Volume 2, Number 6
For those of us with something of a useful institutional memory, it’s like deja vu all over again, as a celebrated sports figure once said.
by William Lindley
Today, March 22, 2012, Florida East Coast, which owns and operates the mostly double-track railway between Jacksonville and Miami, announced plans for the construction of a privately-funded, privately-owned, privately-operated passenger train system to commence operations in 2014. This will include forty new miles of railway between Orlando and FEC’s main line on the Space Coast. FEC itself, not Amtrak, will be operating these trains.
What were those allegedly crazy guys at the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad headquarters in Jacksonville, Florida doing in 1970 running all of those long, passenger-filled trains every day of the week?
As Amtrak continues to say the right things, and to do a few as well, the logic of incrementalism is making inroads… but the “old-think” that stunted our passenger rail network for half a century hasn’t gone away yet.
Originally posted to the All-Aboard email list
As a thought, both the Southern and Rio Grande stayed out of Amtrak in the beginning; even the staid Seaboard Coast Line wasn’t doing poorly running the Florida trains and many have said SCL thought long and hard before jumping into Amtrak.
For now, Amtrak is the only game in town regarding long-haul trains. As California has on many occasions concerning many other subjects, they have shown the way to regional self-reliability through willingness to tax themselves for local concerns. And they should be applauded for this. They wanted more rail, so they were ready to pay for it, along with the necessary equipment to operate services. All other areas of the country should take note. And, don’t forget the commuters of the Midwest in and out of Chicago have been doing this very thing successfully for years.
