Re: MF July 28, 2007


I said "capital city OR largest city". Amtrak goes to Baltimore,
Maryland's largest city. (And doesn't the state-run MARTA system
connect Annapolis to Baltimore?)

*First off, MARTA is Atlanta' transit system. You're thinking
Maryland's MTA, of which MARC (Maryland Rail Commuter) is a part. And
the nearest rail gets is light rail to Glen Burnie or MARC trains at
Bowie, both about 17 miles away. There's one bus line connecting Glen
Burnie to Annapolis, and some rush-hour commuter bus service to
Baltimore and DC.

Amtrak goes to Louisville.

*Like hell it does. They have a Greyhound bus connection. A LONG bus
ride.

Is Helena also Montana's largest city? If not, where does that Amtrak
line stop
in Montana?

*Biggest city I can find on Amtrak's route across the northern part of
the state is Havre. (Just off the top of my head amd my handy wall
maps, not cross-checked against latest census data or whatnot.....)

Amtrak goes to Las Vegas, right?

*NO. Amtrak "serves" Las Vegas BY BUS.

Man, Tinsley's looking MUCH better as a researcher than you are.
Thirty seconds to download the route map PDF from the Amtrak website,
dude--that's all it takes.


And that's because the PTB in this country...backed by the money of
the auto industry...put the government behind highway construction
instead of rail maintenance and construction in the era after WW2.
Look at the movies made before that war and during it...there's a
romance of rail travel that's definitely part of the milieu. That
romance didn't disappear until the government turned automobiles into
the easier, more "romantic" mode of transportation.

*And you believe everything Hollywood tells you, right? Maybe we
should send Shirley Temple to Iraq; after all, she got those Civil War
colonels talking peacefully in that movie, right? For every "luxury"
train you saw in those glamorous movies, there were twenty or more all-
coach trains not much better than Greyhound buses or many current
Amtrak coach trains. During World War Two, anything that could roll
was pressed into service--and the Pennsylvania Railroad even ran off a
bunch of *box cars* with slatted bench seats and end doors in
desperation, while the New York Central just turned away potential
passengers with "don'tcha know there's a war on?" and shrugged
shoulders. Check out "Pullman troop sleepers" online--basically box
cars with benches and sleeping bunks.

Your little "conspiracy" above is basically what you want to believe,
and at best it's only a small part of the bigger picture, which
involves every damned body from the Duryea brothers to the Wright
brothers to Henry Ford to Adolph--no, no, not gonna invoke Godwin's
Law here, but he did create the "autobahn" that impressed our military
leaders.......--to Eisenhower to American consumers to Madison Avenue
advertising to the "robber barons" of the eighteenth century to......
well, the rest of you can get the picture.

Ah, SEPTA's Fox Chase-Newtown line, right? <:-)

Actually, I was thinking of the Media-Elwyn line that formerly ran all
the way to West Chester, but had its western end abandoned in the
'70s. Now that Chester County is both growing and looking to prevent
further congestion, suddenly the idea of re-extending the line is in
vogue...although it'll cost a fortune.

*And according to my books, the operation between West Chester and
Elwyn was abandoned in 1984 account a failing bridge. This was after
SEPTA acquired the line in 1983 from Conrail. So you get to blame a
government agency, not the railroad. Meanwhile, if there hasn't been
enough demand for service to replace that bridge in the past 20-odd
years, what makes you think that there was enough traffic to keep that
line open in the interim between then and now?

Similarly, the Reading RR ran a line from Reading to Philly that was
also abandoned 40 or so years ago...and now there's been talk of
building a light rail line along the same right-of-way.

*Once again, redundancy. The skeletal remains of service to Pottstown
and Reading was killed off ca. 1982 account low ridership--it probably
should have been killed off ten or twenty years earlier. The proposed
Schuylkill Valley Metro would use an abandoned parallel PRR freight
line, not the Reading used by the earlier commuter trains and still
heavily used by freights. The proposals are being made because the
right-of-way is still available, not because the demand for service is
so pressing.

Again...had those lines been kept operating, even as a one-train-a-day
each way service, reinvigorating them now would be a far less costly
proposition. That's the problem with private ownership of such
services...the outlook is never beyond the next quarter, never mind
next year.

One last time: It's not the function of a private corporation to
operate benevolently for the "public good"; it's to make profit for
the shareholders. If the need is perceived to be so great for such
things as a commuter line or service, the government can step in with
the dollars to make it happen.

.

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