that AIG and the credit markets almost have, or almost did.

If we do that, the question comes as to how much money will be put into Passenger Rail. Or will the government just support new highways and airways and revamp air transport? In our opinion, we cannot do the latter without leaving our transportation systems vulnerable to attack. Only a balanced Passenger Rail component secures the system against such attack.

Question Two: Is Joe Biden pro rail just because he commutes on a train?

We think not. Biden has been critical of Amtrak, just as have many legislators, without offering a solution that demonstrates a comprehensive knowledge of the problem. We know lots of folks who bitch about the service but have no idea what it really takes to run a passenger train, let alone a railroad.

We do not see a presidential or vice-presidential candidate that can truly be called pro rail. Transportation won't become glamorous enough to catch the eye of the media, and hence of the voter, unless it is interrupted in the same way that failure of Fannie and Freddy would have interrupted the financial markets. (And please do not think we are advocating this. We are just saying.) It is a pity, but keep it in mind when you vote.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Precursor

2008-09-14T07:00:00.000-06:00

It is too soon after the disasterous wreck of this past Friday to lay blame.

This is why we disagree with Metralink blaming the engineer. Again, it is too soon, and all sorts of things might have gone wrong. If experience is any teacher, it usually takes more than one thing to go wrong to cause such a disaster or contribute to it.

However, please pray for the injured and for the newly departed. These include the poor engineer of the Metralink train.

We would just like to ask our readers if, after prayer please, you would think about the future of Passenger Rail in this country. On its present course, most, if not all, passenger trains will be sharing the rails with the already overburdened freight transportation industry. And all will be running across barges and trucks during their journeys. Will both sides - passenger and freight - be safe? What do we - as a nation - need to do to keep this from being the precursor of even more such disasters as almost every one in the past has been?

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Breather

2008-08-31T07:00:00.000-06:00

Now that we have vented about what - historically - has been done wrong. Let's take a breather and think about what might be done right.

Let's think about doubling. What part of Passenger Rail and Amtrak in particular should we fund to double the current status and how efficient would that be?

It is reported that Amtrak ridership is growing in spite of stagnent numbers of routes (with the exception of new, state funded routes) and stagnent amounts of passenger cars available to the fleet.

Doubling Route Miles

This would probably result in a better than doubling of passenger miles, but would require doubling or better the amount of equipment and the service facilities that go with more equipment. It would probably require more than doubling the payroll. Would it result in double the revenue? We doubt it.

Doubling Train Frequency

This would probably result in more passenger miles. It would not require twice the equipment and probably could be done without doubling employment in on-board crews. However, it would result in higher maintenance costs.

Doubling Track Speed
A necessity if train frequency is to be doubled. Better signalling would help with this, so this would probably require double the expenditures of host railroads on track and signals.

Doubling The Amount of Equipment
This would be a first step in doubling the availability of all passenger rail and must be done no matter what the cost.

Doubling The Size of Management
A real danger if we start pouring money into the system.

We start to see how interconnected is the network that we dismantled by nationalizing the Passenger Rail system. If Congress can come up with not double the money but enough money to double the system, it's really hard to say where it should go. It should not go into administration and/or management.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

No. 4 - Manufacturing and Industrial Design

2008-08-17T07:00:00.001-06:00

What is it about North American freight railroading that makes it unique? It has a look and esthetic that is unlike railroading anywhere else in the world.

Passenger Rail in North America used to be the same way.

Actually, with most of Amtrak, it still is. But with commuter rail not so much any more. And we have probably long given up the possibility that the coming revival of intercity Passenger Rail will look anything more that Global, or worse, European.

The extraordinary hiatus in development of purely American intercity passenger trains has given the rest of the world a leg up. Worse, we will never know what the evolution of the passenger train would have been had we just continued to run them in a quantity and at a speed that kept them in the public eye and mind. For instance, the trend toward bi-levels started with the Santa Fe equipment might have been more incentive for eastern routes with increased clearances. Fifteen years ago, Amtrak still had to devise Superliner-like interiors to fit into single-level cars still having to squeeze through tunnels that couldn't clear Superliners.

With the increase in sizes, would we now have a third or fourth generation of Super-Superliners that make Passenger Rail even more fuel efficient than it already is with broken-down antiques? With a continuity in design and volume of use, would green locomotive builders be targeting passenger use instead of just freight? We will never know.

Had we been building North American passenger cars right along, the cost of including integrated, state-of-the-art amenities (the full range of electronic media, the best of human creature comforts) might not be as great as it is now for single, disgustingly small (by car count) orders that come only once every two decades.

We The People have done ourselves a great disservice in settling for Amtrak.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

No. 3 - Marginalization and Demonization

2008-08-03T07:00:00.000-06:00

Third on Mister Trains' list of what the United States should have done to ensure that Passenger Rail was viable in the twenty-first century is a two-parter. Because they are two sides of the same coin, we have put them together; but they just as easily could have been No. 3 and No. 4.

Marginalization: The act of diminishing the importance of something by shoving it off to the margins of public consciousness. In our society today, the homeless, the harmless insane, the elderly poor, and Passenger Rail are all marginalized. When public policy evolved (or devolved) to support air and highway transport at the expense of rail, the policy makers found themselves with a nightmare of complaints from those who still viewed rail as the way to get from here to there. Train-offs were always made after loud public outcry from those who did not want to lose the passenger train.

So we dealt with it by convincing ourselves that those loudmouths were not riders but complainers and that they probably would not use the trains if they were left on the timetable. We then marginalized the communities that suffered and sometimes died because of the train-offs. We told ourselves that they were little hayseed towns that didn't have an economic future anyway.

During the process of marginalization, the media always presented the railroads as an archaic form of transportation. Likewise, successful European or Asian passenger trains were characterized as quaint and touristy. Not until our trains were long gone and the rest of the world's weren't did the media start showing us the "modern and space age" trains of France, Japan, and etc. Now the only experienced passenger car builders come from places other than the United States.

Demonization is an extreme form. Not only were railroads characterized as archaic and outdated, but they were placed in a blame situation for almost every possible annoyance that a transportation form could have. They were too hot, too cold, unsafe, they contributed to noise, pollution, they dispoiled the land, they were founded by robber barrons who never repaid their debt to society.

Trains retreated, they retrenched, and they kept a low profile. Today they do their jobs without the high advertising budgets of airlines and auto manufacturers. Throughout the world, however, railroads haul more passengers more miles and more comfortably than do today's airlines. But they don't do it here.

Mister Trains still gets comments from people who don't get it. From those who say rail is archaic. We bet that fewer people in the rest of the world feel that way. Where Passenger Rail was never marginalized or demonized, it flourishes.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

No. 2 - Regulation

2008-07-27T07:00:00.000-06:00

We shall reach back a little further in time for the second item on our list of things we, the United States, should have done to foster a vital Passenger Rail system over time.

Regulation of the rail transportation system, in general, should have ended after the Robber Baron era. We are sure that the public of the late nineteenth century saw abuses by the railroads. The system of regulation that continued without mercy into the third quarter of the twentieth century abused the so-called private-sector railroads far more.

In today's economy, we are having a healthy discussion about the relative merits of free markets v. regulation. Movements are afoot to re-regulate rail and big oil and big drug and big any other business that is seen as making a buck off the Little Guy. But every dollar made in this country originates with the Little Guy.

By regulating the health out of the railroads, Government deprived the Little Guy of a vital form of transportation. The Little Guy no longer had the choice of taking a passenger train from Point A to Point B. Indirectly, Little Guy and Girl were deprived of truck-free highways good for a Sunday afternoon spin. We were deprived of the clean environment that trains foster and trucks do not. We were deprived of all of the potential advancements in rail service that many other parts of the world have or will have. Because even while regulating rail, and with the exception of national emergency (read World War), Government refused to run the trains. Via ridiculous yearly Congressional debates over funding Amtrak, Government still refuses to run the very corporate entity it set up to be the trains.

Would we have done better without regulation? You bet. First, the railroads that ran the passenger trains would have had a fairer chance to remain solvent. Though solvency in railroad terms is an interesting accounting theory probably served more by a whole book than by this blog, suffice it to say that a fully solvent corporation, one making money for its investors, is less likely to have to cut off marginal parts of the business.

