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Rail travel advocates fear that, on top of the sudden loss of almost half of Amtrak's system, the plan might mark the beginning of the end for all significant intercity rail services in the U.S. Even if it may be too late to stop the DOT plan, it is not too late to examine how the U.S. came to such a shabby pass.
The amputation plan embodies a whole bundle of questionable notions that have long clouded the prevalent American view of passenger rail service. A conspicuous one among them was evident in the chartering of Amtrak, which was directed to function as a profit-making organization. The cold fact is that no national passenger system, in the final accounting, ever pays its own way. Amtrak's succession of deficits ($600 million this year) was inevitable, and the DOT reaction rested on yet another flawed notion: the remedy for an insufficient passenger system is to cut it back and make it even less sufficient. These and other peculiar notions — including the specious belief that Americans do not really like to ride railroads — add up to a sort of official mythology of passenger travel in the U.S.
The odd thinking that has long held sway in national rail travel policy springs out of a stubborn resistance to rail travel as a public service justified not by profits but by its contribution to social convenience and wellbeing. After all, municipalities everywhere subsidize local mass transit and recognize the obvious need to do so. Washington still thinks of automobile transportation as strictly private, even though the Federal Government alone has invested some $48.6 billion in roads since 1971. Airlines are similarly considered private, even though they would be as financially strapped as Amtrak if they were billed for only the nearly $2 billion the public pays each year for the air traffic control systems. Every attentive citizen, finally, becomes aware of the inextricable public-private money mix that sustains all transport. But the strangest thing — and perhaps the most revealing — is that nobody gets worked up about it except when the issue of railroads comes up.
This peculiar official sentiment is linked, underneath, to a mental picture of the railroad industry that lingers from the past. The trains that used to inspire novelists and songwriters were contrivances of freebooting laissez-faire capitalism, and they became symbolic monuments to a time that believed that any enterprise that could not make a profit deserved to die. In fact, though, an extensive passenger-train network tenuously survived into the 1940s, when, suddenly needed for war duty, it worked profitably at capacity. Then, in the postwar period, when the nation lavished attention and money on the development of air and highway transport, rail travel sank into the red. One reason was that the mail subsidies that used to help pay the basic cost of a passenger train were increasingly handed to truckers and airlines. Passenger trains fell into the trend of continual service cutting that both reduced chances for a comeback and encouraged Americans to turn more and more to cars.