Amtrak – All Aboard?

I vividly recall my last Acela train ride from Boston to New York. This special high speed train only runs once or twice each day, and it was significantly more expensive, and of course slower, than the airline shuttles that conveniently depart each hour from Logan Airport. The train was about half full, and I must admit it was a pleasant enough trip through Southern New England down to New York City. The dining car was a major annoyance, however. I had to wait in line 45 minutes to get a bite to eat. There was only one person working at the counter, although there clearly was room for two. And I’m being quite charitable in saying that this particular Amtrak employee was slow and marginally competent, frequently losing track of orders and slowly calculating, and often recalculating, the cost of each order on a small hand-held calculator. Why on earth Amtrak would spend billions on trains and equipment without putting a modern cash register in the dining car, as well as competent employees, God only knows…

What trains are really good for in America is ferrying tens of thousands of workers in and out of urban work areas twice each day on busy commuter lines. That could even be profitable business, and greatly help alleviate traffic congestion on the roads.

Perhaps East coast cities like Boston and New York are close enough to each other, and there’s sufficient demand to warrant some government support for (relatively) high speed rail service. But what simply doesn’t make any sense is wasting tons of money by running ¾ empty trains through the vast open regions between distant cities within the nation’s interior. This of course raises the issue of shifting part of the burden of running Amtrak from the federal government to cities and states that benefit the most, if at all.