Did we say marginal? Yes, because although Passenger Rail does not make money on a fully allocated cost basis, there was a time when it did make money on an avoidable cost basis. Basically that means that, if freight is solvent and paying all fixed and avoidable costs (trains, track and infrastructure), then Passenger Rail has only to pay avoidable costs to make money. What once was an accounting ploy by the railroads to show regulators how badly they needed to raise the rates became common practice and had everybody convinced that passengers were dragging freight down. (They were - but only because freight rates were regulated too heavily to make a profit from the combination of both freight and passenger service.)

Without regulation, passenger rates would also have risen with the economy. The railroad that wanted to lure pasengers from airlines and automobiles would have been free to hold the bargain-basement sale (at the expense of freight, which would have been paying its way in any case). Without regulation, freight would have been able to maintain its competitive edge with truck and barge, and been able to "do a deal" on rates where needed to snag the business. (As opposed to going to the government hat in hand to ask mother-may-I when a rate change seemed appropriate.)

In its own way, and with the help of the NIMBYs and environmentalists, Government still regulates the rails. Freight has been free to flow at market rates for decades, but building more infrastructure is a daunting task. So you won't see new rail routes blazed out of virgin territory any sooner than you will see new oil refineries in cities that never had them, or new oil rigs off the coast of California.

We are a nation of contortionists, my friends. Because we have been screwing ourselves for years.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

What We Should Have Done - No. 1

2008-07-13T07:00:00.000-06:00

The decline of the passenger train in the United States did not come as a shock to anyone.

Just as it should be obvious to anyone today that the passenger airliner is on the ropes, so it was clear in the early 1950s that Passenger Rail would not survive the private passenger auto. The precipitous drop in rail travel numbers after World War II should have engendered a national transportation policy that included saving the trains.

The National Defense Highway system, subsequently the Interstate Highway system, was first and foremost supposed to be a device to enhance national security. Yes, troops and equipment could move fast by rail, and had moved faster by rail during the war than they had ever before. But our Government foresaw that war materiel could move faster on a system of limited-access highways.

Instead, what our Government should have done was establish a national defense transportation policy - a policy whereby private citizens, commerce and industry, and Government and the military could be assured that, no matter what the disaster, all would have access to the transportation necessary to their needs.

While establishing a route system for the highways, the Government should have been identifying essential passenger routes for all modes of transport and weighing the cost benefits against what would happen if one or more of those modes became undesirable or unuseable for reason of some national emergency.

Instead our money went into a distinctly inferior system of highways that ultimately saddled us with spiraling maintenance costs and accelerating depreciation precisely BECAUSE we did not establish balanced and well-considered policy towards other modes of transport. And it did this while using public money to effectively cut many communities off from both motor commerce and passenger rail. (Count the number of communities that any Interstate bypasses by looping around them, and see how many of these still have Amtrak service.)

The unheeded and nonetheless inevitable decline in the railroads' passenger service during the next 15 years certainly was not headed off. And Amtrak, instead of being well-considered policy, was instead a political stopgap. What happened with the creation of Amtrak - saving a few routes for political and popular expediency - was nothing like what should have been done a decade or two before. It was an emergency measure that did ALL modes of passenger transport a disservice. To say nothing of what it did to We The People.

Next time, No. 2.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Bleak Future

2008-07-06T07:00:00.000-06:00

Don Phillips is an internationally recognized authority on transportation. He writes a monthly piece in Trains Magazine, and he has a doozy in the current (August 2008) issue.

Whether or not he is right in blaming President Bush for the transportation policies of the past 8 years - and Congress is at least as responsible - you have to listen to the truths he tells.

Truth No. 1 - U.S. transportation policy is a mess. We would go one step further and say we have none, but we guess that maintaining the status quo with a minimum of funding and no new taxes is policy. Unfortunately, the status quo just won't cut it. Highways are just about at the breaking point, the air traffic system is as archaic as the California Zephyr was when the first jet passenger aircraft were in diapers, and we need all the intercity rail routes we have just to move freight. In fact, there are some parts of the country where starting up Commuter Rail to take cars off the roads will just put trucks on the roads in their places. It is just that bad.

Truth No. 2 - The public is in the dark as to transportation policy and transportation options. We are not talking about deciding whether to fly or drive - we are talking about whether we will have the option of getting there at all. The public sees rail transportation as an anachronism. We can see that in some of the responses we get to our blog. The public is not disturbed by the lack of options until the public is stuck in truck traffic on the way to an important meeting. The public sensitivity is so dulled by the continual squandering of tax money that it doesn't give a fig any more.

Truth No. 3 - Our leaders, the President, Congress, and state governments, would just as soon keep it that way. That's because if the public knew of the options and opportunities for a first-class transportation system that have been passed by - by elected officials more concerned about their re-elections than about the Re-public - then we, the people, would probably throw the whole lot of 'em out and start over.

Truth No. 4 - Nothing will get better if we ignore it. The way Mister Trains sees it: Fuel prices will level out or continue to rise, but they won't fall significantly and will never again drop to as low a percentage of costs for goods and services as they once were. We are beyond the break point, and some transportation companies, particularly those with no hedge on energy costs and with customers who cannot withstand any significant increase in fuel surcharges, will have to merge or quit business. That is true across the board, and we have already seen the bankruptcies in the air transport business. Any failure in one mode will put more pressure on another, and hence more costs through excess loading, wear-and-tear, and penalties on missed deliveries.

The cascade of chaos is awesome to contemplate. Eventually, we can see a few truck lines carrying on over highways to which we cannot devote any money because use taxes have dropped. We can see trains parked in sidings for days or weeks waiting for capacity. If that happens, you will see empty shelves in all retail establishments, even Walmart. We can see air traffic cut to a half or a third of what it is today. We can see Amtrak unable to get a train from one city to another because of the congestion. And we can see idle commuter trains in idle terminals, because half the work force that needed them won't have jobs. This one could make the Great Depression look like a cakewalk.

Our Enemies - and they are Legion - are licking their chops.

Bleak? Yes! Possible to turn around? Maybe. Don Phillips doesn't think so, and he has a lot more credentials than Mister Trains.

The scariest part of all is this: Not one average Joe or Jill who reads this has a clue what opportunities have been missed - what could or should have prevented this Bleak Future.

Down the road, we will attempt to tell you, if the First Amendment holds out that long.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Or Maybe Nader

2008-06-26T11:01:00.002-06:00

Please. Just navigate to this link: http://www.counterpunch.org/nader06252008.html

This pretty much says most of it. And we agree that the candidates for all offices should be debating this with just as much concern as they are debating any other issue.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Minneapolis to Duluth An HSR Experiment Worth Watching

2008-06-22T07:00:00.000-06:00

When contrasted with other High Speed Rail corridors in the Upper Midwest, this is a short one. About 150 miles as opposed to over 200 for the next shortest (Chicago - Detroit). It's also one that has to traverse many fewer miles of urban rail wasteland.

Chicago to Detroit has about 100 miles of such wasteland, Chicago to St. Louis considerably less, although the corridor is almost 300 miles. St. Louis to Kansas City is comparable in wasteland but over 270 miles.

Now that municipalities, both suburban and rural, along the Minneapolis to Duluth routing are being heard, it is possible that this corridor will become the first to accomodate both HSR and Commuter Rail on the same right-of-way. Perhaps - with good signalling - on the same tracks.

The high price of motor fuel demands this kind of experiment, as does the general greening of public policy whether one believes in man-made global warming or not. (We don't.)

If any of you have ever watched the scoots on their three-track speedway west of Chicago on what was once the Burlington Route (CB&Q, then Burlington Northern and now BNSF Railway) with commuter trains run by Chicago's Metra, even with CTC from the 1930s, then you can believe that this can be done with the right number of tracks and the right investment in signals.

And certainly we have come a long, long way from the CTC of seven decades ago as well as with the extra control that can be had on diesel-electric locomotives with microprocessors and computers - and the newest potential: electro-pneumatic braking instead of all pneumatics. (A boon for longer freight traffic, but also allowing longer controllable commuter trains.)

And a 150-mile route is just the right percentage of long-distance for economical HSR versus slow-speed routing for conflicting trains. If a viable system could be developed for this routing, it could be expanded to apply to just about any one where either the HSR or the low-speed rail wasteland percentages are higher.

We would hope the government, developers, researchers, and manufacturers recognize this as a golden opportunity to carpe the diem.

