Part 2: Infrastructure improvement: Painless? Or just a pain.

The absolute wrong way to make infrastructure improvements, in my opinion, is for a state or municipal agency to either tax its constituents or go into debt (a future tax) to repair or upgrade infrastructure. Many will argue that it is the government agency’s responsibility to maintain infrastructure that already serves a wide range of commercial interests. I would concede the “maintain” part of this only in some circumstances: Those where the commercial interest will suffer an actual loss if the repairs aren’t made or the system shuts down due to lack of repair. In other circumstances, the repairing agency should, at very least, asses the cost of repairs to the commercial interests rather than the taxpayer.

For upgrades, let’s let the commercial interests most likely to benefit from the upgrade (or new service) invest up front. There are probably some instances where the investor should cover the entire cost of an upgrade or new line. There are probably even examples where the investor should actually contract for and build the line, perhaps even run it.

Here's an interesting observation: Amtrak, which wouldn’t know how to make a passenger train turn a profit even if it were not a hamstrung quasi-government agency, realizes that privatized passenger service is the wave of the future.

How do I know this? Simple. Amtrak is taking steps to cement its ownership of major metropolitan terminals and maximize its return on that investment by increasing what they charge local transit authorities for use of those stations. I think this is because Amtrak sees the potential for private operators wanting station space and forcing them to either pay high prices for track slots to Amtrak or buying the stations outright from Amtrak, under favorable terms, making Amtrak the tenant. And I would concede that the part of this that's not about private operators is an effort to juice the non-Amtrak commuter agencies.

Is Amtrak preparing to make profit from real estate while ignoring its congressional mandate to maintain a national passenger network? Maybe. There has been a lot of talk about Amtrak shirking its mandate, both in the industry and in the interested media.

If it were any other entity but Amtrak, I’d say that someone is thinking of selling off the long-distance routes to private operators, and charging those operators for station slots. But logic doesn’t support it with Amtrak. Why begin to suspend and truncate long-distance trains if you’re trying to make them attractive for a buyer? Those routes where Amtrak complains most about a drop in ridership almost always have only Amtrak's actions to blame; and that includes the Southwest Chief said to be up for being cut in two like an earthworm just to see if both ends can survive. If they do, it will only be under private operation.

If even Amtrak sees this potential for private operators to use passenger stations, it must be there. BrightLine in Florida intends to prove that privately owned and maintained trains on good headways serving population centers can make a buck not only on running trains but also on the real estate around the trains and stations. If there is even the hint of BrightLine’s success at this, others will follow. And, yes, it’s the right way to improve public infrastructure, as long as it doesn’t become a trap for the government to just take over more failed trains.

This all leads up to my opinion that Amtrak’s policy of spreading costs for so-called corridor routes among the states was and is a mistake. With the plethora of city, regional, state and federal entities that all have a stake in the trains today, it’s going to be awfully difficult to disentangle the interests to get everyone to agree to a privatization policy. If private operators steal ridership from existing government-fed agencies, and that's a big if, the government agencies will be scrambling to privatize before the public money dries up. It's a true axiom: Government cannot stand competition.

That complicated tangle of interests, and need to over regulate everything, is exactly why it’s difficult to get private developers to believe a new station or, say, and extension of a certain train’s route, will last long enough, in Amtrak hands, to bring any return on private investment.

So, maybe, in the long term, Amtrak has the right idea. Let the passenger trains die. What’s left, when the need arises and the opportunity for investment presents itself, will become, like BrightLine, a success story for a new era of passenger rail. And—I never thought I’d say this—one that doesn’t involve government subsidy.

©2018 – 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.)