Getting out of the political tangle...and other fairy tales.

Here in America, we live in a world where only the politically possible gets done. We have lived in it for some time now, in fact so long that it seems like a normal state of affairs. Before anything new is established, from school innovation to high-speed rail, we decide first if it is politically possible.

Take, for example, the Brightline project in Florida. It is possibly the most promising effort since the 1950s to prove that private enterprise can build and run a passenger railroad at a profit. Politics, however, doesn’t see promise in anything that it can’t control. So state legislation gets introduced to target private high-speed rail companies and impose extraordinary pedestrian safety measures, such as fencing.

Now, I’m reasonably certain that Brightline’s management checked the political winds before getting started, but like getting Donald Trump elected president, that was before anyone thought Brightline would get as far as it has; and that’s pretty far. At last reporting, they should be running private, for-profit passenger trains as early as July.

Think it’s over? It’s not. There are still political blocks that will try to derail Brightline and drive government back to subsidizing any new passenger rail.

Amtrak? Talk about a political tangle.

It’s Amtrak’s own fault. Amtrak and its proponents have done nothing for all these years to make Amtrak an independent, self-funding entity, as did Conrail, for a parallel example.

Amtrak could have become more robust early on. It did not have to strip the passenger system down as lean as it did. It was, however, a political beast from the get go. Bowing to politics, nobody wanted to be the guy who said, “Let’s make this work,” when the political winds were saying, “Let’s keep it running for a few years until everyone is sure it’s a failure and then dump it.”

Politics, though, rarely takes note of the quiet voices among us. Those quiet voices kept it funded, albeit at an embarrassingly low level, while the loudest voices continued to try to criticize it to death.

Only the Northeast Corridor, where there are a lot of liberal political voices, has become more robust. Even then, the corridor suffers from a lack of capital for infrastructure improvement. Nothing has ever been done to make any other routes legitimately more robust, with some exceptions in areas and states of liberal political persuasion. Riding the long-distance trains today, trains that, I might point out, serve largely rural and dare I say conservative areas, involves an experience not unlike the first years of Amtrak—the equipment today is even older than the “heritage” equipment of Amtrak’s first few years.

Politics, dammit!

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Last week I discussed the push for a second Amtrak schedule between Chicago and Minneapolis and the fact that it continued in the face of the drastic cuts to Amtrak seen in the Trump budget proposal. It seems that in the past week, the Twin Cities area has started to catch on that not just a new schedule, but the existing Empire Builder schedule are both in jeopardy. It may be too late to mobilize to get a second train, but is it too late to save the first?

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Also in the meantime, the sorry state of even the Northeast Corridor infrastructure has been laid bare. Track failures that should have been easy to anticipate and avoid struck hard. Nobody got hurt, but oh boy did the derailments and subsequent need for emergency track repairs cause tie-ups and headaches for thousands of train passengers.

As I’ve said repeatedly, America needs a better comprehensive plan for surface passenger transportation, and that includes maintaining the existing infrastructure to higher standards.

I also think that Wick Moorman, Amtrak’s still-new, biding-his-time president, is finding out that stuff happens, and finding a successor who shares your vision of running Amtrak—his only real stated goal in taking the position in the first place—is going to get harder as more budget doo-doo hits the fan.

As infrastructure and equipment ages, the fan is starting to turn faster.

©2017 – C. A. Turek – mistertrains@gmail.com

(Charles A. Turek is a writer and novelist based in Albuquerque, NM. After four decades working in areas of the insurance industry related to transportation, he now writes on all aspects of American railroading. Charles is a political conservative but believes in public funding of passenger rail as a part of the federal government’s constitutionally conservative obligation to provide for defense and public infrastructure so that private enterprise may flourish.)