It doesn't take much...

...to get something by me, frankly, but this is one I should have caught.

Among the programs the Shrub gang's budget for Fiscal 2006 proposes to eliminate is federal support for Amtrak. It's been talked about before and other administrations have tried to do it before - but this time they may get away with it, especially since the Senate just voted down an amendment that would have provided $1.4 billion in subsidies.

The White House liars claim it's all about "putting Amtrak on a sound footing" - just like their Social Security plan is supposed to do for that program - and involves Amtrak becoming a holding company competing for business. What it would really mean is dumping of a significant part of the costs of maintaining passenger rail service onto already-overburdened states, in a number of which passenger rail might disappear altogether. It would also mean the end of long-distance trains and forcing Amtrak into bankruptcy, putting control of it in the hands of a trustee whose legal duty is to the creditors, not to the passengers.

This is insane. The idea that any industrialized nation can treat an intercity rapid mass-transit system - in short, a modern railroad - as a pointless frill to be indulged only if and where it can fatten investors' wallets is nothing short of a national embarrassment. But despite the fancy talk over the years about "helping Amtrak stand on its own," a frill is exactly how it's been treated since day one.

"[Amtrak] has struggled ever since it was formed," said John Spychalski, a transportation expert and professor of supply chain management at Pennsylvania State University.

He said Amtrak has been systematically starved of investment over the years and subject to unrealistic expectations that it could somehow get up on its own feet and become a profitable enterprise. "You cannot operate intercity rail service at a profit," he said.

Some individual lines may make money "above the rail," excluding the cost of basic infrastructure and maintenance, but "there is no way those systems as a whole are going to make money on passenger traffic," he said.

And it's not just here:

Even in Britain and other European countries where passenger rail service is far more integral to the overall transportation network, privatization efforts have met with mixed results at best.

The Wikipedia article on Amtrak notes that

[t]here have been few times in history when any intercity rail passenger operation in the world has been truly profitable, even with respect to only its operating costs, and passenger trains have never brought in enough revenue to pay for their infrastructure costs. Even highly efficient private-sector railroads such as the Norfolk and Western could not earn a profit, or even recover operating expenses for passenger service. The concept of Amtrak as a for-profit business was fatally flawed before the first passenger boarded. [emphasis in original]

That is, from the very beginning, Amtrak was expected to do what almost no other passenger rail system in the world had ever done. "Unrealistic expectations" hardly seems to describe it; "designed to fail" would be more accurate.

What's more, highways and airports, as is fairly well known, get massive subsidies. One measure of just how Amtrak has been treated is noted by the National Association of Rail Passengers (NARP):

[P]ublic policy is skewed against users of trains. The federal government provides a tiny (and diminishing) proportion of its transportation funding to rail - in 2003, $32 billion to highways (doubled in 20 years, accounting for inflation), $14 billion for aviation (more than doubled in 20 years), and barely $1 billion for Amtrak (cut more than a third in 20 years).

Wikipedia mentions a recent Congressional hearing during which Sen. John McCain (R-DemocratWishfulThinking) demanded an end to all operating subsidies for Amtrak. Current Amtrak president David Gunn asked

the Senator if he would also demand the same of the commuter airlines, upon whom the citizens of Arizona are much more dependent. McCain, usually not at a loss for words when debating Amtrak funding, did not reply.

And yet despite it all, Amtrak hasn't failed, at least not yet, because it has proved to be more popular and more useful than it was thought it could be.

But now it's under new threat, one that even involves going back on prior commitments: As 21 House GOP members noted in a March 3 letter to the chair of the House Budget Committee, just last June a new five-year financial plan for Amtrak was met with a promise from the White House for $1.4 billion in support for the service for each of the next four years. Apparently keeping their word to their own party members means no more to the Shrub team than keeping their word to anyone else does. Instead, they want to weave a

vision of creating a network of intercity rail hubs of 200 to 500 miles that would connect urban areas to airports and public transit systems.

Put more simply, they see railroads as a means to get you to and from the airport more efficiently.

That "vision" is wrong not only logically and environmentally (train travel is cleaner and more energy-efficient than plane travel) but, dammit, aesthetically. Full disclosure here: I've logged at least 26,000 miles on Amtrak and I do not want to see it go. There is, as they say, something about a train. Part of it, I admit, is that there is a certain romance about trains, perhaps even a certain pleasant nostalgia, that just doesn't stick to other means of transportation. But there's something more: When I travel, I want to enjoy the traveling. I don't want to just get somewhere as fast as humanly possible; I want to enjoy the getting and the coming back as well as the being there. For that, nothing beats a train. When you fly, you see clouds. When you drive, you see pavement. When you take the train, you see scenery.

And I just can't wait to get on the road again.

Footnote: In addition to the NARP, you may care to check out Friends of Amtrak, Save Amtrak, and the Amtrak Historical Society.