Jeff Smith wrote: ↑Thu Nov 05, 2020 10:21 amSo, in the Keystone/Harrisburg topic, there's been talk about Pennsylvania buying out Amtrak and operating Keystones themselves. Their motivation ostensibly is, to paraphrase: “keep PA money in PA”, and not subsidize Amtrak, but rather, their own service.
I posited that perhaps they should contract it out to a private operator, which shall form the basis of this discussion.
There have always been proposals to privatize Amtrak, or break it up. I’m going in a bit of a different direction here. Amtrak would become less of an operator, and more of a transportation agency overseeing rail operations and ROW ownership.
Which lines could you see being ideal for private operation, and which operators?
I'll start us off:- Keystone. Duh.
- Empire NYS. I think this is a no-brainer, particularly ALB-NYP. Leave west of ALB to Long Distance.
- Chicago–Milwaukee
- Florida from Jacksonville south. The Florida trains are daylight schedule, right? Except perhaps the Star, which is only a few hours off.
- Sacramento to Oakland
- Charlotte to Atlanta
What else ya got?
So the idea here is really to create more layers of government control? No operator would be “private”; if that were the case, then the states ought to help the actual owners of the railroads to take back passenger operations and without onerous overregulation and/or taxation, or else it is state operation with a state-approved operator (already the European and Asian companies are leaving bad tastes in passengers’ mouths) over someone else’s railroad.
Keystones operated by the state of PA means the last stop is 30th Street. Amtrak will not let those trains onto their Northeast Corridor.
The idea of having state-run trains from New York to Rensselaer (not Albany) seems to make no sense, and instead of going to NYP they may have to go to GCT; the West Side railroad is not going to be bought up by the state at this point. Would NYS then extend third rail north of Croton to Rensselaer to make this happen (let’s “go green” if you are serious, guys), or would all of their state money be tied up with the three-times-the-estimate and eleven-years-late East Side Access project?
Hiawathas are interstate. Metra runs to Kenosha WI on the former CNW, but would Wisconsin be willing to switch their former MILW service to what may end up as (borrowed) gallery-car operations from time to time?
BTW, the notion of Amtrak merely being a ROW owner/operator is more like the UK’s not-so-good idea of not-full privatization, where all of the infrastructure is kept under state control under the “Network Rail” umbrella; just another beast to be fed.