OUR POLITICAL MASTERS WANTED AMTRAK TO GO AWAY.

Trains contributor and longtime railroad journalist Rush Loving tells the tale. "The plan was to create a cash-strapped passenger railroad destined to fail from starvation."  (Just in case you didn't believe my assertion of the same thing.)

The Federal Railroad Administration then assigned one of its young staffers, James W. McClellan, to slim down the national passenger network. McClellan killed such notable trains as the City of New Orleans and the Wabash Cannonball, so when Amtrak opened for business on May 1 it was operating one-third of what had been the nation’s passenger fleet.

Railroad CEOs, such as the Burlington Northern’s Louis Menk, hated passenger trains. Not only did the trains lose money, they complicated operations, delaying freight service and beating down tracks. Amtrak was supposed to be an experiment, and Menk and others conspired with the Nixon White House to starve Amtrak for the subsidies it needed to be a successful enterprise, thereby giving the administration an excuse to declare the experiment a failure and kill Amtrak. Unknowingly Congress had aided that compact by failing to provide enough subsidies at Amtrak’s start.

Roger Lewis, an affable man who had been head of General Dynamics, a defense contractor, was named president. Unfortunately, Lewis had been fired from General Dynamics and always seemed reluctant to stand up to Nixon and possibly get fired a second time. Lewis, who had no experience in railroading, also seemed reluctant to make decisions and did not get out on the property other than to ride the Broadway Limited to Chicago or even take the Metroliner to New York.

Lewis and his board hired Harold Graham of Pan American World Airways as marketing vice president. Graham and others on the staff came from airlines and thought only they knew how to deal with passengers and viewed railroaders with disdain. “We’re having to correct all these old practices that developed over the years,” Graham said. He attempted to make trains like airliners, with all cabins, seats, and meals looking the same, and he took diners off the New York-Boston trains and club cars off Metroliners. He even was determined to fulfil the dream of many airline people and kill off first class.

The City of New Orleans was the Illinois Central day train in 1971; the overnight train was the Panama Limited. But the Arlo Guthrie song caught on, and Amtrak renamed the Panama as the City, but it's on a slower overnight schedule now.  First class on the Metroliners and Acelas took away a lot of the air shuttle business, I wonder if one Donald Trump put the airline mob back in charge out of spite.

It took a lot more than the oil embargo to get Our Political Masters to take Amtrak seriously, and make efforts to fund it at levels more generous than "make it comfortable until it expires."  Read and understand.