IN PRAISE OF FRAGMENTATION. A passenger train salesman makes a pitch for corporate welfare.

What does a federal transportation program look like? Simple: like our highway and airport programs. The federal government doesn't operate the vehicles or market the service. There's no such company as "Amcar" or "Amflight." Instead, Washington helps the states to fund a state-of-the-art infrastructure that private operators can have access to -- highways for private cars and commercial motor coaches, airports for airliners. Congress needs to stop focusing solely on Amtrak, a government-owned train company operating on obsolete private and public infrastructure, so that it can refocus on getting matching funds out to states and communities that want to build up their intercity railroad tracks and start running fast, frequent, comfortable trains that people will pay to ride.

State of the art infrastructure? In Illinois, we have two seasons, winter and construction, and equipment failures in the Chicago area air traffic control system are legendary. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Impatient, I guess.

Several impatient states -- California, North Carolina and Washington -- couldn't wait for a federal program, so during the go-go '90s they spent some of their taxpayers' money to build track capacity and buy trains on their own. Their programs are successful -- California's 60 daily departures are carrying more than 4 million riders a year, and growth is quickly surpassing the capacity of the state-owned fleet.

But even rich states such as California have hit the fiscal wall, much as Pennsylvania did in 1939, when it ran out of money to finish its new turnpike and had to wait for an emergency grant sought by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Unless Congress develops a federal-state matching-grant plan for railroad tracks like the highway program it started in 1916 and the airport aid program it passed in 1946, passenger trains will continue to starve, highway and airport backups will grow, and Mead's successors at the Transportation Department will continue to scratch their heads about why the federal government can't seem to run a profitable train business.

I thought we had state of the art infrastructure. Why the delays at the airports and on the highways? The trains account for a small fraction of daily miles travelled. Perhaps the simpler solution is to abolish the subsidies?

Passenger trains used to be a profitable business in this country -- many, many years ago, when railroads enjoyed a monopoly over mechanized overland transportation and the federal government was not yet building and subsidizing two competing travel systems. But those days are gone. To expect a passenger train company to earn a profit on today's underfunded, obsolete and downsized track network is an exercise in nostalgia.

Underfunded, obsolete, downsized? Watch the double-stacks rip through DeKalb at 70 mph and tell me it's obsolete. Look at Santa Fe's second main track program and tell me it's underfunded. Look at Union Pacific's third main track in Nebraska and tell me it's downsized. The problem is that passenger trains don't mix well with freight trains. Asking a freight railroad to run one passenger train a day, the usual Amtrak long distance frequency, is akin to asking a steel mill to bake a pizza in a reheat furnace. Asking a freight railroad to accommodate a fleet of passenger trains is even more disruptive. The secret is to provide passenger tracks separate from the freight tracks, which the eastern trunk lines understood years ago.

But to expect fast, frequent, efficient trains to carry masses of travelers who now fly, drive or stay home is the height of reality -- provided the funding is there for a railroad infrastructure as modern as the ones government provides for cars and airplanes. The key is our proven federal system of matching grants. It's amazing how much money a state legislature will appropriate for a project when it knows there's money waiting in Washington to match it. And it's amazing how eager entrepreneurs are to provide quality transportation once they're sure government will keep funding the infrastructure.

What is that quip about the State being the fiction by which each expects to live at the expense of the other? Does anybody remember another Congressional fiddle of the 1990s, not spending all the gasoline and tire tax money intended for the Highway Trust Fund, in order to make the budget deficit look smaller?

Jack O'Toole, who located the article, notes,

As a train enthusiast, I have to admit that opening the door to fundamental change in the current system makes me a little nervous; fact is, an awful lot of folks in DC are bound and determined to let passenger rail die, and they’re almost certain to try to use any major reform effort as a Trojan coach car to achieve that end. Still, what Coston says above makes sense. In the end, rail can only get well if it’s organized like every other mode of transportation in the country, with private companies operating in a subsidized environment (and hiring their share of lobbyists to ensure that the subsidies are sufficient to keep the whole enterprise afloat).

Considering the fate of the legacy air carriers, the intercity buses, and many of the trucking companies, I'm not sure that's the improvement. (I have been doing some reading on Amtrak reform over the Christmas break and will weigh in on that shortly.) Ending Amtrak, which is what the Post article is about, is not equivalent to ending passenger rail, which in several cities operates as a commuter authority independently of Amtrak (consider Indiana's South Shore Line and Metra's former Union Pacific and Rock Island services in Chicago), and which includes land cruise operators such as American Orient Express, and the (sometimes steam-powered!) Grand Canyon Railway, which the National Park Service recommends visitors to the South Rim use.

And speaking of public investment in transportation, Belle Waring's recollections of the Washington (DC) Union Station in the 1970s are spot on.