We can always hope.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Amtrak Budget: Is the Glass Half Full, or Just Half Cracked?

2008-06-15T07:00:00.000-06:00

If it is the objective of Congress to thumb it's collective snotty nose at the taxpayer in general and at Amtrak in particular, then the pathetic Amtrak appropriation just passed by the House is a measure of success.

$14.9 billion for Amtrak for FIVE fiscal years 2009 thru 2013.

At the very same time, The Associated Press is reporting just about $14 billion in earmarks (called Pork) going to Members' districts in just ONE year. And, if the AP is just half right, that means that about $700 million is going into the pockets of lobbyists for the district and/or organization - read political contributors - that pushed for the earmark. (The AP is guessing about 10%, so conservatively, 5% isn't any stretch at all.)

And supporters of the Amtrak appropriation had to beat back amendments that would have gutted and hamstrung any Amtrak management efforts at improvements.

Let us pray, for remember, with Congress, it's never too late to screw things up.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

We Can Say It Now

2008-06-08T15:46:00.002-06:00

The primaries are over and it is going to be, by God's grace forbidding any disaster, Barack Obama vs. John McCain.

If we were to vote today and base our vote solely on the political history of the two candidates, we are afraid - very afraid - we would have to vote Democrat!

Mister Trains has always had a habit of voting for the best man, so we are not convinced that Mr. Obama is the best man overall, just the best for Passenger Rail.

If you check out this blog: http://trains4america.wordpress.com/2008/05/03/obama-talks-up-high-speed-rail-amtrak/
You will understand that Mr. Obama has at least a rudimentary understanding of HSR and of why trains are more fuel efficient - greener if you will - than other modes of passenger transport.

Mr. McCain has a history of criticizing Amtrak, and has said at least once that a priority for him would be shutting it down. Does anyone doubt on this date, with oil jumping up $10 in one day and gas prices well over $4 in may parts of the country, that shutting down Amtrak would be a catastrophe from which our domestic transport system would not recover?

Yes, Mr. McCain was in a legislative position in which he had to see the worst of Amtrak's failures, but no, Mr. McCain, that is not the solution to this problem. Only if we follow the current trend and gradually move Passenger Rail back into the private sector will anything like this work. McCain's motto: Millions for highways but not a penny for Amtrak.

We are going to listen hard to both candidates for the next five months. We of course won't be able to avoid it and we will be praying for ear plugs by that time. But somewhere in those words is going to be the only hope of Passenger Rail, and by God if it is Obama then so be it.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Passenger Rail and The Directionally Challenged

2008-05-25T07:00:00.000-06:00

A large part of the job of any CSR working for a passenger transportation company - be it airline, rail or bus - is getting people to and from the terminal. People will get on the 800 number and use it like a free GPS to get directions.

It gave us the idea that Amtrak, in addition to publishing system timetables and train-specific timetables, should publish timetables that include every U.S. municipality. Not that Amtrak will probably ever serve every city, even with bus service. But in today's computer-driven age, there is no reason not to be able to publish your time from say Skokie, IL, to Union Station, Chicago, by car. And then at the other end by whatever means to whatever municipality. Sure this would take a huge book if published on paper. But on the Web, it would be child's play to design pages that would give the consumer this timetable.

This way a customer not only gets some idea of how long the total trip will take, but the customer also gets a sort of guide. Coupled with system maps, this should be an attractive draw for customers. We know there are many potential Amtrak riders that shy away from riding the train for the very reason that they do not know how to plan the non-Amtrak ends.

More specifically, in the Skokie example, the timetable could give the time at Skokie, representing the time the Skokie-ite had to leave home. Then perhaps the time at Lawrence Avenue, Chicago, and the Edens Expressway, maybe the time to park the car in some long-term facility. At the other end, a time would be shown for the transfer say from Oakland Jack London to a San Jose bound train, and then add the California train schedule with maybe time for cousin Joe to drive you from San Jose to his home.

Yes, some travel agents do this now, but only with the parts where you buy travel. If you are driving yourself, you are on your own to figure times.

Maybe this is already being done somewhere, and if it is, we would like to see Amtrak pick up on it and figure out how to do it with their own schedules.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

When Will It Hit Them?

2008-05-18T07:00:00.000-06:00

"It" being the train, that is. And by "Them" I refer to the entire United States Government, all branches and all agencies, and all state governments. Them Politicians.

It has already hit the general public and, to some extent, private enterprise. Consistently, the railroad press and the general media carry more stories about Passenger Rail than they did just five years ago. And they are all positive – for Passenger Rail.

The media attention is in a few distinct categories, but it all shows that the general public is either becoming more aware of Passenger Rail alternatives or being pressed to do so by keen observers. The categories:

News stories of startups of new passenger service, both Amtrak and privately run.

News stories about groups that advocate Passenger Rail improvements including the institution of new lines.

Editorials advocating improvements or new lines.

Opinion pieces stating what a bunch of transportation dunderheads we have in our governments. Them Politicians.

Meanwhile, back on The Hill, Congress continues its obstructive tactics to marginalize Amtrak and snatch as much money as possible for highways and air transport.

A local buffet restaurant once placed television advertising that suggested potential customers’ ignorance of the goodness of their product by smacking them in the face with a heavy frying pan and then having the question “When will it hit you?” running over the still-ringing gong of the frying pan. Well, when the hell will it hit the government? Them Politicians.

The way we see it, government must do several things, among which are:

Fund Amtrak in an enlightened and non-politicized way. That means realistic spending on new and improved equipment and services.

Continue and increase subsidies for increased service by private carriers. Include short lines in the bidding process and don’t prohibit startups from participating.

Stop the process of hamstringing railroads with re-regulation. Possibly the only reason private rail is healthy today is the de-regulation that occurred almost three decades ago. If the so-called re-regulation takes place, limiting rate-making and abolishing the anti-trust exemption for railroads, it will take another quarter century to kill them off. So look at another fifty years before we get back to what we have today - if the politicians have anything to say about it. Unfortunately, they do.

Wise up when it comes to implementing un-realistic risk management. No mode of transport is perfectly safe.

Educate the public that Passenger Rail does not make money up front. It is a necessary public service that helps everybody else make money, increases commerce, and improves government bottom line with a rising economy.

Stop listening to the tree-huggers and NIMBYs and let Passenger Rail be the green source of transport it has always been. It is ironic that the same person who doesn’t want a train running past the house won’t complain when the same number of folks drive by in heavy-polluting SUVs.

When will it hit them?

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Transportation and Oil

2008-05-04T07:00:00.000-06:00

Both are in crisis. Both are controversial. And in both cases, the United States Government is to stupid to see it.

These two crises are one - in more ways than one.

Both have been precipitated by long years of public and governmental complacency and by the inability of private sector businesses to see beyond the current quarter and the bottom line. Both are fed by the lack of public imagination of our politicians and by the ability of special interest groups to influence public policy.

Case one: Much of our government and most of the public doesn't think there is a transporation crisis or an oil crisis. They think of it more in terms of high prices and/or lack of service. They believe that the businesses that provide product or service can remedy any problems by not overcharging the public.

Case two: Controversy over the place for Passenger Rail in our society hasn't stopped for one second since private Passenger Rail fell in the late 60s. About the same time, controversy over whether we should be getting oil from our own shores began.

Case three: The public does not see and crisis unless it is presented as such by the media. Ditto for the government. Government and legislation chases problems that are in the news, not those that never make the front page or Nightline.

Case four: Investing in both transportation and oil production or refining right now is a risky business. The bottom line is months (many quarters) if not years away. The pension funds and the trust funds that control the equity won't stand for it.

Case five: If you can't think of an easy fix for the problem, oil or transportation, then no fix is better than a partial one. We can ride it out until a good fix comes along. This is foolhardy and won't work.

Case six: Fixes are going to cost money, and they won't come about if railroads (read Amtrak), airlines and oil companies just lower their prices. They are already all disincentivized by government, and loss of profit motive removes even more incentives for innovation.

Case seven: Environmental activists have done wonders for us since the 1970s. Think DDT and detergents in the waterways. But many if not most are now over the edge and looking for a cause that hasn't been tackled. Most of the causes are minor ones, at best, and don't require the heavy-handed approach that the major ones did. They need to pull back from both oil and transportation projects so we can actually get something done in this country. Dubai wouldn't be as spectacular if they had environmentalists to tell them they couldn't transform the pristine desert environs.

