Riding the Rails In America -- At High Speed - Gas 2

Riding the Rails In America -- At High Speed

I think that trying to fund HSR before you have rail passengers is putting the cart in front of the horse. The US should slightly increase Amtrak’s subsidy over the next 10 years, allowing them to add more cars to the LD routes that need extra capacity. Shortly thereafter they could start adding 7 day service on trains that are not daily and doubling up trains on the routes that would support twice daily service like the Empire Builder and the California Zephyr. Most importantly, money should be spent on adding tracks to areas that are bottlenecked now, whether it is double or triple tracking, get rid of the slow spots. But most importantly, the Positive Train Control improvements should be allowed to increase the max speed of most of the trains, where possible, up to 110 mph. Which brings us to a huge part of the problem. A way has to be found to incentivise the freight l...

Full article: http://gas2.org/2012/10/25/riding-the-rails-in-america-at...