GETTING INTO TRAINING. Destination: Freedom breaks down the passenger rail and mass transit components of the economic stimulus act.

As I understand it, the $1.3 billion for Amtrak is capital funding. I don't have any specifics on what that capital might be. I suggest that there's value in coach seats. (The Acela Expresses are pushing 10 years old, the glorified commuter cars called the Horizon Fleet and the Amfleet II cars nearing the quarter-century, the Superliners nearly thirty, and the Amcoaches and Metroliner cab cars in middle age.)

The bill is called economic stimulus. Does that mean a builder somewhere has passenger coach plans ready to be assembled? I have my candidates. Does Hunter Biden know that Sarah Palin has newer passenger coaches than Amtrak has?

Then comes the much larger sum for development of high-speed rail. Sorry to repeat myself, but high-speed rail in many parts of the country, including the Arklatex and Greater Chicago projects the bill has in mind, is a relatively simple matter. Post the 79 mph track for 110 or 120 and post the curves REDUCE TO 90 MPH. More importantly, though, the high-speed rail proposal has some opponents claiming a public choice dynamic at work, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's Disneyland to Las Vegas being part of the project. (Disneyland is Walt Disney's vision of an arcadian America that might never have been and Las Vegas a tribute to the power of wishful thinking augmented by subsidized water and power.) The Overhead Wire calls all passenger rail advocates to fact-check the polemicists, with more details at The Transport Politic.

The capital appropriation and the high-speed money do not provide for Amtrak operating funding, something that has been and remains an annual exercise in political brinkmanship. Trains proposes that the political brinkmanship has to end before Amtrak (and the rest of the national transportation policy) can be fixed. There's a short version of the proposal at the Richmond Times-Dispatch with additional commentary at Trains for America.

With stronger awareness about the environment and the economic benefits of greater transportation options, it seems that more politicians are correctly starting to talk about passenger rail in terms of “investments,” like they have have about highways for decades.

Where politicians are involved, however, the public choice dynamic, or pork-barrelling, or log-rolling is a real possibility. The same issue of Trains that includes the Amtrak reform proposals runs an editorial warning against the restoration of the North Coast Hiawatha. That train, along with the first Lake Shore and the Turbotrain to Parkersburg, West Virginia, were pet projects of Mike Mansfield, the Democratic Majority Leader, and Harley Staggers, a long-time Member of Congress who may have redeemed himself with the Staggers Act, deregulating the freight railroads.

The Disneyland and North Eastern is something to be watched for, as it will ruin passenger rail's credibility. Other additions to the national network will provide material for another day.