I had a vision last night. In it, Bill Flynn, Amtrak’s new president, was asked to testify before a Congressional committee considering Amtrak’s recent request for a grant of $1.475 billion. In my dream, this was the first question he was asked: “Mr. Flynn, you’ve asked this Congress for a grant of almost a billion…
Those of us who spend a good deal of our time and energy being advocates for more and better passenger trains, are often frustrated because we don’t seem to make much headway with some of the elected officials who are in a position of influence and, if they wanted to, could actually make things happen….
At a NARP luncheon a few years ago, I was chatting with an Amtrak executive who said, albeit facetiously, that Amtrak is the the most profitable money-loosing national railroad system in the entire world. He was right then and even more so today. Amtrak has just released their numbers for the fiscal year just ended…
Yesterday an Amtrak train derailed near Philadelphia and it’s a real mess. Six dead and hundreds injured. It’s way too soon to know exactly what happened, but there is pretty valid speculation. It seems clear that the train went into a curve much faster than the safe speed. The result was inevitable. Once investigators…