There's been a lot of conversation on this and other websites about how to "fix" Amtrak (and to a lesser extent freight rail as well). The answer always seems to come around to plowing a frightening amount of money into the rail network. Problem is, as a lot of states (cough Illinois cough cough Michigan) have learned over the past couple of years, right now there just isn't an efficient way to do that.
Things get even worse once we zoom out to the national scale. We badly need large-scale investment in rail infrastructure if we're going to make sure that the American rail system can handle everything that climate change is going to throw at it over the next 50 years or so, and we need it even more if we want to shift passengers and freight back onto the rails to try and make climate change a little less bad. We know what needs to be done; just think about all the "obvious" fixes we on this board have discussed over the years. The problem is that there's not an organization with either the financial resources or national focus necessary to make change happen quickly, efficiently, or effectively.
We in the US have faced this problem before. The demands of mobilization for WWI ground the rail network to a halt. As a result, the US government formed the United States Railroad Administration, which temporarily nationalized the railroads, allowing the federal government to quickly and efficiently plow millions of dollars into the rail network. Also, since the organization was able to focus on the American rail netowk as a whole it was able to make decisions about investment and traffic routing that made sense on a national scale but that no private railroad in competition with another private railroad would ever have been able to make (all trains enjoying equal trackage rights into cities, for instance).Once the war ended, the USRA was dissolved, and most of America's railroads have stayed mostly private ever since.
My question is, why don't we, facing a similar (if quieter) crisis on our rails as we did in 1917, reform the USRA? Even if we didn't, the threat of nationalization might be a useful bargaining chip in persuading private railroads to go along with state and federal projects. Needless to say, the provisions in place in the original USRA legislation that mandated the government return tracks and rolling stock to the private railroads in an equal or better condition than when then were 'borrowed' would still be in place.
Thoughts?
Things get even worse once we zoom out to the national scale. We badly need large-scale investment in rail infrastructure if we're going to make sure that the American rail system can handle everything that climate change is going to throw at it over the next 50 years or so, and we need it even more if we want to shift passengers and freight back onto the rails to try and make climate change a little less bad. We know what needs to be done; just think about all the "obvious" fixes we on this board have discussed over the years. The problem is that there's not an organization with either the financial resources or national focus necessary to make change happen quickly, efficiently, or effectively.
We in the US have faced this problem before. The demands of mobilization for WWI ground the rail network to a halt. As a result, the US government formed the United States Railroad Administration, which temporarily nationalized the railroads, allowing the federal government to quickly and efficiently plow millions of dollars into the rail network. Also, since the organization was able to focus on the American rail netowk as a whole it was able to make decisions about investment and traffic routing that made sense on a national scale but that no private railroad in competition with another private railroad would ever have been able to make (all trains enjoying equal trackage rights into cities, for instance).Once the war ended, the USRA was dissolved, and most of America's railroads have stayed mostly private ever since.
My question is, why don't we, facing a similar (if quieter) crisis on our rails as we did in 1917, reform the USRA? Even if we didn't, the threat of nationalization might be a useful bargaining chip in persuading private railroads to go along with state and federal projects. Needless to say, the provisions in place in the original USRA legislation that mandated the government return tracks and rolling stock to the private railroads in an equal or better condition than when then were 'borrowed' would still be in place.
Thoughts?