Amtrak

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

 Last Summer, while visiting Montreal, I met a retired couple in the hotel sauna who’d arrived there by Amtrak from New York.  Gas was over $4/gallon, flights were expensive, so they decided to give the train a shot.  Well, you can imagine how that went.  The cafe car ran out of food about halfway through the journey, the toilets stopped being serviced at around the 8th hour of the 12-hour trip, etc., etc.  Needless to say, they didn’t have a great experience.

Amtrak has atrophied from eight years of neglect under the Bush administration.  Here in Western Washington, (and maybe in the well-funded Northeast Corridor) we’ve been spared the brunt of it thanks to state funding.  But it’s gotten pretty grim out there on some routes.  

All of which is a long way of saying that I’m very glad that the new Amtrak CEO seems like he’s ready to turn the agency around.

Of course, if we hadn’t neglected the service for the last eight years, we wouldn’t have to dig out of such a big hole.  But President Obama seems really serious about funding rail transit, so better days may be ahead.