Much as I love trains, Amtrak sucks. I found out that in Europe and Asia, people commonly refer to all Amtrak engines as SLOBS (Slow Locomotive Offshoot Blowouts). You can’t blame it on big oil, climate change or safety for why we don’t invest in rail transport the way we should. But there are over two dozen other countries with electric and diesel service t exceeding 200 mph and altogether over 40 other countries with that same service over 170 mph. Amtrak at best goes 140 mph regardless of what they advertise or claim, yet on average they go much slower and use excuses to announce delays so that people don’t ask for refunds. A bullet train in Japan could go between NYC and Dallas in 5 hours.
If you take the US out of all these stupid wars, we have no business in, stop wasting money on stupid projects, use eminent domain the way it should be used, we could start to have a good system at 75% of the cost of what it is now. The railroad is just one more way the world is laughing at us.
I remember taking trains in Europe in the 90s and they were much faster there then here. My daughter currently lives in Japan with her boyfriends and one of the reasons she loves it there is because of the railroad. I know that the reason Amtrak is so dysfunctional is because of severe mismanagement. I if you talk to anyone of them, they will give you a double talk of their problems without admitting that there are a lot of problems they can correct. I still take the train, but it is so disheartening for me to have so much difficulty traveling when all they care about is the method of payment and selling tickets.
Amtrak is owned and operated by the Federal Government, who you can always depend on to mismanage things. They continue to run it the same way each year and continue to complain that they lose money. They charge customers heavenly for travel and even update the same old junk equipment instead of trying to explore how they could make the system work better.
Amtrak has even cut back on some well used rail lines and claiming it as losses, which goes to show how bad they are at making decisions. If they operated properly, they could charge much less for tickets, pay crew better, have more on time service and most importantly, have more patronages leading to more popularity. This is a period where airlines are having problems, and yet Amtrak does not capitalize.
