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.

If you take this thought process out a bit further, if some sort of change in federal government regulation would have allowed railroads to get rid of the short hops and money-gulpers quicker and restructured passenger service into less of a ghost of its domestic transportation system than it was and more into a passenger services provider, perhaps there never would have been a need for Amtrak.

One thing is clear; Amtrak was created by a Republican administration (Nixon) to fix a big business problem. There were many considerations, including the unions. And, the funniest part is that the original administration figures were based on the assumption that Amtrak could be launched and turned into a success for less than $150 million!

The thinking could be extended to the theory that in the last 60s/early 70s, not enough creative thinking was being done; simply creating another government welfare program (VERY popular in the 60s) would make the problem go away.

It’s always great fun to consider the vagaries of history.