CARE ENOUGH TO PRIVATIZE:

The Railroad to Nowhere (JOHN TIERNEY, 4/19/05, NY Times)

Nearly five years ago, as Amtrak officials were hailing their new Acela train as "a giant step forward" for America and "the kind of rail system we've all been dreaming about for decades," a former Amtrak official named Joseph Vranich offered another perspective.

"I say without equivocation," he told The Hartford Courant, "that the Acela program is turning into the world's worst high-speed program."

I quote him now not merely because he was right, but because he offers a useful model for coping with the latest Acela fiasco, the shutdown of service because of faulty brakes. The passengers left stranded are still stuck in stages of anger and depression; the politicians vowing to fix the Acela are still working through the stages of denial and bargaining.

Mr. Vranich has moved beyond all that and reached acceptance. He now sees that the dream of decent Amtrak service is dead. [...]

But in the 1990's, after writing a book on foreign trains, he finally gave up hope. Japan and other countries were setting rail speed records and reviving their rail systems by turning them over to private companies, but Amtrak was still going nowhere. Mr. Vranich made the conversion from spokesman to scourge, arguing in books titled "Derailed" and "End of the Line" that train service would never improve as long as Amtrak had a monopoly on it.

Socialism doesn't work? Stop the presses!

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 19, 2005 6:03 AM