There were inferences that Richard Nixon was a "closet railfan"; who knows if any foundation to that.
While no question whatever, all railroads wsnted "out", to have discontinued all Long Distance routes in one shot would have been "too much". So, while of course never written, RPSA70 did put in place the means to have an orderly means to be rid of the LD's. By orderly, I mean that routes such as the Sunset would be gone before would the City and the Lake Shore would stay until the East-west connections were likewise. Absent the legislation, it would have been an "everyman for himself", and the discontinuance would have hardly been orderly.
But alas, the Critters discovered that trains were an inexpensive "rolling pork barrel"; for it didn't take but three months to have the North Coast Hi make the scene.
So there we are today with no end in sight for what was to have been gone by, say, '76.
The Corridor, and its "feeds", was going to be publicly funded, for there was never any contention as to its essential nature. So Amtrak represented a vehicle through which it could be funded.
Finally, what I think was a very wise provision of the legislation was the so-called Sec 403-b providing for Federal-Local shared funding of trains that a locality was willing to fund. For without such, there would be as many trains in California, and Maine, as there are today in Montana (note I didn't say SD or WY).