Just a few thoughts. We will shut up now.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Passenger Rail and The Traveler

2008-04-27T07:00:00.000-06:00

Strange bedfellows? Yes, in this day and in this century and on this continent.

In North America, in the twenty-first century, and by most people, Passenger Rail is considered an anachronism. It's something your parents or grandparents - or great-grandparents - used. It has no utility beyond the museum exhibit and the tourist railroad.

Even in major cities with light rail and heavy rail commuter networks, it is not the transportation of choice for most people. If you look at the numbers, there are far more people who look at Passenger Rail as one of the following:
1. A good way to keep traffic off the streets during rush hour.
2. A deep hole into which your sales-tax or gas-tax money is thrown.
3. Not really Passenger Rail but some sort of people mover that just happens to involve tracks and trains.
Far more, that is, than actually ride the trains.

In the northeast, and little by little, people are starting to see Passenger Rail as the first choice for travel. The melt-down of the airlines and the degeneration of service from all air carriers - one that mimics the plight of Passenger Rail in the late 1960s, will probably bring more people to think of Passenger Rail as the first choice. More, that is, if there is actually Passenger Rail to choose.

We are at a turning point in the history of Passenger Rail in the United States. Other modes including the personal automobile will fail to deliver the quality we expect in the years ahead. For road transport, this will be so because of the price of fuel, but more so because of the scarcity of good roads that aren't occupied by freight - that is: Trucks. For air transport it will be because of the selective mismanagement of the airlines that again mimics the selective mismanagement of the struggling rail systems of the 1960s. (What a way to attract passengers! Start taking away amenities and charge more!)

Passenger Rail won't suffer so much because it still relies on good old free enterprise to some extent. The rails and ways that guide it will continue to be maintained and invested in by private enterprise for the foreseeable future. If we can just make sure that everyone who wants to choose the train has that option, we will be more than halfway there.

The United States has transportation so hamstrung by the mish-mash of government invervention and non-intervention that fares or user costs will probably never ever reflect the actual cost of transportation as delivered to the end-user. It would be nice if it could, because then we would have the modes competing on a level playing field and Passenger Rail (and freight rail for commodities) would win hands down. Unfortunately, our liberalized and socialized government will not be able to resist putting massive infusions of cash into failing air carriers (a subsidy) in the same way that it always resists putting subsidies into Passenger Rail.

We would like to see the unsubsidized approach, but it will never happen. So as a consumer of transportation services and as a citizen we resist the all-government approach and thank God for happy mediums.

We need to reach one soon on the transportation front. Otherwise we will all have to stay home and tend our solar panels, and travel - as a leisure activity and as a tool of trade - will be dead.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Amtrak's Little Secrets

2008-04-06T07:00:00.001-06:00

As it is with all public entities, we are sure there are dirty little secrets at Amtrak. To the extent that these secrets are financial and hurt the cause of Passenger Rail, we decry those secrets.

Rather than go on a full-blown rampage and ask for disclosure, we would rather see Amtrak and most public agencies just get on with their business.

Congressional investigations cost time and money and do not fix problems. In most cases, the problem that precipitated the investigation has already been fixed, but Congress must know who knew what and when before it is satisfied that it has spent as much public money as possible on the subject. Congress will then move on.

Congressional investigation of Amtrak hurts its reputation and gives non-riding or yet-to-ride public the impression that Amtrak is a boondoggle and not worth taxpayer money and consideration.

So please: Would those of you who are keeping Amtrak's dirty little secrets just forget about them and get on with business? Stop stealing or cheating and get on with business! And would those of you who are trying to uncover Amtrak's dirty little secrets just put the energy into something positive?

For the latter group, why don't you get involved in something that will result in new Passenger Rail service rather than in exposing what has been? Unless you are just jealous that you didn't get in on the cheat. In that case, get out of Passenger Rail altogether!

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Nothing Wrong With A Name

2008-03-30T07:00:00.000-06:00

Thesis: Names that mean something are worth more than those that don't.

This thesis may have been false in the past. At a time earlier in the post-industrial revolution world when modern meant both new and unique, brand names that tangentially invoked their product's purpose or appearance were probably pretty popular. Otherwise so many of them would not have survived into the twenty-first century.

We are thinking Passenger Rail and comparing names like Amtrak and Metra to names like Rail Runner Express or North Star Express or even Metro North. The latter of which at least uses two words that were a part of the English language before the invention of the particular rail service described.

Every successful passenger system in the world names the really good trains. Those systems that are exceptional make use of system names that carry both bearing and pride, and that say, "This is a successful railroad."

We dislike the following railroad names: Metra, CSX, BNSF Railway, etc. We like Union Pacific, Kansas City Southern (even though the parent company tends to initialize as KCS Industries), Canadian Pacific, etc. We think a descriptive name is worth a thousand recognitions of the manufactured one.

Amtrak is a shortening of America and Track. Why it wasn't spelled Amtrack probably has more to do with the mindset of advertising agencies than with saving paint on one "c", but we don't know for sure. It's a misnomer, because we were saving passenger trains, not track. Amtrain would actually have been more descriptive, and we can go on to the realms of the ridiculous.

Were Amtrak to redo its image as something else, changing the name to something recognizable would be both valuable and important. Off the head-top, we could think of a dozen names that would at once be more descriptive, romantic, user-friendly and melodius. We aren't going to share all of them, but even something like North America Intercity Railway sounds better than Aaaaam-traaackkkk. Railway of the United States.

We could be truthful: United States' Taxpayer's Railway

We could be romantic: Great Eastern and Western Overland Route

We could be playful: Trains To Everywhere

Or truthful again if Amtrak doesn't shape up: Trains To Nowhere

How about catchy without going the acronym route? Fun Trains Rail

Or green: The Energy Saver Route.

Or satisfy the accountants: The Billion-Dollar Down The Hole and Western

We are just kidding . . . but you see what we are getting at. After all this time Amtrak is no longer a valuable name and needs to be dumped.

Nothing wrong with a name, if it means something.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Nuclear Locomotives & Public Perception

2008-03-23T07:00:00.001-06:00

A retired nuclear engineer from Sandia National Laboratories, no less, recently got a letter published in the Albuquerque Journal "Outlook" business section. We can't link you to the article here, but we will summarize. We won't name the engineer because it is not our intention to embarass him, just to point out some salient facts.

Mr. Retired Engineer wants to know why we don't just shift every bloomin' truckload off the highways and onto the rails. He has realized that the saving in crew costs and the savings in fuels would be tremendous.

Next, Mr. R.E. suggests that we pull the freight train with nuclear powered locomotives. (Then he goes a little off the deep end and suggests that the whole Navy should go nuclear and we should use nuclear powered desalination plants to provide fresh water.)

We are going to give Mr. R. E. the benefit of the doubt and assume he is a scientist and well educated. We are also going to assume that he is in the habit of applying logical thinking to problem solving.

With those assumptions, we can only conclude that Mr. R. E. looks at the railroad tracks in his neighborhood and assumes that, because trains are not flowing like trucks on the highway, the tracks are underutilized. This may be the case, but since he is in New Mexico and abreast of the BNSF Transcon, we can only assume that he is ignorant of what it takes in cost, manpower, maintenance and environmental impact to increase the capacity of our freight rail system. (The Transcon is always running at capacity.)

This is not a blog about Freight Rail, but this is true of Passenger Rail, too. The general public has no idea of the cost of increased capacity, or of the lead time necessary to create such capacity. This appears to be a problem with public perception in general and it applies to more than just railroads. (Think oil and gas and refineries.)

Then there are the nuclear locomotives. Mr. R. E., those of us in our 60s now all thought this would happen long ago. But there are a few problems, one of which is weight. Diesel power happens to be extraordinarily suited to the tractive force vs. engine weight equation. Yes, most diesels as they came from the factory will provide more tractive force with more weight and get better fuel economy. But weight increases track forces, track wear, and hence track maintenance.

Another problem with all of this is public inertia. The general public thinks "China Syndrome" and "Three Mile Island" when it thinks nuclear. The general public, thanks to the media, also thinks toxic hazardous material spill, death, and litigation when it thinks of railroads. That's why there is a movement afoot for cities to get railroads to build bypasses.

The NIMBYs control what happens next. Some of this goes back to the weight equation. So much radiation shielding would be required that weight would be prohibitive.

