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Perhaps because today (Friday, September 2, 2011) is the day that ushers in a holiday weekend that's widely viewed as a celebration of leisure in contradistinction to work, the Washington Post has surprisingly devoted a big chunk of its front page to a lengthy, well-illustrated article by reporter Katherine Shaver, entitled "The tracks of luxury", about private rail cars, focusing on the restored 1923 car Kitchi Gammi Club owned by Chuck Jensen of Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania. It's a positive and reasonably informative piece, worth picking up a copy of the paper for if you have the chance. There's also some video footage and a photo gallery supplementing the article on the Washington Post website: Go to www.washingtonpost.com/local, and go down to the heading "The tracks of luxury".
The article isn't perfect, of course. The reporter paints all private car owners with the "train buff" brush (would she describe as "buffs" people who own yachts, or private jets, or luxury customized buses, or RV's?). She seems to think that the Metroliners still exist. She makes the irritatingly parochial assumption that private car owners' only real interest is in riding up and down the Northeast Corridor, and that they'd supposedly prefer to be hauled by an Acela or by one of the supposedly-still-existing Metroliner trains, and that it's only because the Acelas and the Metroliners supposedly only recently topped 110 miles per hour that private car owners have belatedly taken an interest in traveling elsewhere in the country (which she refers to as "[seeking] additional routes"). It includes a couple of horrible statements from Amtrak spokesman Steve Kulm about the company's hauling of private cars, which nets it about $660,000 annually: the first being that "[Amtrak is] always under pressure to operate as a business" (seemingly implying that technically Amtrak is set up as an agency rather than a business; Kulm should be fired for making that remark); and the second being that Amtrak's private car hauling is done in part to support America's long history of railroading (another remark that Kulm should be fired for: Amtrak should never state that it is doing anything for the sake of history--and I don't believe it is doing anything for the sake of history--because any impression of that type that's given to the public plays right into the hands of Amtrak's most virulent detractors).
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Mr. Paulshore, I'm surprised to learn that the rates Amtrak charges for handling Private Cars ("PV") are so low. For what it worth, the fully allocated cost to operate my own mid-sized automobile is at present some $1.85/mi.
Regarding the Amtrak spokesman's comment regarding "pressure to operate as a business" , I take no issue whatever with it. The statement simply recognizes that the fiction contained within the Act (RPSA 70 that formulated Amtrak) has fallen by the wayside. Regardless of that Amtrak does have a corporate structure, it simply is a Federal agency within the USDOT - never has been anything else over the past forty one years.
The "sake of history" remark is, well, "so what's new'. The entire Long Distance system, in which I doubt if there is any special-interest group being more vested in the continuation of such than the private car owners, is really all about history - such history being that once upon a time people actually got on a train in Chicago and rode it all the way to Los Angeles because it was the only reasonable and practical way to get there. That era effectively died with the 1953 "truce" that ended the Korean War hostilities. Possibly at such time there's actually a treaty between the two belligerent nations, so will go the Amtrak LD system, allowing whatever funding future Federal and State legislative bodies choose to appropriate to passenger rail to be directed to developing routes where such is a reasonable and practical transportation mode and in the process slow down the need for additional and far more costly, $$$$ and environment, highway and air transport infrastructure.
Posts: 9976 | From: Clarendon Hills, IL USA (BNSF Chicago Sub MP 18.71) | Registered: Apr 2002
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