Abandon all hope - All ye that enter into an agreement with the UP -

UP clearly has no intention of honoring its agreements. The more you give up (slower schedules) the more UP will TAKE beyond what you gave. Didn't somebody once say that you cannot negotiate with someone hell bent on your destruction.

In the last few years, both the UP and the CSX have repeatedly gotten Amtrak to slow their schedules in return for reliability. Not once has the reliability improved. Some trains are already dead (The Sunset east of New Orleans for example). Giving more of same to the UP will get more of same back - more dead trains! What was this new manager of Amtrak thinking.

This has been the gambit ever since we accepted (it was a hard sell then) the idea of a government entity (Amtrak) relieving so-called private industries of some of the common carrier duties they were created to serve. Perhaps we should have relieved them of their corporate charters as well.


The following is food for thought at least:

Yes, railroad corporations were in fact created by congress (or designates), intending thereby to serve public purposes. Then public subsidies were granted and private investments made. It was always intended that the return on those private investments would be earned in honest exchange for serving those public purposes. Else why should the power of goverment be used to enforce recognition of a private association such as a corporation.

Now it seems that the rail industry wants to keep its returns while sluffing off more and more of its once proudly served duties - leaving more and more freight on the docks, as well as passengers. Then to put even more salt in the wound, deliberately sabotage the effort to maintain public ground transportation - even while they are relieved of the so-called financial burdens. They never were relieved of the duty itself.

Now I read in the trade journals that after a half-century of tearing up track, they want to also be relieved of the capital investment now desparately required to replace that ripped out capacity; wanting goverment help instead. But as many of the trade journals have pointed out, they must find a way to get it without allowing any "interference" by the government in their so-called private businesses. You gotta admire their chutzpah! But since all seven class ones on the continent are now clamoring for "Infrastructure" help from the public treasury - it is an opportunity to get tough with them.

Not one thin dime of public "investment" should be granted without public equity ownership - and authority. Of course, given the hundreds of millions in track improvements already completed on so-called private r.o.w. in California and some other places, this should be retro-active to those places as well.

With dominently public ownership of main corridors (such as in the Federal Highway System), then anyone with a train and a connector track can book time on any public track, and then actually get it. This won't hurt the industry at all. In fact, the industry will boom just the same as the trucking industry did when a truely free market was created there, by a similar Federal investment.

Public purposes will then also be served by these public investments. Most importantly, it will once and for all put an end to the current rail monopolies, which have for generations only stiffled rail industry growth; and consistantly left the public (both freight and passenger) standing on the docks.

OPB