RE: On this day
1971 - The National Railroad Passenger Corporation came into being. Better known as “Amtrak”, it is responsible for the provision of long-distance passenger trains in the United States.
It is surprising that in the land of free enterprise, Amtrak is a nationalised business, owned entirely by the Federal Government, although it receives some funding from States towards the cost of local trains.
The films of the immediate post-war period show American trains as elegant Streamliners with crisp linen in the restaurant cars, but rail travel was already in serious decline by this time. Although more people were getting cars, which affected local trains and suburban services, the main damage to long distance trains was caused by the expansion of air travel. By UK standards, the distances between US cities are huge. New York to Chicago is 17 hours by train but only just over two and a half by air; to fly from Miami to Los Angeles is five and half hours but by train it takes nearly five DAYS.
By the 1960s local passenger services with being withdrawn in their hundreds but the problem some of the historic major companies had was that their original 19th century licences had been granted on the basis that they were obliged to run passenger trains and this was still legally binding. Freight remained extremely profitable but passenger trains were costing them an arm and a leg so the government were lobbied to find some way out. The solution was Amtrak and it was expected to be temporary. The then US President Richard Nixon was persuaded that it would need funding for no more than three years, after which time the passenger trains would quietly fade away.
But try as they might the trains just wouldn't go away, aided by a vociferous pro-rail lobby and politicians from rural states whose constituents would be otherwise isolated. Now, more than 40 years later, Amtrak limps from one financial crisis to another with insufficient funding and dated rolling stock but still maintains a skeletal service in 46 states. Although the general political divide is that Republicans don't like Amtrak but the Democrats do (Bush II was particularly anti-rail and tried to veto all funding on more than one occasion), there are exceptions on both sides, and the biggest cuts to services came under Democratic Presidents in 1979 and 1997.
As it is the areas around New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington, southern California and Silicon Valley get frequent, fast, modern train services as we would recognise them, but many large cities have no passenger trains at all, including some of over 1 million inhabitants such as Phoenix, Las Vegas, Nashville, Louisville and Columbus. Nor do another 16 cities with a population of 500,000 to 1 million, such as Tulsa, Baton Rouge and Chattanooga, which hasn't seen a choo-choo since 1979 and is now more than 100 miles from the nearest train service.
Denver, Albuquerque, Salt Lake City, Dallas and Minneapolis are among many cities that get just two trains a day. Houston, with a population of over 2.2 million, gets just six trains a week!
But despite this, there are still daily trains linking Chicago with LA, San Francisco, Dallas and Seattle to the west and New York, Washington and Boston to the east. For many small rural towns, especially in states like Nebraska, North Dakota, Montana, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Kansas the one daily train each way is the only public transport for hundreds of miles.
In recent years the effect of congestion and the soaring price of oil has seen the situation stabilise and there's been something of a mini rail revival with some states taking up the offer of matching federal funding to develop local services, and even plans for high-speed corridors in the mid-west and California, but there is no sign of a major boost to services any time soon.
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(This post was last modified: 01-05-2012 14:05 by mr williams.)
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