Only one way could be devised to nuke all locomotives. Build a land-based power plant and feed the power through standard catenary ala Northeast Corridor to electric locomotives. Voila! But see my comments re: costs below.

It's a real hoot to think of trying to drive a nuclear powered locomotive through any inhabited area, let alone also pulling a train full of potentially toxic materials through a heavily populated one. It's nice that Mr. R. E. still has the naive sense of the invincibility of science that probably brought him to become a research scientist.

Unfortunately, in the land of railroading, be it Freight or Passenger Rail, we have to get real. And reality is, we would have to quadruple the capacity of freight railroads, or pentuple it if we increase Amtrak routes, in order to even come close to carrying half the freight that highway trucks now carry. If we started now and spent TRILLIONS of dollars, it would take us at the very least a DECADE, and probably TWO DECADES to accomplish this. (Maybe three decades if we have to build new electric facilities, catenary and the locomotives to use it.) This writer and Mr. R. E. may not live to see it.

We are truly behind the eight ball. So you younger scientists out there, please come up with ideas that will work. But keep it real. And ABQ Journal editors, if you are reading this, please use your column inches for ideas that make sense.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Hiatus

2008-03-16T07:00:00.000-06:00

Mister Trains is gratified by all the recent responses (both comment and email) for the past week. Regrets that we have not had enough time to prep a subject to post. Seems we get less and less of that time which doesn't require working to make ends meet.

But thanks all for recent responses and keep hitting this page just to connect to other sites, please.

Happy train riding.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Follow the Cash

2008-03-09T07:00:00.001-06:00

Please read http://www.startribune.com/local/north/16241527.html .

Who has most of the loose cash to spend? And who needs to find ways to keep getting people through the doors despite the faultering economy?

No, it's not a government subsidized polling place. It's Indian Gaming!

Amtrak and anyone else trying to get Passenger Rail and/or HSR going in this country needs to look at Indian Gaming as a potential partner. Routing new trains through or very near casinos, perhaps with connecting light rail or monorail lines (a la Vegas' successful/unsuccessful monorail), needs to be given heavy thought and probable priority.

We in New Mexico already have stops near Indian casinos. But Gov. Richardson missed the boat when he didn't ask them to pony up some of the costs. Maybe he still can.

In other places, like Minnesota, it's still possible to get them involved and get our train-loving hands on some of their cash.

We are being a bit course, of course, but this is a real win-win situation for both the tribes and the trains. We hope Amtrak and every state agency now thinking of sponsoring and funding passenger rail reads this. Readers please help by forwarding this post to any projects in your state.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Irony

2008-03-02T07:00:00.000-07:00

As the United States' prosperity grew and the fortune's of the freight railroads grew with it during the past two decades, we failed in making public policy that took advantage of our prosperity. It is now ironic that some in government would re-establish regulation of the railroads in the face of a faltering economy.

It is more ironic that, as the economy erodes, as the environment looms ever larger in concern, and as energy becomes harder to make and harder to buy, we will need the railroads, and Passenger Rail, more than ever.

We fear we have missed our chance, that a downturn in the economy will now make it both economically and politically impossible to start the projects we as a country need to keep our transportation systems viable.

It is also ironic that the passenger transportation mode that is most energy efficient - bar none - is the mode that gets shafted when it comes to both public funding and public planning. And let's face it, we can't convince our politicians to pay for something that is unplanned and spontaneous. We need a public policy that says the government will back plans that are good and viable, and in fact welcome those plans. No more of the "don't bother me with that" attitude from Congress and the administration - any administration - when it comes to Passenger Rail.

If you can't see the need for Passenger Rail, take a few airline flights. You soon will. If you can't see the need for Passenger Rail, ride an intercity bus. You soon will. If you can't see the need for Passenger Rail, drive an Interstate on a Sunday evening when the rested truckers are making their last haul to the Monday delivery point and clogging all lanes. You soon will. If you can't see the need for Passenger Rail, ride Amtrak and imagine what it would be like if the schedule you are on is multiplied to two to four trains a day, and on time. You soon will.

Please forward this post to every politician for which you are eligible to vote in your district. Maybe they soon will, too.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Intermodal Includes Passengers

2008-02-24T07:00:00.001-07:00

http://www.progressiverailroading.com/news/article.asp?id=15161

At least in some places on the planet. Why can't KCS invest this kind of cash in the US?

First there would be the NIMBYs, although they are getting weaker as we talk. More and more people are realizing that good Passenger Rail service is a necessity, not a tourist attraction or a luxury.

Then there is the problem that our freight railroads are overloaded and none of them want to add the burden of Passenger Rail. In Panama, granted, it is for tourism, but they can squeeze it in even on the overburdened rail system. Why? Because the dollars are there.

Bottom line is that the railroad wants to make money for its stockholders. In fact, it must. We tend to forget that a corporation has a contractual and common law duty, called a fiduciary duty, to use any means possible to make money and not to squander the investments already in there.

But we get just a little worried when we hear of all the advancement in Passenger Rail systems worldwide, even in what we would consider Third World. Doesn't it make anyone just a little bit uncomfortable that, while the United States fritters away dollars and political capital on fruitless economic stimulus, much of the rest of the world has seen the light?

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Frustrations

2008-02-17T07:00:00.000-07:00

We have been reading much in recent days about successful Passenger Rail projects. The most recent newsletter from NARP (see link at right) has a list of completed projects and future projects.

We are proud of and thank God for the completions. We are happy with the number of projects in the works for completion in the next five to seven years. But we are frustrated by two things.

The first is that many of the projects in the works will be stalled, cancelled or downgraded because of the current lack of federal funding and the downturn in the economy. The politicians think they can do a whole lot about the latter, but they can't. They could fix the former, but won't in any election year.

The second thing that frustrates us is the low percentage of future projects that are for intercity rail. Yes, Passenger Rail is just as important to the urban network. But intercity Passenger Rail is and has to be the wave of the future if we are to wean ourselves from expensive oil and from overcrowded overreliance on the highway and air transport system.

Only two frustrations? you ask. More actually. Some of which involve the way our overblown, self-important bureaucracy tends to feed on its young. Such as the FRA taking the tightest, most literal construction for ADA compliance of all Passenger Rail station platforms. (Very well reported in the March 2008 Trains.)

There is no reason for some of it, and some of it comes from the abject fear of being sued, which is fostered by our system of torts. Most judges never met a lawsuit they didn't like.

We hope that next February, NARP's list of future projects is longer and has more intercity rail on it.

©2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Time for Passenger Rail

2008-02-10T07:00:00.000-07:00

We are linking you to this article by Arthur Frommer on the Lakeland, FL, Ledger's Web site: http://www.theledger.com/article/20080210/NEWS/802100347/1326.

The reason? We agree with everything Mr. Frommer has to say about the future of Passenger Rail in these United States. We also agree that one of the best things we who want Passenger Rail in this nation's future can do is urge all who will listen not to vote for incumbents who do not support subsidizing Passenger Rail. That sounds like too many negatives. What we are saying is, "Throw the bums out."

The Task is the creation of a modern Passenger Rail system that serves all of the population centers of this great nation.

We are still unwilling to agree with those who think the entity called Amtrak must survive and carry on The Task. Whatever form it takes, Pasenger Rail must be more market sensitive and less strapped for cash than Amtrak has been in all of its history. Whether Amtrak can evolve enough to accomplish this remains to be seen. Whether our Congress can evolve enough to accomplish The Task is doubtful, given the full court press we have seen from some of our senators and representatives to altogether dump the "anachronism" that they see as Passenger Rail.

So we are also unwilling to agree that any incumbent can survive and change enough to carry on The Task. With the presidential contestants almost in the bag -- it will be Hillarobama v. John "I was a prisoner of war - support the War" McCain -- the best thing we can do for now is build up a groundswell against all who vote regularly against subsidizing a national passenger rail system. (Alternately: "for" all those who support the subsidy. But throwing out the bastards will be oh so much more satisfying, won't it? And incumbents already carry more baggage than an Amtrak Superliner.)

Remember, the President is an administrator, while the Congress legislates. If we can get a majority "for" Passenger Rail in both the Senate and House, we don't need no stinking President.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Global Warming?

2008-02-03T07:00:00.000-07:00

Forgive our cynicism when two of Amtrak's premier (if there is such a thing) trains have been plagued by weather in recent days. On top of which, on the surface anyway, it would appear that the weather is not what one would expect from global warming.

