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Southwest Chief "In The X-Hair"
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by Vincent206: [QB] My last trip on the Southwest Chief was in January 2016. I enjoyed that trip but it was easy to notice that the Chief's infrastructure was worn out. Most of my rail trips are between Seattle and Portland, which might be the most up-to-date and well maintained 79mph rail infrastructure in America. The Southwest Chief, by comparison, runs on tracks that are from another era. I can understand Amtrak's dilemma: finding money to fix an old rail plant that only serves 2 trains a day is difficult and Congress isn't going to drop hundreds of millions of dollars into Amtrak's lap. But Amtrak's solution to this problem, as spelled out in the [URL=https://www.dropbox.com/s/397rbtfluu9uifp/Dismantling-National-System-Trains-3-4.pdf]Anderson Presentation[/URL], is a terrible way to fix the problem. For decades Amtrak has been calling for states to pitch in and help with the long distance trains. Since 2016, Colorado, Kansas and New Mexico have collaborated on finding money to get the rails fixed with federal and local dollars. Much of the trackage has already been fixed in KS and CO. Another grant has been earned to improve most of the remaining bolted tracks in NM and fix other bits of ancient infrastructure. But now Amtrak is balking and threatening to annul parts of the Chief because there isn't a total solution to fix all the problems. Amtrak has always operated on an incremental improvement basis. There never is enough money to make all the problems go away. And in this case, the states have stepped up. In the future, I can't imagine any state would be willing to put money on the table and shovels in the ground if Amtrak decides to replace train service with buses on the KS to NM corridor. On the last page of the Anderson Presentation, the slide reads "Amtrak wants to partner with the states to expand corridor services to and from this corridor". If Amtrak is serious about partnering with the states to expand corridor service, they had better come up with a better solution than 7 hour bus rides. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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