WI: Instead of Amtrak the rail companies were subsidized?

So something that's been rattling around in my brain lately and I finally decided to post here and see what you guys thought. Basically instead of nationalizing rail service the US Government gives the railroads subsidies to run the passenger trains instead? The thinking going through my head is that it could actually fix a lot of the problems with current US passenger rail service since the chief one of the trains being run over foreign track and thus being given lower priority compared to freight goes away.
 
Under a system in which the feds subsidized private passenger rail, you'd see private railroads demand more and more money for track upgrades for other purposes, just like today. Amtrak wants to run a few more trains in Virginia, and Norfolk Southern manages to wrangle several hundred million for double-tracking for it.
 

DougM

Donor
Tithe truth is, that the government created the problem that caused the collapse of the passenger train at least in part.
They created the interstate highway system that took huge amounts of passengers from the railroads.
The created and still subsidize the airports/airlines and the air traffic controllers.

The government dictated what routes the railroad had to provide passenger service to so they had to ask before they could stop a train that was losing money.
And the last nail in the coffin was when the government took mail off the trains and put it on aircraft and trucks.

Most passenger trains used the money from the mail to pay for the train and the passengers ticket was pretty much profit. When the mail was stopped most passenger trains started to lose money.

Trains are the least subsidized of any more of transport in the US. Compared to trucks, and airplanes and ships they get very little.
 

Delta Force

Banned
The rail companies wanted to get out of passenger rail because they were losing money all over the place. Routes are politically very difficult to close, so they were kept running even if demand didn't exist. I don't know about the United States, but in the United Kingdom there are still ghost trains that service stations while not being listed on any passenger or cargo schedule lists.

Amtrak wasn't really intended to save passenger rail as much as allow railroads to relieve themselves of the liabilities of passenger rail. Everyone viewed it as a last hurrah for passengers rail and expected Amtrak to last a decade or so. Instead the focus shifted to pressuring Amtrak instead of the private railroads.
 
Even if the government started subsidizing passenger rail sometime after around 1958 or so, it's likely you'd only have a handful of railroads still in the passenger business. Only the very largest passenger carriers (NYC, PRR, NH, AT&SF, etc.) would probably still operate trains; smaller roads and also-rans would probably be allowed to dump passenger service, since I doubt the federal government would be willing to subsidize every single passenger train on the rails.
 
From the research I've done for my dissertation, this was the original plan prior to about the winter of 1969.

The big reasons why it didn't work, as well as why the plan was abandoned by both the Nixon administration and Congress was:

i) The railroads, especially Penn Central (which ran most of the remaining passenger trains), were heavily in debt. I mean Penn Central had an annual profit of a few million in a good year and had a billion dollars of debt due to mature by the end of the century. A subsidy isn't going to solve that.

ii) Penn Central's managers in particular saw the passenger trains as a waste of their time as well as their money.

Furthermore, it would not solve the problem of passenger trains being given secondary consideration to freight because passenger trains even fully loaded aren't as valuable as freight. To solve that particular problem, you either need a Network Rail-esque organization or full-on nationalization, with said nationalized organization deliberately prioritizing passenger trains.

teg
 
Passenger Rail had been subsidized.

When the the last RPO/Mail contracts were switched to airlines and trucks in 1966, the last nail was driven in, Private Passenger Rail could not continue outside the Northeast Corridor.

Even there, Penn Central was hemorrhaging money.

All of the RR companies had been deferring maintenance on tracks, Stations and cars for years, plus cutting number of trains.

A Station that may have had 50 daily trains during WWII, would have under 5 by 1970.

After 10 years of Amtrak, this was the routes available

amtrackmap1980.jpg


Some States with no stops at all and the trains ran slower than they did in WWI
 
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