Steven P. BarrettFUND AMTRAK: WE NEED IT NOW MORE THAN EVER, PART ONE
June 20th 2008 22:41
Train on platform awaiting passengers.
Back some four decades ago one of my favorite pastimes was to go down to the main passenger station in Wiesbaden, where my father was stationed at then Lindsay Kaserne, which served as the Air Force's Headquarters. Of course, those were much more innocent times and save for a fence the station maintained to keep people from getting too close to the terminal tracks and the locomotives/and or rear passenger cars, a kid could have a field day just watching all the different trains going in and out of what I thought was a massive station with its enormous glass sheds. Of course, visiting the much larger station in nearby Frankfurt a.m. helped to put the Wiesbaden edifice in a different perspective. Nevertheless, the fact that a relatively small or compact city like Wiesbaden could boast such a large and beautiful station hosting a vibrant national railroad system was never lost on my young mind then and still a ("more matured") mind today.
I can still recall the bombed out shell of Munich's old main station when my family pulled through there on a trip from Frankfurt to the Alps (during a trip my dad took us to Wiesbaden when we lived in Casablanca, Morocco.) But the trains ran smoothly and on time. Clean, neat and comfortable. This was in 1956, only a decade after the station had been turned into rubble.
This rebuilt station is now one of Europe's busiest.
The Germans rebuilt their much vaunted system back quickly and kept making improvements.
What a far cry from the disgraceful way we treated our once famously efficient and luxurious private railroads, the New York Central, Pennsylvania RR, So. Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads. I can still recall the "big boys" that used to pull the seemingly endless freight trains into Cheyenne, WY--and this was only back in the 50's. Before heading to Germany in 1962, I rode the NY Central from Dayton, OH to Springfield, MA twice, and this included two nice rides on Pullmans. Even during the early 60's, passenger expresses and long distance trains that used to roll unimpeded from Chicago to New York were delayed due to derailments caused by already deteriorating track conditions.
Whenever I hear some of my more economic minded fellow conservatives holler for more "privatization," rascally thoughts of tying them down to tracks come to mind. They'll survive, thanks to the sluggishly slow speeds some trains have to travel just to keep from derailing. Does 10 to 15 mph sound like "rapid transit" to you? (Maybe to a tax-shelter accountant it sounds like a rapid trip to a nice fat check.)
You'd think that might serve as a "foretaste" of what I should've expected when my family took a "duty train" from Frankfurt to Berlin, after all, the East Germans and Soviets wouldn't have had any eagerness to put our tracks on their "immediate" repair lists. So long as the trains rolled, what would they've cared? Apparently our enemies cared more than our fellow citizens when it came to maintaining a decent rail system befitting the world's greatest economic and military power.
Outside of the tit-for-tat border crossing hassles between West Germany and the Eastern Sector, our steam locomotived trains cut through the occupied section w/o a problem. What a grim sight to see grayness in the cities and towns we passed through. At least the people running the once proud Prussian section of the old Reichsbahn had the socialists to blame. We only had our capitalists for the steady defragmentation of our passenger rail system.
Railroad executives blamed the airline industries for what they did to the passenger rail system. Don't let them get away with it. Ironically enough, one of Amtrak’s biggest supporters, the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, while addressing social problems, came up with an interesting phrase called "benign neglect" which I'm sure apologists for those exec's disgraceful treatment of our once proud railroads would love to use again to justify starving AMTRAK.
There was nothing "benign" about this neglect. Instead of using B-17s and B-24s, they used wiley tax accountants, lobbyist allies representing airlines, and pliant polticians to do the job.
Part II -- Restoration & Need to Maintain AMTRAK
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