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Location: Nashville, Tennessee, United States

6/06/2002

All I can say is, Amen
The WaPo - that's the Washington Post in case you don't know - reported Thursday that Amtrak is on the verge of a financial train wreck.

Now, as Nashvillians know, a certain Nashville congressman wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to get Amtrak service from Nashville to Atlanta. Rep. Bob Clement has been trying to get Congress to appropriate the bucks for years. Now Clement is running for the U.S. Senate, where he will have more power to try to make such fiscal lunacy happen.

Before you vote for Rep. Clement, please read this lovely essay from Megan McArdle.

Here's an excerpt:

Amtrak is precisely the kind of public-private Great Society partnership that 70's business was all about. After all, the important thing is not that this system is bloated, expensive, and immune to the prodding of common sense; the important thing is that the people who work for Amtrak need jobs, and there are people who need the trains to get from one place to another, and it doesn't matter that it would be cheaper to buy an economy car for every single previous Amtrak rider, because automobiles are tools of the devil. Rail transportation's the wave of the future, dude. Sustainable development is groovy.

Rail isn't even profitable where rail is supposed to work; the subway in New York loses moderate amounts of money (and is perennially starved for capital development funds that could improve New York's transportation picture); the commuter rail system loses a lot. And that's in the most densely populated area of the United States. How in hell is rail supposed to work in Nebraska?

Shutter it. Sell of the Boston-Washington line to a company that can actually operate it with a profit and without dumb politicians making sure that the trains go to every idiot whistle stop installed 100 years ago. Give the rest to the freight companies, or tourism companies, or anyone else who wants 'em. But for Gosh sakes, stop wasting our money trying to bring back the good old days of 1910.

Amen.