Well well well!

You sure do throw a lot of labels around - such as "Tea Party" and "Christian" and other ad hominem dismissals.

No where did I mention anything remotely related to the tea party perspective, nor did I mention anything related to any religion. I believe public schools are useless because they actually manage to educate very few of the their graduates. They don't even dare to teach "critical thinking", or even how to do rigorous study. Nope - notta - nothing - not the sciences - not engineering - not mathematics - just social fluff! So, am I supposed to be impressed with your ad hominem dismissals, any more than I am impressed with the public schools? Nope - I'm not!

Oh but of course, we should all know better than to offer an eye witness account of anything, or even an opinion as to what is killing all hope of passenger train revival in America. Instead - we must (in a hobby forum) provide reams and reams of documentation along with it, or be dismissed.

So, you think that a public agency can go into the same market as private enterprise, and buy the same products (ie, track and construction materials, signals, controllers, similar enough locomotives, etc, etc), but have to pay several times more for them than does a private company. And that is OK!

You blow it off so glibly - they don't buy in volume you say. Hogwash! Nobody buys locomotives in bulk. Nor do private railroads build more miles of track than do public passenger agencies.

Forty years ago when I started out, the construction cost per mile for the public was almost ten times the cost to the private railroads per mile of track. As striking as that difference was, it is rapidly accelerating towards twenty times the the private rate. True enough, there are some things to account for some of this, such frills as electrification in some places, but that generally only doubles the cost per mile. Add in yet another 10-12 million a mile, and you can then get frilly grade separations and fencing to boot. But all that still accounts for but a tiny fraction of the difference. So what is causing this unsustainable explosion in public costs.

What is profoundly different is the obscene, absurd, and inept procurement rules that all public agencies much cowtow to, which are getting worse and worse hour by hour - it seems. And that is the avenue where the corruption I speak of is entrenched. It isn't called corruption because it is all legal. But those rules favor contractors and suppliers at the extreme expense of the public good; and do little to make public procurement actually righteous. To be fair though, some of these extreme costs charged by vendors, are used to offset the enormous costs imposed upon them by irrational gov't procurement rules.

The fact is that public procurement at all levels is totally inept and corrupt, because the law itself is inept and corrupt, and is getting more so every day. So who made it that way - and why? And why won't either major party ever do anything about it. Well Duh!!!

So here I go again - telling what I actually witnessed in my forty plus years as a public servant and consultant. Too bad such eye witness accounts will be dismissed if they somehow contradict your world view. Yep! I just can't stop questioning authority. But I survived - somehow. And I will get my well earned retirement - soon, when I choose to go!

So will I still ask too many pesky questions of the powers that be? Or indeed too many questions, for someone who sees the world through ostrich feathers!

You betcha!