Tag: Amtrak

Will I (Stucky) Survive The Train Ride To NYC?

I’ve lived in this area about half of my adult life. Taken the train to NYC many times. But, I had no friggin idea how bad the tunnels are. And I really have always wondered why there are no lights. Now I know … it’s pitch black for a reason. Holy shit, this is a frightful read. Maybe Ms Freud and I should take the bus.

The Most Awful Transit Center in America Could Get Unimaginably Worse

Think Penn Station is bad? Let’s go into the crumbling, disaster-prone tunnels that lie beneath.

Commuters exit Penn Station.

By Devin Leonard

To get to New York’s Penn Station, every northbound Amtrak passenger makes the last leg of their journey, through tunnels beneath the Hudson River, in the dark. Trust me: They should be glad. One day this autumn, an Acela pulls into Newark, N.J., and a railway spokesman escorts me onto the rear engine car, where we stand and take in the view facing backward. As we descend into one of the Hudson tunnels—there are two, both 107 years old, finished in the same year the Wright brothers built their first airplane factory—a supervisor flips on the rear headlights, illuminating the ghastly tubes.

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Amtrak—-A National Hazard At Any Speed

Guest Post by

This week’s tragic accident in Philadelphia should be a reminder. The real train wreck is Amtrak itself—–a colossal waste of taxpayer money and the very embodiment of what is wrong with state intervention in the free market economy. Worse still, the pork barrel politics which drive its handouts from Uncle Sam virtually guarantee that as time goes on Amtrak will become an increasing hazard to public safety, as well.

It seems like only yesterday, but one of my first assignments as a junior staffer on Capitol Hill was to analyze the enabling legislation that created Amtrak in the early 1970s. I was working for an old fashioned conservative Congressman and his first question was “how will it ever make a profit when we are running the trains from the Rayburn Building?”.

He couldn’t have been more clairvoyant. While it sponsors claimed Amtrak would be spewing black ink by 1974, the answer to my boss’ question was simple: never!

But you didn’t need to wait 43 years to prove it. There is not even a remote case that subsidizing intercity rail travel is a proper or necessary function of the state. Amtrak accounts for well less than 1% of intercity passenger miles. On every one of its 44 routes there are bus and air travel alternatives, and that is to say nothing of automobile travel —-  in cars with drivers today or in the driverless kind tomorrow.

Moreover, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that passenger trains will never be economically competitive outside of a handful of densely populated corridors. By contrast, what was absolutely guaranteed from day one back in 1970 is that a government controlled passenger rail system crisscrossing the United States would become a monumental Congressional pork barrel—–an endless rebuke to rational economics.

And that it has. The cumulative taxpayer subsidy since 1972 totals more than $75 billion in dollars of today’s purchasing power. During the span of nearly a half century, Amtrak has operated upwards of 40 routes that have never, ever made even an “operating profit”.

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