jmlaboda
New Member
"I think nearly everybody will agree the way passenger rail is in this country is not really beneficial to anyone."
Such a broad generalization simply is not true... there are a huge number of people every single day that find it to be of use, if not then the number of passengers would be dramatically falling, not rising.
As far as the bankruptsy of railroads when they ran passenger trains, this is also not true. If anything the railroads benefitted greatly from the tax write-offs of such calculated losses (which, in retrospect, was allowed to inflate such so-called "losses" without justification) and this has been discussed in various railroad publications a number of times.
Railroad's, themselves, also contributed to the so-called "losses" by discontinuing services (sometimes without state or federal approval) or providing services beyond what the trains justified, creating loss by choice.
In example, the Southern Railway. Back in the early-50s Southern's modernized heavyweight dinette - coaches operated at a profit from their introduction to when they were withdrawn from service, as did the Budd coach - buffet lounge cars, largely because they only required one or two staff total compared to a full diner crew. What did Southern do? They took these profitable cars off the trains that they were assigned to and replaced them with fully staffed dining cars, thus creating "losses."
Southern Pacific decided not long before the inception of Amtrak to truncate food and sleeper service on the Sunset Ltd. in Texas without approval of the ICC, claiming that they were incurring some considerable "losses" but was forced to reinstate such services, which ended up including a transcontinental sleeper even before Amtrak. And the reduction of services offered, or changes to schedules to make travel inconvienient, was done on a number of other trains as well... adding to their so-called "losses."
One can look all over the place in railroad history and find where anti-passenger management created losses by making the services unusable or unattractive. As I have said, some of the "losses" were their own doing.
Such a broad generalization simply is not true... there are a huge number of people every single day that find it to be of use, if not then the number of passengers would be dramatically falling, not rising.
As far as the bankruptsy of railroads when they ran passenger trains, this is also not true. If anything the railroads benefitted greatly from the tax write-offs of such calculated losses (which, in retrospect, was allowed to inflate such so-called "losses" without justification) and this has been discussed in various railroad publications a number of times.
Railroad's, themselves, also contributed to the so-called "losses" by discontinuing services (sometimes without state or federal approval) or providing services beyond what the trains justified, creating loss by choice.
In example, the Southern Railway. Back in the early-50s Southern's modernized heavyweight dinette - coaches operated at a profit from their introduction to when they were withdrawn from service, as did the Budd coach - buffet lounge cars, largely because they only required one or two staff total compared to a full diner crew. What did Southern do? They took these profitable cars off the trains that they were assigned to and replaced them with fully staffed dining cars, thus creating "losses."
Southern Pacific decided not long before the inception of Amtrak to truncate food and sleeper service on the Sunset Ltd. in Texas without approval of the ICC, claiming that they were incurring some considerable "losses" but was forced to reinstate such services, which ended up including a transcontinental sleeper even before Amtrak. And the reduction of services offered, or changes to schedules to make travel inconvienient, was done on a number of other trains as well... adding to their so-called "losses."
One can look all over the place in railroad history and find where anti-passenger management created losses by making the services unusable or unattractive. As I have said, some of the "losses" were their own doing.
