Well, as a matter of fact I met George Hilton, once. He was SP's professional "scholar for hire" for a long period through the late 50's to the late 60' when they wanted to kill passenger. And he did all kinds of research, some of it, even true, to justify it. Hype often depends on who pays the piper. His academic work has some merit, but some of it was pure twaddle, bought and paid for. Tenure allows you to do that. There are some much better train bashers that I can give you as sources to use, that are still alive, and who's work is much better??? But, there is no objective truth to this decision, it is a judgement call, not predetermined by some abstract "law" of economics.

As an economist, I know, that if you want a different outcome, all you have to do to "prove" your hypothesis, is choose a the "right" set of assumptions, that will prove "your" point of view. This is often self serving dogma, of course, and not science. Science is a test of a null hypothesis, that something makes no difference. And, for this kind of question, even the scientific method offers less than useful answers. So we depend on things like game theory to test the possibilities.

We have options, and we make choices, cicumstances change, and we have real limits, in phsical resources, human resources, and time, and few things are ever very cut and dry in this complex world. There appear to be some things that may make the NWP-NCRA restoration work, and some that may doom it. But, I happen to think that we have some very changed circumstances ahead over the next 50 or so years, that will favor a maintenance and restoration of our rail systems, and that some variation of NCRA-NWP-Smart just might work. But, I like trains and have a pretty fair understanding of what they can and can't do, so I'm a bit biased.

Life is a crapshoot. After all, we all would have been much safer staying in the caves, where the saber toothed tigers didn't eat us, wouldn't we? Mitsy would be okay with that, it would be a perfect world?