Let Mister Trains warn any readers of this blog who are tempted to comment extensively on the Church of Global Warming, this writer is a scientist by education. We understand that this could be extremely wet weather fueled by climate change. We also understand the data does not support the theory - yes theory - that climate change is caused by the activities of man.

But isn't it ironic that one of the few modes of motor-driven transport that would meet all the criteria for those concerned with GW is not able to match wits with it? If, and we say if, GW is a reality and if, and we say if, we can reverse it by changing our ways, it is too bad that our Passenger Rail system is so pared to the bone that it can't cope with route blockages. (Granted, in the case of the trains stalled on the Donner Pass route, it wasn't really the weather but a man-caused mistake that cut the route.)

Those of us who support an expanded Passenger Rail system, and who are not members of the Church of GW, need to curb our skepticism and see this as a grand opportunity to use public opinion, however misguided, to get what we have always said is our goal: Better Passenger Rail in the United States.

Some of the many dollars in gross product that will be spent on curbing GW can be spent on Passenger Rail.

Amen to that.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

A Politician For Passenger Rail

2008-01-27T07:00:00.000-07:00

We are going to go out on a limb and post an email we received from Illinois U. S. Senate Candidate Andy Martin. Please note that this is copyright material, and we are taking his forwarding of this to us as permission to reprint it without change or further comment.

(CHICAGO)(January 22, 2008) The newly-released “Report of the National Surface Transportation policy and Revenue Study Commission” strongly supports U. S. Senate candidate Andy Martin’s high-speed dedicated rail “One Illinois” passenger train proposal. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-gettingaround_21jan21,1,1446677.column “Last month I proposed the ‘One Illinois’ Plan to link Illinois’s cities and the Midwest region with high-speed dedicated rail service,” Martin stated. “I am very pleased that the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Study Commission has essentially endorsed the same goals. “The year 2009 is critical for every Illinoisan. That is when federal transportation legislation will be reviewed and revamped. If Illinois does not have a strong voice in Washington, we will be losers again. “We need to create an integrated transportation system for Illinois and the Midwest. High-speed trains would run from Milwaukee to St. Louis and Carbondale, from the Quad Cities and Peoria to Indianapolis, all connecting through the Chicago area. We would tie our state together and the region’s economy closer together. High-speed rail to Rockford would allow both Rockford and O’Hare to grow and save billions of dollars in wasted spending for An unnecessary third airport. People from Southern Illinois could get to major cities. Real estate values would be revived. “It is no secret that our economy and the world economy are under strain. These strains are not going to disappear overnight. A public works program based on productive investment in transportation infrastructure would help revitalize Illinois’ economy as well as the region’s economic base. “Dick Durbin has been an embarrassing failure on transportation issues and rail issues. His promises of new Toonerville Trolleys for Illinois, slow “Durbin Mule Trains,” are a disgrace and a manifestation of his incompetence. The rest of the world is moving forward with high-speed rail. We are falling behind. Our leaders in Washington have failed us. It is time for a change. It is time for Dick Durbin to ride one of his mule trains back home, although given Durbin’s ‘Potomac Fever’ he will probably stay in Washington after he is defeated.”------------------------------------------© Copyright by Andy Martin 2008. Chicago-based Martin holds a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Illinois College of Law. Comments? E-mail: AndyforUSSenator@aol.com. Media contact: (312) 440-4124. Web site: http://www.AndyforUSSenator.com. Also: AndyforUSSenator.blogspot.com; AndyforUSSenator.wordpress.com.

More Front Runners

2008-01-20T07:00:00.000-07:00

And we are not referring to the commuter rail service in Utah.

As of this writing, Sens. Clinton and McCain appear to be in a primary winning mode. How do they fare on Passenger Rail?

Sen. McCain has been not voting for most critical Amtrak legislation. He is not vocally for any form of Passenger Rail. As a matter of fact, it is difficult to find one of his speeches that even mentions rail tranportation. We do not think that a President McCain would be a friend of Amtrak or of Passenger Rail.

On the other hand, Sen. Clinton is quite vocal about Passenger Rail and has strongly advocated spending that would improve - not just New York - but national long-distance Passenger Rail. Her voting record on Amtrak does leave something to be desired, but she has supported major initiatives that would fund a modern rail passenger transportation system. She doesn't flinch at the prospect of spending billions.

Of the front-running candidates we have looked at so far, Hillary Clinton seems to be one of our best hopes for the expansion and improvement of Passenger Rail in this country.

In future blogs, we will look at the Passenger Rail records of other presidential candidates that may still have a chance at their party's nomination.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

A Big One Down

2008-01-13T16:44:00.000-07:00

The only presidential candidate with a real, hands-on record pro-Passenger Rail is out of the race. Bill Richardson is no longer a candidate and has refused to say who he will endorse. You can bet he's still on the menu for VP, however.

We have roundly criticized Mr. Richardson for his approach to NM Rail Runner and for his approach to presidential candidacy. Nonetheless, his record pro-Passenger Rail is astounding. The basic commuter rail system was up and running in record time. He devoted time and money to get it done and it was done. We see this as a greater accomplishment than what Congress has done with Amtrak in a whole decade.

Not only is the basic system done, but it WILL go to Santa Fe, the state capitol, and it will do it riding down the median of Interstate 25, a busy commuter stretch. It can only be good for ridership when, one day, commuters in their stop-and-go traffic watch the Rail Runner speeding by and note how much more pleasant and convenient that could be.

We criticized the choice of the median, but now that it IS the choice and is underway, we support anything that keeps the train rolling.

Had Mr. Richardson been given the chance to implement just one Amtrak improvement as significant as this (proportionately for the entire US), we would be looking at a better national system than we have had since Amtrak day one and for long before.

We are not supporting Mr. Richardson's party, and we are not fond of his other politics. Bring 'em home no matter what particularly stinks, particularly. But none of the remaining candidates have this much success and progress, pro-Passenger Rail, under their belts.

A Big One is down.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Is It Too Soon To Start Weeping?

2008-01-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

We do not think it is ever too soon. So, in the spirit of the new Presidential Primary season, we are going to give readers of this post something to think about when it comes to the most recent Primary/Caucus results.

At this writing, those results are in Iowa only, where Sen. Obama came out ahead on the Democrat side and Gov. Huckabee on the Republican.

First Obama: As a US Senator, Mr. Obama has not recently voted on any legislation that would have helped or hurt Amtrak or Passenger Rail. As a matter of fact, on most legislation of a transportation issue, Mr. Obama has not voted. Despite his high profile in Illinois with respect to additional Passenger Rail routes from Chicago to downstate Illinois, he is reported to have only supported the interests of road builders and auto dealers while in that state. He is rated very highly by interest groups that support road construction.

By the way, Mr. Obama's major thrust in supporting the reorganization of Chicago's rail map was so that motorists didn't have to idle so long at grade crossings.

Mike Huckabee has absolutely no record on transportation and/or Passenger Rail, one way or the other. Well, let's put it this way, unless you know him, you can't find out his position one way or the other by doing any reasonable on-line research. So that might as well be none. The only reference we can find in his speeches are to intermodal rail facilities, which he seems to think are good for business.

Both candidates have refused to answer questions posed on transportation and specific other issues by nationally recognized political Internet sites.

Opinion: We would say that neither of these two early front-runners will be good for Passenger Rail from an administrative point of view. (On balance, neither would do any good for it as a Senator or Congressman.) With this kind of narrow focus in our presidential candidates, is it any wonder that Passenger Rail in this country is alway in trouble?

As other candidates get jerked to the forefront by the votes of unsuspecting citizens, we will cover the positions/records of others.

© 2008 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Merry Christmas, Happy New Year

2007-12-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

And for the politically disenfranchised and liberally disabled, Happy Holidays.

We don't often go off the radical end and jump in among the lunatic fringe in this blog, but - just for argument for year's end - consider these ideas:

Somewhere there is a planet in the universe that is beaming all its stupid people to earth to become politicians.

The increase in complexity of society is outpacing the ability of the human mind and body to adapt to it.

In another dimension, the term "Passenger Rail" may mean something completely different.

The mean value of the human condition may just be "at the threshold of hell."

May the supreme builder of the universe bless you and keep you.

We don't expect to post again until after the first of the New Year.

