FAILURE HAS CONSEQUENCES, EVEN FOR QUANGOES.

There's a running feature on Cold Spring Shops telling Amtrak "This is not good enough."  A little foul weather has brought the carrier problems all winter.  You might remember January.

That's the close-to-time California Zephyr of last December 2 with the stock of the Carl Sandburg having been turned at Galesburg with a bus in substitution.  That might have been a weather-related event, or it might have reflected a line closure for bridge work, not of the dental kind.

Earlier this morning, a rather long and extremely late California Zephyr made a double stop at Galesburg just before 9 a.m.

The train that left Emeryville on March 17 was running late and ran into foul weather in Nebraska.  The operating crew went dead on the Hours of Service Law, and when the foul weather affected freight operations, the relief crew being brought on a freight train also went dead, somebody made the decision to haul the rake back to Denver.

The train that left Emeryville on March 18 was also running late, and at Denver it picked up the March 17 rake, and here those combined trains, with passengers, car attendants, and food service crews in both sets of cars, arrives.  It was easier, apparently, to wye the March 17 rake to put its baggage car at the hind end and keep all the passenger carrying stock together, than to switch them up.  There are four coaches coupled between the two lounge cars.

While all this drama was unfolding, current Amtrak chief Stephen Gardner tendered his resignation.

Nothing good will come from Wednesday’s dismissal of Amtrak CEO Stephen Gardner, who was pushed out as part of the White House’s purge of officials who are not deemed loyal to President Donald Trump.

The timing of the move was curious. The Trump administration has been seeking to pull funding for programs it deems wasteful or contrary to its priorities. Gardner announced his resignation on March 19, just five days after issuing a statement saying that Amtrak looked forward to receiving the $2.42 billion Congress has appropriated for fiscal year 2025. Could that be a coincidence?

Trains correspondent Bill Stephens is prepared for the worst.

Amtrak needs a CEO who is an experienced railroader and knows the business inside out — someone who can fix its operational and mechanical woes, improve efficiency, boost revenue, and effectively manage its ballooning capital budget. In other words, someone who has been a Class I railroad chief operating officer.

Yet thus far the Trump administration has been allergic to expertise. So what Amtrak instead will get as its next CEO is a political hack. He or she will know nothing about passenger trains or railroads. But that won’t matter: His or her marching orders will be to dismantle the national network and privatize what’s left.

During his first term, Trump sought to cut Amtrak funding in half, phase out support for long-distance trains, and block funding for the much-needed Gateway Project on the Northeast Corridor in New York and New Jersey.

Earlier this month, billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, who heads the advisory Department of Government Efficiency as part of the administration’s efforts to upend business as usual in Washington, said Amtrak should be privatized.

Given the performance of Official Washington's "experts" in this century, and the reliability of Amtrak's national network, which includes relatively new Charger diesels that suffer in the snow like Dallas Cowboys in Green Bay, the DOGE boys don't even have to raid the office.

Under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Congress has earmarked $22 billion for Amtrak and $36 billion in federal-state passenger partnerships through fiscal 2026. Much of the grant money remains tied up in the cumbersome Federal Railroad Administration review process, which likely will get further bogged down by job cutbacks at the agency. This means the funding is vulnerable at best.

Put all this together and the inevitable conclusion is that Amtrak as we know it will cease to exist.

Long-distance trains will disappear. State-sponsored routes will continue in some form, so long as the states pick up the tab. And the Northeast Corridor will be raffled off to the highest private bidder.

Calls to privatize Amtrak, zero out its funding, or eliminate long-distance trains are nothing new. In the past, Republicans who represent rural states in Congress always rode to Amtrak’s rescue. Neither they nor their constituents wanted to lose their long-distance trains. At the end of the day, Amtrak always emerged from political scuffles with enough funding to scrape by.

Do rural state politicians really want to get on the wrong side of Our President in defense of long distance trains that might be cancelled because the diesels Dementia Joe bought keep breaking down, or because there's a little snow on the rails, or because somebody's having a bad day?

Musk has called Amtrak a national embarrassment, saying it falls well short of providing world-class service. He’s not wrong.

But you get what you pay for: Comparing U.S. passenger rail to well-funded systems in Europe, Japan, or China is an unfair apples to oranges comparison given our relatively meager spending on Amtrak and the fact that most of its routes must operate over host freight railroads.

Instead of decimating Amtrak, why not provide the funding and proper oversight required to Make Passenger Rail Great Again? Flying is a hassle. Driving gridlocked interstates is a nightmare. On trips under 500 miles, there’s no better way to travel than on a passenger train.

That's not necessarily an argument for spending more public money.  Under 500 miles, perhaps a Brightline style operator working with the freight carriers and their real estate holdings might be able to do the job.  The "hassle" that is flying is your tax dollars not at work.  And the last time I checked it was, umm, government policy that precludes pricing the interstate highways as productive assets.