(Richard White is an outstanding left historian.) NY Times Op-Ed, May 18 2015 Our Trouble With Trains By RICHARD WHITE
EIGHT train passengers died last week in Philadelphia. Their deaths are particularly alarming because they were doing nothing more dangerous than traveling along Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor. The news about the train accident has focused on technological fixes that might have prevented the disaster. The deaths are, however, also rooted in our long love-hate relationship with the railroads. It is this particular history that has served to render our railroad problems so intractable. Amtrak is a public-private corporation, but the government’s involvement in rail began long before Amtrak. It has taken various forms: public subsidies, public stock subscriptions, the leasing of convict labor, partial public ownership of private railroad corporations, and regulation. Government funds were the lifeblood of many 19th-century American railroads. The partnership structure meant that the public absorbed the risk. Those who controlled the corporations, if not the corporations themselves, reaped the benefits. (The Europeans, who have maintained their state-owned companies and close government supervision, have done much better at passenger travel.) In a country of vast distances and poor roads, railroads became essential, but there were still many reasons for Americans to dislike them. And nothing focused, and still focuses, public attention on the deficiencies of railroads like accidents. Train wrecks yield victims, and, more commonly, trains kill those who work on them. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, railroads rejected new technologies that could have improved safety as too complicated and too expensive. There was pressure to nationalize the railroads, which often meant operating them like a modern interstate highway, with the government owning and controlling the infrastructure and allowing regulated private carriers to use the tracks. During World War I the nearly catastrophic inefficiency of the railroads brought about temporary nationalization, but by and large the public option was never exercised. From the 19th century on, popular resentment mounted, often focused on the commuter rail. Danger and bad service caused passengers to flee to automobiles and, later, airlines whenever they could. Railroads lost money by carrying people, but they could not simply cease to run passenger trains. Both their charters and laws required them to do so. Amtrak, which was started in 1971, was a blessing to them. They could keep the lucrative freight and ditch the costly passengers. The government created Amtrak to salvage a failing passenger rail system, but in detaching passenger traffic from freight traffic it created a monster that had to seek its lifeblood elsewhere. Freight traffic sustains railroads. Amtrak became a kind of corporate vampire. It has to feed on subsidies because it lacks the most lucrative part of rail transportation. When they divided the ledgers Amtrak got the red ink; the private rail lines got the black ink. As American rail lines became freight lines, they had no need to build or maintain the tracks necessary for higher-speed passenger traffic. Amtrak has by and large lacked the funds to build new tracks or improve their safety. Given Amtrak’s hybrid infrastructure, the result is that American passenger trains run more like other advanced countries’ freight trains. When they go faster, disaster can ensue. In our current political climate, we are not going to get a fully nationalized railroad system. We are not even going to get a reliable regional system in the Northeast, where a critical mass of riders exists. The devil’s bargain that created Amtrak forestalls that, since even in that region it is hard to imagine a rail line that supports itself without freight. Our current system will never produce safe and reliable passenger travel without large public subsidies. What the critics and proponents of subsidies both ignore is that they benefit not only passengers but also the historically subsidized freight railroads, which have been allowed to shed their public responsibilities to provide safe passenger traffic while keeping their profits. If anything positive can come out of this horrible accident, it will be a public recognition that our expectations, and current funding of Amtrak, are not only unrealistic but also dangerous. It is too easy to think our problems represent a departure from a golden age of American railroads. Very few of us are old enough to remember a supposed time when trains ran efficiently, safely and dependably — which is convenient, because there was no such golden age. We have worked long and hard to create the railroad system that we have today. But, as with so many things, we sometimes forget that our troubles are of our own making. Richard White, a professor of history at Stanford, is the author of “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America.” _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