©2007 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Where Should Amtrak Shine?

2007-12-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

Everywhere and in every Passenger Rail endeavor, of course!

But let's not wish for too much. Focus is everything and we all know Congress has none.

Where Amtrak should be shining, it isn't. This weekend brings that to the fore when we look at air traffic snarled because of snow in the northeast. Flights in to Chicago are delayed because flights out to the east have to be. This storm should not be delaying Amtrak.

But it is. Looking at the scheduled vs. estimated arrival times for Amtrak in Chicago it appears that the delays for Amtrak are worse than air traffic.

Because we like it, we would certainly rather wait for a train in Union Station, Chicago, than we would wait for a flight at either of Midway or O'Hare. But not everybody likes trains as much.

Amtrak should be shining in the areas where there is no excuse for it to be as shoddy as the shoddy-as-the-passenger-trains-of-old airlines are. Trouble is, not enough people remember the shoddy Passenger Rail 1960s, BA.

Please email us and tell us where you think Amtrak should and could be shining without even one dollar of extra subsidy. Then tell us where the focus of future subsidy should be. As you know, our position is that Amtrak should be as heavily subsidized as roads and air traffic. So don't argure against subsidy. Just tell us something constructive.

©2007 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Life Imitates What, Exactly?

2007-12-09T07:00:00.000-07:00

We have all heard that life imitates art and form follows function. Among the many aphorisms that we hear, these two seem to hold the record for applicability.

In Passenger Rail, as in railroad design on the whole, form has always followed function. As a matter of fact, function has demanded that form follow. From the early passenger coaches to the specialized cars of the streamline era, to the super-specialized cruise cars being built for special trains, function has dictated form. Getting over the railroad within all gauges - and I don't just mean the distance between the rails - has been the function of passenger rail. Getting as many passengers over the railroad with the train is part of it.

Early on, carbuilders knew that drawing on the stagecoach or landau design and simply putting it on flanged wheels was not enough. It took a long time before European designers of coaches and other passenger equipment saw that just stringing together the bodies of several coaches to make the car - with the resulting compartmentalization and entry / exit from the outside of the car - was not enough. American designers resorted to the box with benches, and then Pullman and competitors made the special-purpose craze take off.

Still, getting the car over the railroad within all gauges - rails, height, width, and manageable length as a function of curvature of the railroad - was the function.

Railroad life began to imitate art in the streamlined era. Art Deco came to the railroad but its form never quite followed the function. It was easy to sheath a passenger car in stainless steel or paint that hid the rivets of the heavyweight steel era. It was not as easy to sheath a steam locomotive with the same art. The form and the art were never truly convenient for the function until the diesel era, when function was able to imitiate art and start the whole process over for the locomotive-hauled train. Streamlining often got torn off the steam locos and left in the shop for sake of convenience. Most Amtrak heritage coaches and other hand-me-downs from the streamline era lost their skirts (covering under-floor equipment) and wheel fairings (covering the ugly trucks).

Today, railroad life imitates art when the side of a train is painted to resemble a cartoon short from the 1940s and the "door closing" warning sound on the train is right out of Loony Tunes. I'm not sure what we're imitating when we try to turn the serious business of passenger transportation into a cartoon, but . . . maybe a jackass.

And now here's the political point: For the next decade or so, we are going to need some pretty good industrial design to help revitalize the Passenger Rail system that we American's have left to the scrap heap for the past four decades. Highways are no longer an option unless they are part of mega-corridors. Airways are going to get more congested and more dangerous, and the restrictions on industrial design - form following function - are more egregious.

Form will have to follow function. We are still going to have to get over the railroad within the limitations of all gauges. But we are going to have to have some art to imitate. It can't be Art Deco - that has been done to death. It is going to have to be pretty good art. Will the next Raymond Lowy please step forward.

© 2007 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Holiday Greetings

2007-11-25T07:00:00.000-07:00

Looks like - once again - our legislators do not intend to give us any presents this Holiday Season. We would not call the end-of-year Amtrak budget a present.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could board a train for a holiday visit?

We don't know how many of the readers of this blog can do that now. We are guessing that most of our readers, being train enthusiasts of one kind or another, are living near a source of Passenger Rail transportation. We would also guess that many people who don't have a source of Passenger Rail transport are not at all enthusiastic about Passenger Rail and probably don't read this blog.

Wouldn't it be nice if you lived in, oh, say Kansas City, and could make a weekend rail trip to Miami with as many schedule choices as you would have by air? (We found 51 air schedules that would do this during a single random weekend in December 2007.) Could or would Passenger Rail ever be able to top this? It is a pity that it can't.

When we had a real Passenger Rail network, not Amtrak, one could board connecting trains (locals) in between the major cities and make connections that made sense.

More and more, none of Amtrak makes sense. Will our legislators ever learn?

Holiday Greetings.

©2007 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Imagine

2007-11-18T07:00:00.000-07:00

We often hear arguments against government subsidy for Passenger Rail. The recent effort to refund Amtrak is a good example. The opponents of funding Amtrak point to the fact that Amtrak has never made a dollar for the government. Imagine that.

With the exception of government owned toll roads, has a highway ever made a dollar for the government? We mean really. You can argue that any plus in the highway trust fund is the equivalent of making money for the government. But is is really? We say no, because it is really only a surplus of taxes and user fees, it is not a profit. If you were to try to run a profit and loss analysis on any single stretch of non-toll road, you would not get a profit.

On the other side of the coin, imagine no government subsidies for anything. Private enterprise owns everything. We are experimenting with this in some states and the jury is still out as to whether a profit can be made. It will only be a profit if it is a toll road business. Otherwise the private enterprise's profit is just coming from the tax dollar just as medicaid contractors make their money from taxes paid into the medicare fund.

What if there were no government payments? Roads would be owned by trucking companies, for sure. They are the only businesses vested enough to want to carry the overhead. The airlines would own the air traffic system. And would anything be a system? It would be much like what the railroads had before standardization.

Imagine driving where you came to the end of a roadway owned by one owner, and you had to wait in line to pay the fee to get onto the roadway of another. But would that second roadway be of the same quality as the first? No, because there would be competition between the businesses and you may also find that the traffic rules, speed limits and safety appliances were different. The private owner would use rules of the road that brought him the most profit.

But there are laws, you say? That would mean a subsidy, even only if the government spent the money to standardize the laws, it's a subsidy.

So don't tell Mister Trains that Passenger Rail should not be subsidized. It is just as vital to our economy and to our security as is any other mode of transport. (With the possible exception of donkey-back.) And it is well past time that we make the decision to do it right.

© 2007 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Don't Do That

2007-11-04T07:00:00.000-07:00

We just wanted to expand a little on the Don Phillips opinion piece in the current (December 2007) Trains. The gist is that it may no longer be as much fun to be a railfan.

It got us thinking: Who or what doesn't want railroading to be fun any more?

Don names some names, the TSA and law enforcement since 9-11 for two. But who is really responsible for telling us not to like trains?

Let's start with the axiom: Anything that is enjoyable can be enjoyed too much and is therefore potentially bad for you. It is behind just about every recent prohibition and/or restriction of behavior of the past ten years.

Applied to Passenger Rail, this works in insidious ways. If you enjoy riding trains too much, government will have to post too many subsidies in the next budget. If you enjoy the scenery too much, you may travel by rail to too many national parks and dispoil the landscape. If you stand on the platform and watch too many trains, you may get in an accident on the platform. If you photograph too many trains, one of your photographs may land in the hands of terrorists.

So it comes back down the the risk averse society again. Fun requires risk, and our government just doesn't want us to take the risk any more. And as this becomes the norm, you will find fewer people ready to take the risk.

Trains are no fun when you can't see, feel, hear and touch them. Passenger Rail can be more fun when it is more than a transportation tool. But you are not supposed to use tools improperly.

The sooner our leaders stop treating us like children, the sooner we can start to have fun with trains again.

* * *

Please read Don Phillips' articles, they are a wake-up call.

* * *

Christopher sent some interesting ideas in his recent comments. Common ground is that gigantic projects require lots and lots of money. It is money that we are squandering elsewhere. It is also a wake-up call. Even the builders of Penn Station feared before the project was over that nothing like as monumental a civic project would ever be affordable again. We certainly hope they were wrong!

