The new Crony Express train line from LA to Vegas

All (taxpayers) aboard! (Whether you like it or not)

It is a shame that trains are so often areas of boondogglery. We quite like trains. We think that there could be a viable private market for train travel if governments would just get out of the way. We think that it is insane that in the United States of America Amtrak is government owned.

President Biden has long been a proponent of inefficient, unprofitable, nonsensical train travel. His son Hunter was even appointed to the Amtrak board in 2006. (He “served” for 3 years.)

For decades passenger rail in the US has been mismanaged and has hemorrhaged money. Consider the ongoing disaster that is the Acela train that straddles the most densely populated area of the US from DC to Boston. Sold as high speed rail it to this day only averages 70 miles per hour because the railroad it runs on can’t handle high speed trains. In fact only 41 miles of track in the entire northeastern corridor can handle Acela’s top speed of 150 miles per hour. One would think that after the billions and billions and billions we taxpayers have poured into the Acela project (and Amtrak) the people who run things there would have figured out how to build the proper train tracks. But no. Acela debuted in 2000 and the old antiquated tracks are still there.