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Introduction: Amtrak's current situation -- A brief history of Amtrak -- Amtrak's role in intercity transportation -- The basic economics of passenger rail -- Policy options for the future of passenger rail -- Appendix. Amtrak's interconnections with freight and commuter railroads.
During the tumultuous year of 2008--when gas prices reached $4 a gallon, Amtrak set ridership records, and a commuter train collided with a freight train in California--journalist James McCommons spent a year on America's trains, talking to the people who ride and work the rails throughout much of the Amtrak system. Organized around these rail journeys, Waiting on a Train is equal parts travel narrative, personal memoir, and investigative journalism. Readers meet the historians, railroad executives, transportation officials, politicians, government regulators, railroad lobbyists, and passenger-rail advocates who are rallying around a simple question: Why has the greatest railroad nation in the world turned its back on the very form of transportation that made modern life and mobility possible? Distrust of railroads in the nineteenth century, overregulation in the twentieth, and heavy government subsidies for airports and roads have left the country with a skeletal intercity passenger-rail system. Amtrak has endured for decades, and yet failed to prosper owing to a lack of political and financial support and an uneasy relationship with the big, remaining railroads. While riding the rails, McCommons explores how the country may move passenger rail forward in America--and what role government should play in creating and funding mass-transportation systems. Against the backdrop of the nation's stimulus program, he explores what it will take to build high-speed trains and transportation networks, and when the promise of rail will be realized in America.
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Competition made the price of flour and cloth and shoes equal and reasonable; why should it make fares and freights unequal and unreasonable? Few indeed were they who could be made to see that the true cause of complaint was with an economical theory misapplied... The system was, indeed, fairly honeycombed with jobbery and corruption.-from "The Railroad Problem"In the middle to late 19th century, a morass of civic and social concerns ensnared private corporations-the railroads-that provided what was essentially a public service. The "railroad problem" was only beginning to dramatically impact the United States when, in 1878, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., an expert on railroad management and the future president of the Union Pacific Railroad wrote Railroads: Their Origin and Problems. Through an exploration of the state of the industry in the U.S., Great Britain, and Europe, Adams examines issues of free trade, corporate power, government support of a public utility, and even social engineering: how do technology and the government's power to tax and subsidize shape society? The great railroads of the 19th century may have passed into history, but the issues they raised continue to concern us today.American businessman CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS, JR. (1835-1915), the grandson of John Quincy Adams, was educated at Harvard and served in the Union Army during the Civil War, achieving the rank of brigadier general.