© 2007 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

May Not Get There From Here

2007-10-28T07:00:00.000-06:00

At least not for a long, long time.

There's a right way and a wrong way to finance new commuter rail. We may be seeing the wrong way with New Mexico Rail Runner. . . . meep! meep!

The communities of the Middle Rio Grande, from Santa Fe (which technically is not ON the Rio Grande) to Belen, constitute the only major coagulation of population in New Mexico. Even then, the total population does not exceed the number of souls that had to be evacuated from Southern California because of the recent wildfires.

The communities of the Middle Rio Grande enjoy clear air and clear water because of their unique location and BECAUSE of the low population density. Albuquerque and Bernalillo County are currently struggling with polution problems just BECAUSE the population has been growing and sprawling.

With the sprawl comes the need for more roads and more lanes on the ones that exist. In this case, the latter are Interstates 40 and 25. (New Mexico doesn't have any three-digit Interstates.)

Along comes Presidential Candidate and Governor of New Mexico, Bill Richardson. He literally invented the Rail Runner project from whole cloth after his first election as governor, and he used lots of local political capital to bludgeon local politicians to go along with it.

Hey, it wasn't a bad idea, but it's time probably hadn't come yet. (Former Governor Toney Anaya has been pushing for a bullet train for New Mexico since his administration - and that time hasn't come yet either.)

So the MRGCOG raided the highway funds with the approval of the governor and the legislature and we now have service from Albuquerque (the Q - as "green" Mayor Martin Chavez wants it) to Belen on the south and to Bernalillo on the north. The highway funds will no longer support the expansion of service to Santa Fe (a must) and the Feds probably won't be kicking in. To make matters worse, the wool-pulled-over-eyes politicians are suddenly finding out what Mister Trains has said all along: That it will cost alot of tax dollars to subsidize this service over the coming years. More so if it never gets to Santa Fe.

Worse still, the highway funds are so low that the state can't fund any highway expansion without more taxes. Adding fifteen to fifty cents a gallon to the price of gasoline in the state that already pays the highest per-gallon price in the lower 48 has been discussed.

While commuter rail is usually a "green" solution, this certainly is not what is happening. While we wrangle about higher gas taxes or higher any taxes, those stuck commuters will spend more time on the freeways with their engines running and waisting fuel and adding to the air quality problems. The sprawl of The Q (thanks Mayor Marty) will see to that.

Oh, woe. We guess we will just have to pony up at the pump and hope. Because if Rail Runner falls on its fat fanny, we won't see communter rail in New Mexico again for lots of years.

Mister Trains is getting to the point where you won't see Mister Trains in New Mexico for long if this keeps up.

© 2007 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Risk Averse Society Bad for Railroad Development

2007-10-21T07:00:00.000-06:00

We have been reading Jill Jonnes' excellent history of the buiding of New York's Penn Station and its tunnels called Conquering Gotham. In its time, this project was compared to completing the first transcontinental railroad and to building of the great pyramid.

We have been trying to think of railroad projects of the past fifty or so years that could compare with it in sheer size, technical innovation, risk, and usefulness of the end result. Of course, if you go back to 1957, sixty percent of the time was one of decline for the railroads. Also of course, the railroads were disinclined to do anything comparable.

For size, the New York terminal project, begun principally (in planning) in 1902, also included the twin tunnels under the Hudson River (North River), the yards that were built where most of the Tenderloin once lay, the quad tunnels under the East River, the connection with the LIRR, and the Sunnyside Yard complex. For innovation, nobody had ever tunneled under glacial silt and a swift-flowing tidal riverbed, and the electrical motive power system for the traction-powered trains had to be built from scratch. For risk, not only did the PRR have to pay for all of this itself (with private investment), but it had to assume the risk of dangerous political upheaval from the then-entrenched Tammany Tiger of New York City politics. And for usefulness, the tunnels and much of the subterranean station are still in use by Amtrak and New York commuter rail systems. (The above-ground portion of the station was demolished before the historic preservation movement took hold - for the construction of a "modern" building.)

So we started trying to think of railroad projects for the future. Projects that could compare with Penn Station. None exist. Why?

It comes down to risk. As a people and as corporate stockholders, citizens of these United States are no longer willing to accept risk. We will not do great deeds because we cannot think great thoughts. We cannot think great thoughts because all great and grand designs for future enterprise are fraught with risk.

God forbid that a man die digging a tunnel today. The lawyers and the insurance companies will put the company for which that man worked out of business with their claims and lawsuits. Private capital wants and needs government support to take a risk. It wants and needs absolution for any sins before going in. Call before digging. Somebody else must pay if we are at fault.

And that costs money.

We have dragged the rest of the world up with us, and the United States has now gotten cold feet. We progress in ever more measured steps and become, like the Europe of old, more interested in furthering our political position with the world than in furthering the domestic progress of our citizens. And those at the back of the line being dragged, with the progress of the front of the line slowing noticeably, are more than happy to step all over us to get to the front. By any means possible. Even by taking RISKS!

How pathetic.

© 2007 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Additions to the List

2007-10-07T07:00:00.000-06:00

We have been absent for awhile attributable to vacation. (We don't get much vacation, and self-imposed deadlines readily fall against the prospect of real relaxation time.)

Vacation was, in part, a driving trip. Some of the trip was along the old Frisco route from St. Louis to Springfield, MO. (Interstate 44) Got us thinkin' about the possibility of Passenger Rail on this route. There is, at least, a spoken committment by MODOT to get this up and running.

Lots and lots of the route that is visible from the Interstate has many degrees of curvature and is built either on fill or in deep cuts. We do not know the profile, but it would be a fair guess that it is from moderately to extremely hilly.

Then we thought about the list we put on this blog awhile back about what a new generation of passenger rail should look like.

We didn't think of this one, but it has got to be useful.

This route through MO seems like a mighty nice scenic route, but we wonder if it is useful in that the track speeds for passenger service have certain got to be restrictive. This route is as best, perhaps, utilitarian. Every year the traffic on I-44 gets worse, and at one point (about 20 mile east of Lebanon) it is the only railroad (that ever was) for at least 50 miles in all directions. People in these areas might ride it no matter what the schedule. So it could be utilitarian, but not really useful.

Much of the US rail network was built to engineering standards that are long outmoded. And we are still using these lines except where freight traffic increases have justified heavy investments in building to twenty-first century standards. (Before you comment, we think that the NE Corridor is just barely making it into this century.)

We know that eventually MODOT or USDOT will pay for revamping the Springfield - St. Louis line. And it will then be a mighty nice scenic line with slightly better track speeds and scheduling. It won't be high-speed rail.

When - oh, my darling when - are we in this otherwise blessed country going to be blessed with the brains to realize that our transportation systems have gone to pot in a big way.

Revamp nothing! Let's get politics out of our national security by getting everybody to pay $40 a year (and we mean no exceptions - kids break those piggybanks and smoker's and drinkers you know this isn't big bucks compared to what you burn and guzzle) toward the war against Islamic Terror, and then let's start using some of those highway trust funds (and highway taxes paid by the biggest users of them) to build transportation systems that are faster, easier and more fun.

Flying ain't no fun, the bus ain't no fun, and we can truly say after this trip that driving ain't no fun.

Passenger Rail is the only existing people transport system that qualifies for all three criteria - fast, easy, fun! Let's do it. Politicians hear this, the public will love ya for it!

©2007 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com

Fall Vacation

2007-09-16T07:00:00.000-06:00

Fall puts a positive spin on train watching and on train riding. In the Northeast and Upper Midwest, the fall colors will be peaking and the view from a passenger train can be nothing short of spectacular.

We urge those who haven't ridden recently to get out and ride a train this fall. Whether it is on Amtrak, a commuter railroad, or a tourist line, your enjoyment of the ride will be significantly enhanced by the fall foliage.

In the South, Southwest and Northwest it will take a little longer for the colors to max out, but the idea is the same. Ride a train and enjoy the foliage.

You can't do it while driving a car and you may not even be able to do it as much as an automobile passenger. With the highways clogged with big trucks and the nation in the full throes of a transportation crisis that the government doesn't care exists, the opportunity to snap a picture of that beautiful scene just may be blocked by the 52-foot trailer on the truck stuck in traffic next to you.

Passenger Rail still goes many places not on the highway and not easy to get to by road.

Many happy rail miles.

© 2007 - C. A. Turek - mistertrains@gmail.com