This Week at Amtrak; 2010-02-16
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Volume 7, Number 6
Gentle Readers,
Thank you for returning this week for another installment of This Week at Amtrak. I would like to give special appreciation to Mr. J. Bruce Richardson for the first seven years of this column.
- Reviewing this Monday, let us begin with a line from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” –
Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said “one ca’n't believe impossible things.” “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast…”
Well, well. Two impossible things happened yesterday.
On the world stage, Professor Phil Jones, at the “centre of the Climategate scandal” admitted there has been no global warming since 1995. According to the Daily Mail, he “also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now… And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.” This is, naturally enough, entirely attributable to a mere blip in the data, all of which he has apparently conveniently mislaid.
- And then, back home in these United States, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the waters of conventional wisdom, Ray Reed of the Lynchburg News and Advance reported Monday evening on the new second frequency on an Amtrak route in Virginia: “Lynchburg’s honeymoon with Amtrak continued in November, producing enough riders on the new train that started in October to generate a profit in its second month of operation. Virginia had planned to provide a $242,000 monthly subsidy to keep the train running. It won’t need any of that money for November…”
Can it really be true that, despite relying on derivatives of accounting methods originally and deliberately skewed by the freight railroad companies over fifty years ago to show passenger train losses no matter what, that Amtrak really is admitting a conventional train can be at least partly profitable? Stay tuned.
- We have discussed before the plight of our nation’s grand downtown train terminals like those in St. Louis and Kansas City which have been perhaps permanently shorn of their proper passenger functions. Cincinnati Union Terminal seemed near to receiving a similar sentence, but thankfully the kind citizens of the Queen City have raised an outcry that the “3-C” trains should again serve this Art Deco landmark as their gateway. We lend them our support toward a strong regional rail network.
- Meanwhile, I recently have been corresponding with Richard Harnish of the Midwest High Speed Rail Association; and in reference to my comment about recent plans I felt were far too large for some high speed rail projects, he wrote:
You don’t get what you want by not asking for it.
Well, that is certainly true. And that’s what Amtrak should have done starting with the Oil Embargo of 1973 — ask Congress, “Give us $x more and we’ll do Y … give us $2*x more and we’ll do Y plus plus plus…” Ah well, hindsight.
Today there do need to be *reasonable* and *prudent* requests… based on what is already working from experiences in California, Missouri, and so on. Not pie-in-the-sky multi-billion dollar wish lists for fast trains that will never get built, nor serve a useful purpose without a base network of local trains and transit. The ground-breaking Shinkansen and TGV, of course, were not built in a vacuum but overlaid a huge matrix of existing services.
Nevertheless, in support both of Mr. Harnish’s position and my own, and speaking of learning from what works — the Arizona Public Interest Research Group recently asked the Arizona Rail Passenger Association to support and speak at its press conference on the US PIRG report issued 9 February –
As a conservative and a Republican (and those two are far from always the same), I am pleasantly surprised by its generally sensible attitude toward incremental progress to eventual true high speed rail. I was also pleased that Arizona PIRG invited ARPA and the Southwest Rail Corridor Coalition advocates to answer press questions on their behalf.
Here in Phoenix, the Metro system was approved and built after several failed transit ballot measures over a dozen years. The difference was that the successful 2000 measure had the support of both the Sierra Club and the Realtors… something which almost never happens. When a group like PIRG now comes to advocates of diverse political backgrounds to support a common goal, things might start happening.
Now, Gentle Readers, I invite you to read the PIRG report and ask yourself — does there exist a common ground on which rail advocates from both sides of the aisle can make sensible progress toward better passenger trains? If you wish, you may reply to me directly ( wlindley@unitedrail.org ).
I look forward to hearing from you until our next Week at Amtrak.
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William Lindley
Scottsdale, Ariz.
